People always like to talk about tort reform. Malpractice reform is the sub-species currently in season, but tort will come back. We just need a spilled-McDonald's coffee lady for this generation. (Scroll to the second paragraph if you think hers was a nuisance suit - she was 79, suffered third degree burns, spent eight days in the hospital, underwent skin grafts and was originally offered just $800 towards her $20,000 in medical bills).
This is what I want you to think about the next time a middle-aged man in a grey suit with a neck as wide as his head tells you about tort reform, and how it's in your best interest. Particularly, I want you to think about this part:
On March 6, 2007, Torres-Gomez, a seven-year Cintas employee, climbed onto a slow-moving conveyor to clear a jam of wet laundry, instead of shutting off the machinery as he was supposed to do.
He jumped up and down on the clump and fell into the 300-degree dryer. Twenty minutes later, another employee heard his burned body banging around in the dryer and made the grisly discovery.
Now, before you get too caught up on "supposed to", read this part:
Torres' suit claims her husband and his co-workers were encouraged by Cintas managers to climb onto the conveyors to dislodge clumps of uniforms to keep up with production.
Last year, an Associated Press investigation found that in the year and a half after the accident in Tulsa, at least eight Cintas plants in six states had been cited by OSHA and state authorities for hazards similar to those that led to Torres-Gomez's death.
A man died. This is not an incident that does not get reported to corporate. Yet, in the 18 months after a man was baked to death in an oven, federal regulators discovered that the practices that lead to his death were still going on.
Deaths are sometimes not enough to make factories, products, lives, safer. Why? Because sometimes deaths, maimings, explosions and all other business casualties are more cost-effective than safety measures.
Workers' comp premiums increase a bit, or you settle small for lost earning capacity, loss of consortium, (loss of consortium - a fun claim, meaning money paid to your spouse or sometimes your children to the damages to family relationships caused by your horrific fiery death). And as long as the ratio of baked-laundrymen to efficiency gains is correct, they'll never stop putting workers in danger.
Unless you fuck their ratio.
And that's what big tort awards do. A multi-million dollar settlement for a dead laundryman may be a windfall to his family, and to his lawyers, considering that if he'd died of swine flu or fell in the bathroom they'd be left with insurance or nothing. But that multi-million dollar settlement may make people think again about safety in the workplace - it makes it less efficient to play with worker's lives.
It makes us all safer.
I love my current job, at a small business litigation practice in a wonderful building, with a brilliant and humane and mentoring boss; I'm crazy for litigation and most people consider our kind - employment discrimination and suits between businesses, pretty sinless. Clean.
But sometimes, I wanna be a ninja. Sometimes, I'd rather do personal injury.
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Kent Pitman
o'stephanie
Nerdyjen
Critical Mess
Mungular
Chris K
Salon.com
Comments
Nice to have you back. I feel smarter already.
(Great pic!)
Frankly, my idea of “tort reform” would be to make malpractice insurance illegal—could I buy white collar crime insurance, so that any crime I wasn't tossed in jail for but was just fined for, I could get my insurance to pay? What is this?
We are taught that the corporate model is a good model, we are taught that without corporations our lives would be so much harder, greed is good, etc, and so many never figure out how to connect that dots that would lead them out of that dark indoctrination.
RATED
Don't you think there is a way punish the business without ridiculously rewarding the client?
Because the potential of winning millions upon millions encourages people to become overly litigious. And this may be good for lawyers who get a cut of these millions, but what about society where no one has to take responsibility for their own actions.
Where a man can break into a family's home while their on vacation, trap himself in the garage because the garage door opener is broken for two weeks, then sue the family for mental suffering because he had to survive on cat food, and then win!!!! I don't care what the media has edited out (as they did in the McDonald's case) to make it sound like it was the thief's own fault. In my mind - once you've committed a crime you shouldn't have any legal recourse to say "while I was committing that crime against you I suffered a lot and its your fault!"
I maintain that it is very possible to punish the corporation with penalties so high that it becomes to expensive to ignore safety without rewarding someone for being stupid. I think that this man who died was probably encouraged to ignore safety regulations, but the family should not have gotten significantly more than what the man would have been able to make in his lifetime plus funeral and legal expenses. I would say I would even be okay if they wanted to double his lifetime earnings to cover "emotional suffering" or some such nonsense. But no more than that. The McDonald's lady should not ever receive more than her medical costs plus legal expenses.
Here's how you do it: In a town in Pennsylvania the citizens voted a measure into place that took away a business's license for three whole years if they were caught employing or providing services to illegal aliens. Result: Instant racism! Anyone who looked remotely hispanic suddenly couldn't buy groceries anymore. And if you could produce proof of citizen ship the market manager would still shake his head. Such documents can be forged you know. But the point was, the price of not being able to practice business for 3 years was SO high that the businesses just weren't willing to take any chances at all. Now, the measure had to be repealed for obvious reasons.
Can you imagine what would have happened if McDonald's lost their business license for three years? How huge an incentive that would be for other companies to better behave? Don't have coffee that's so ridiculously hot it can seriously burn people! And when someone sues you because you broke this rule - pay their damn medical bills!
Now admittedly shutting down the entire McDonald's franchise over this would hurt a lot of people. You know, people losing their jobs and little children with no more happy meals. That's pain right there! So fine them millions or billions of dollars - whatever is appropriate! Use it to pay down the national debt or something rather than rewarding the lady for being stupid enough to put hot coffee in between her legs, take off the lid(!), and then drive over a friggin speed bump! You shouldn't reward her for that no matter how big of a jerk McDonald's is. Pay medical bills when astonishingly severe injuries show up? You betcha! But no more than that.