Brook D’Angelo was driving to a distressed property in Niagara Falls, where she worked as a Neighborhood Inspector, when her City-owned car slammed downward into a deep sinkhole in an unpaved alley. The impact broke her lower back and ripped her abdominal wall. So, like some 160,000 injured New Yorkers each year, D’Angelo filed a claim in 2018 for New York State’s oldest guaranteed labor benefit: Workers’ Compensation. Every day counts with an injury like hers, but it took D’Angelo six months to find a doctor in the area willing to take on the hassle of getting paid through the State’s Workers’ Comp System. She had serious doubts about the surgeon she finally found but went ahead with treatment because she couldn’t find anyone else who accepted the benefit. The first surgery “butchered” D’Angelo, she said. It required three more surgeries and resulted in a 14-inch incision and the use of porcine dermal collagen - pig skin - to hold her abdomen together. Each attempt left her body with irreversible scar-like adhesions and left her unable to bear children. New York became the first State in the Nation to set up a Workers’ Compensation System in the wake of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. In the century since, the Social Insurance Program has covered medical bills and cash for recovery time for countless injured Construction Workers, Prison Guards, Nurses and other Workers. Yet - in recent years, the program’s benefits have quietly shrunk by over a third. From 2014 to 2023, the dollar amount of benefits insurers pay to Workers fell by $1.4 billion per year - a 37% drop, according to the latest available insurance data compiled by Economist James Parrott and shared with New York Focus. In that same period, Parrott calculated, insurers pocketed nearly $11 billion in profits. (Parrott is not related to this Reporter.)

To Continue Reading This Labor News Story, Go To: Inside The Long Retreat of Workers’ Compensation in New York