KEY POINTS:
Paul Jarvie from the Employers and Manufacturers Association (Northern) tells us the ACC scheme is the best in the world for employees, but suggests employers get a rough deal.
The association is concerned about the financial impact on businesses from a Government proposal to add 25 new occupational diseases and conditions to an ACC "presumptive schedule".
Cover is given for a listed disease if ACC is satisfied the person has the disease and exposure occurred at work.
ACC provides cover for people with occupational diseases through this list of work- related diseases, or through a three-step test where the burden of proof is on the worker.
After reading Paul Jarvie's piece, you might be forgiven for thinking employers are carrying an unreasonable burden in compensating employees exposed to disease and injury at work, and are bracing themselves for the next big hit.
Where Jarvie's analysis falls short is in his failure to acknowledge that it is workers, not employers, who are already bearing the brunt of occupational disease.
This has been highlighted by the National Occupational Health and Safety Advisory Committee, which has published a series of reports documenting the sorry case of occupational injury, disease and death.
One of the committee's recent reports focused on the significant under-compensation of occupational disease and injury. It provided evidence of the disproportionate allocation of the cost of occupational disease - 47 per cent of the financial costs on each of workers and society and less than 6 per cent on employers.
The committee further estimates the full cost of occupational disease and injury totals $20.9 billion annually, and that only 2 per cent of costs are compensated by Government agencies such as ACC and Work and Income.
The committee's findings came as little surprise to unions. The report supports long expressed concerns that the costs of workplace disease and injury are borne largely by injured workers and their families.
The committee has highlighted that up to 1000 New Zealanders die each year from work-related diseases, and there are up to 20,000 new cases of work-related disease.
So what has that got to do with the Government's consultation on whether to add another 25 diseases and conditions to the presumptive schedule? I would assert "quite a lot" if not "everything".
The underlying issue is what proportion of loss is going to be borne by ACC, what proportion by the employer, and what proportion by workers and their families.
The Council of Trade Unions welcomes a broadening of the coverage of occupational diseases. The addition of 25 new occupational diseases will lessen the burden of proof on workers when there is a clear evidential link between their illness and their work.
The three-step test and the way it has been administered, has tended to place an unduly high burden on the claimant to prove the work exposure as the causative link.
And I am sure that is why we have, apart from occupational deafness, only a handful of occupational disease cases accepted by the ACC scheme each year.
Awareness of occupational disease is very low, with many in the public and even among the medical profession being unaware that there is ACC cover for occupational disease.
We see this proposal as an incremental, but important, step in what we hope will be an ongoing process towards ensuring workers don't continue to carry a demonstrably disproportionate, and unfair, share of the burden of cost of occupational disease.
Employers have successfully externalised their costs, and I would hope they would share the CTU view that a far greater portion of the cost falling on workers should be carried by the social insurance scheme, ACC, rather than workers and their families.
* Ross Wilson is president of the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions.
