Day’s Labor Lost

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Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego) had a change of heart this week, and it’s probably for the best.

Fletcher had introduced a bill that would have amended two sections of the state’s labor code relating to workers’ compensation for day laborers. As part of her proposal, anyone employing a day laborer, who are not included in the current workers’ compensation law, would have been required to either carry workers’ compensation insurance or pay the worker for injuries sustained in the course of his or her employment.

But last week Fletcher apparently opted to pull the bill from consideration following a committee meeting.

“The Assemblywoman has agreed to work on this bill over the next year to ensure that the 40,000 day laborers in California will be covered by the state’s workers’ compensation system safety net without having to purse a costly pathway of personal injury litigation,” her office said in a statement.

Here are some thoughts for Sanchez to consider.

For starters, without a way to enforce the law, the bill is just a waste of paper. But almost any method of enforcement in a situation involving day laborers who entered the country illegally would almost certainly involve those workers making themselves known to a government agency. That’s unlikely in the best of environments, less so under the current administration.

Whether here legally or not, day laborers are by and large participants in the underground economy, taking cash for a day’s work and often working on a new job every day. The level of enforcement needed to make such a requirement effective would be so costly as to be prohibitive.

Which is not to say the problem should go unaddressed. Like other workers in the cash economy, day laborers are more likely to be uninsured. When they are injured on the job, they end up in emergency rooms, adding to the ranks of uncompensated care patients.

Adding another layer of bureaucracy and squeezing homeowners who pay someone $100 to help haul stuff out of the garage isn’t the answer. Fixing the health care system, however, may be.

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