The Building Industry of Washington (BIAW) has unanimously voted to file an initiative to reform the state’s workers’ compensation system. “BIAW has decided to file an initiative to send a message to the Legislature and the Governor that inaction on this important issue will not be tolerated,” said BIAW President Gary Cronce, a Grapeview homebuilder. “BIAW is making sure legislators and Governor Locke know if they don’t reform the system, we will.”

The initiative, which is now being drafted, will seek to overhaul the state’s onerous workers’ comp system via a number of reforms, most of which died in the 2004 Legislative Session. The initiative likely will include the following:

• Require an annual, independent audit of the state workers’ comp fund;
• Limit attorneys’ fees in workers’ comp cases;
• Re-define wages to exclude the use of fringe benefits (health care, pension) in calculating an injured workers’ time loss payment;
• Impose a flat rate for calculating time loss payments, eliminating current “sliding-scale” model which factors in an employee’s marital and parental status (Washington is the only state that does not use a flat rate for time loss payments);
• Use four-quarter averaging to calculate time loss wages, eliminating the current calculation based on the “wage at time of injury” to ensure time loss payments more accurately reflect the workers’ true earnings;
• Tie time loss cost of living adjustments to inflation.
• Discontinue the requirement that employees pay part of workers’ comp premiums. (Washington is the only state that requires workers to pay into the system)

   Washington State’s workers’ comp system is considered one of the most costly and inefficient in the nation, with comp taxes increasing by 40 percent over the past two years.

Gov. Gary Locke has created a “Blue Ribbon Commission” to study reforming the system. While some business organizations, such as the Association of Washington Business (AWB), are participating in the commission, BIAW was intentionally left out of the process — despite running the largest workers’ comp retrospective ratings program in the state.

Miffed at the governor’s snub of the group, BIAW elected to follow California’s lead in taking reform measures to the people. Over one million voters in California signed petitions to put a workers’ comp reform initiative on the ballot, and polling data showed 80 percent of voters supported the reforms. California Governor Arnold Schwarzengger leveraged that data to force the legislature into reforming the system.

“BIAW is hoping to accomplish the same thing here in Washington State,” said Cronce. “But California definitely had the advantage of having a governor who not only supported workers’ comp reforms, but actually went out and collected signatures to put them on the ballot. Here in Washington all our Governor wants to do is create another task force to further study the issue.”.