WorkCover management wants to make big cuts in compensation payments to injured workers. The rationale put forward is that injured workers are to blame for WorkCover's poor performance, rather than its own continuing inability to manage the scheme.
The cuts on offer include significant reductions in weekly payments; moves to throw all but catastrophically injured workers off the scheme after two years and measures to restrict injured workers from challenging WorkCover claims decisions. Most of these proposals are based on Victorian provisions implemented by gung-ho Liberal Premier, Jeff Kennett, in the 1990s.
According to WorkCover, whose executives by the way are quite handsomely paid, compensation payments to injured workers are 'too generous'. While weekly benefits in South Australia are certainly among the best in the country, compensation for serious disability and work-related deaths are substantially lower than in other jurisdictions such as New South Wales and Queensland. South Australia is also the only state that does not permit injured workers to take common law actions against their employers for negligence.
The root cause of WorkCover's problems is the lack of effective rehabilitation. For many years now WorkCover management has failed to deliver in this critical area.
Not surprisingly WorkCover's return to work outcomes have deteriorated and consequently so too has its financial performance.
Reasons for this lacklustre performance are not hard to find. WorkCover has adopted a hands-off management style and is increasingly out of touch with the needs of injured workers and their employers. Its management culture is largely content-free and staff morale is near rock bottom.
Overwhelmingly injured workers want to return to work but often, especially in the case of serious injury they need a helping hand from WorkCover to do so. In far too many cases this is not happening. The result is that South Australia's return to work rate is now the worst in Australia.
The Stanley Review in its December 2002 report highlighted many of the management problems with WorkCover's return to work performance.
The problems identified by Judge Stanley were WorkCover's failure to provide early rehabilitation for injured workers and its lack of innovative return to work programs.
Unfortunately, not much has changed over the last four years. The number of claims agents used by WorkCover has been reduced from four to one, but where are the innovative return to work programs? Part of the problem, of course, is that WorkCover has increasingly positioned itself as a contract manager rather than as a workers' rehabilitation and compensation agency. In the process it has lost sight of its core business, which is to assist injured workers and employers with the return to work process.
Like so many organisations these days, WorkCover is long on spin but not so strong on performance.
Only a few short months ago it was congratulating itself on the 'good progress' it was making in returning injured workers to work. But if that was the case, why at the same time was it scheming to cut workers' entitlements?
The bottom line is that the WorkCover's slash and burn proposals to reduce workers' entitlements are self-serving and an admission of its own inability to manage the scheme. What South Australian workers and employers urgently need is a WorkCover management that is part of the solution, not part of the problem!
Dr Kevin Purse is a Research Fellow with the Hawke Research Institute at the University of South Australia and a former WorkCover Board member.
