Austin workers comp attorney Aaron Allison explains why many corporations, including big-box retailers like Walmart, are workers comp non-subscribers in Texas. For more information, call (512) 474-8346.
Video Transcription:
It’s completely a business decision of cost. I’ll give you an example, a Walmart became non-subscriber in 2011 in Texas and what they did before they became a non-subscriber was they did a cost-benefit analysis, they looked back a set number of years of when they were subscribers to workers comp, how much did they pay to be a subscriber to workers comp insurance. They looked at that cost and then they looked at if we became a non-subscriber, what would we pay to be a non-subscriber? We know that 50% of the time is a non-subscriber the worker is the sole cause of their own injury, they tripped on their own feet, they did something which was entirely their fault and how they were injured or they were just injured by their own mistake at work. So in those cases, we know that we’re not going to have to pay on those cases. So that reduces our burden by 50%, then we look at the remaining 50%, those cases even if we did pay paid the lost wage benefit, paid in the medical benefit and we paid a settlement for their injury, at the end of the day, how much have we paid on an annual basis and they compared it to what they paid on an annual basis as subscribers and it was significant. The entire reason the large retailers have all gone non-subscriber in the state of Texas is that it’s an enormous cost savings for them to do that even though they can be sued. Even though they’re stripped of comparative negligence by statute, it’s still cheaper for them to be nonsubscribers and that is the entirety of their decision. For more information, go to AaronAllisonLawFirm.com.
