Florida Officials Courageously Target Exploited Workers

...the employers who exploit them, not so much, apparently. And in the process, of course, helps reward employers who hire undocumented laborers.

This article in the Insurance Journal explains that Florida officials have been touting the arrests of undocumented workers who used fake ID to get work (and thus get Workers Comp coverage). Apparently, those workers foolhardy enough to actually make a claim when injured at work were instead arrested.

According to the article, there have been way more cases against such workers than there have been against the employers who benefit from such exploitation. And the beauty of this all is that the system rewards employers who use such desperate workers, because if the injured workers are afraid to file claims when injured, the experience modification factors for these employers will stay low--lower than the modifiers of companies that play by the rules and hire legal workers.

For companies in construction trades in particular, keeping experience modifiers low is an increasingly critical matter--more and more, customers are insisting on experience modifiers at 1.00 or lower in order to even bid on projects. And the new NCCI experience mod formula is pushing a lot of smaller companies over that all-important threshold, with dire consquences.

So nice to know that Florida authorities are focusing their efforts on the poor desperate people who do the dangerous and difficult work, and not the shady employers who take advantage of them (and in the process, gain a huge advantage over honest employers.)