WCDefenseCA

Happy Wednesday, dear readers!

I know how much you like the humble blogger’s pop quizzes, and you know how much your humble blogger loves to make his readers happy, so what else could we start today’s blog post with other than a pop quiz?

What’s significant about July 1, 2023?  If you said it is the first day of the second half of the year, you are correct.  If you say it is day two of a five-day weekend ending on Independence Day, then I envy your working conditions.  If you say it’s time to check our TTD rates, then you have won yourself the nodding approval of the humble blogger.

That’s right! Come July 1, 2023, minimum wage increases in various counties and cities in California!  Sheppard Mullin has a really good breakdown on which counties and cities are affected and by how much.

So, what should you be doing in anticipation of July 1, 2023?  Well, for starters, check if the county or city where your injured worker worked has a minimum wage increase going into effect on 7/1/23.  If it does, check if your injured worker receiving TD was earning above the new minimum wage.  Finally, if your injured worker was earning less than the new minimum wage prior to the date of injury, you may want to recalculate the TTD rate using the new minimum wage.  One easy way to do that is to divide the new minimum wage by the hourly rate the applicant was earning prior to the DOI, then multiply the resulting number by the TTD rate.

So, if applicant was previously earning $15.75 per hour in Alameda, and would now be entitled to $16.52 per hour, $16.52 (new minimum wage) / $15.75 (old minimum wage) = 1.05.  You would then multiply the previous TTD rate by 1.05 to get the new TTD rate reflecting the increased minimum wage. 

As if you didn’t have enough to do or worry about…

Straight on till Friday, dear readers!

Happy Wednesday, dear readers!

Well… perhaps that’s not accurate.  When is Wednesday Addams ever truly happy?

Never mind… let’s check up on what’s going on in Sacramento, shall we?  Oh, of course… increasing costs for California’s employers.  In this case, the proposal would affect the healthcare industry, with a minimum wage of $25 per hour effective January 1, 2024.

Senate Bill 525 would apply to every California healthcare employer, including urgent care, hospitals, and home health care, among others. 

My beloved readers might think… well don’t doctors and registered nurses already make more than $25 per hour?  Well, the same brilliance and diligence that draw you to this blog also leads you to be so well informed. 

However, this bill would raise the minimum wage not just for nursing, but “caregiving, technical and ancillary services, janitorial work, housekeeping, groundskeeping, guard duties, business office clerical work, food services, laundry, medical coding and billing, call center and warehouse work, scheduling, and gift shop work” but “only where such services directly or indirectly support patient care.”

Seriously… what the heck?  Is the legislature on a crusade to kill the healthcare industry in California?  Your humble blogger did a quick and totally unscientific search of such positions for San Francisco, where one would expect wages to be among the highest due to the cost of living, and found most of these postings are well under $25 per hour.  The wages offered are significantly lower as we get to more rural areas.

If this insanity becomes law, what can we expect on the comp side?

Well, a full time security guard working for a hospital for $20 per hour, out on TTD, would go from an AWW of $800 to $1,000, with a corresponding TTD increase from $533.33 to $666.67.

Hospitals are already facing serious challenges: COVID19 was not very helpful in keeping the lights on and we are still reeling with expenses related to the COVID19 presumptions and staff shortages.  Raising the minimum wage from the state-minimum of $15.50, to this monstrosity of $25 will make rendering services that much more impossible.

Hopefully, SB525 joins the pantheon of colossally bonehead ideas that never become law.  But with California, you just never know.