Alright dear readers,

I hope you had a safe and fun Halloween.  Your humble blogger decided to take this opportunity to educate his kids about taxes by taking 45% of their candy while they were asleep.

Now that we’ve had our fun Halloween, let’s turn to something that really is scary for those of us who ply our trade and earn our daily bread in the workers’ comp world.

Crack open your 2005 rating schedules again, dear readers, and find page “3-4” where you might find the occupation “Bulldozer Operator” which is assigned occupation code 351.

There are a lot of dangerous things that can happen to bulldozer operators on the job, but if you search for relevant case-law on Lexis you’ll probably find a bunch of amputations and death cases.  In other words – pretty serious stuff!

Well, you can’t get hurt if you’re not working.

Built Robotics is pushing its new autonomous bulldozer.  It will allow a supervisor to control and plan out the work from a safe distance.  The bulldozer can work more than 8 hours per day, will never file for workers’ compensation, and doesn’t need a salary.

The most dangerous jobs are the most expensive and the first that make financial sense to replace with robotics and automation.

I’m not sure how much this robotic monstrosity will cost, but the next time a foreman sees a friend and co-worker hurt or the owner of a company sees his or her workers’ comp premiums spike, don’t you think the threshold for “reasonable expense” would go up?

Does our workers’ comp system still make sense when all the truly dangerous jobs are done by R2D2 and the Terminator?