From Bob's Cluttered Desk

There’s an old saw in the safety world that says the rules are written in blood. It’s a grim reminder that most workplace safety regulations exist because someone, somewhere, was hurt or killed doing something that now has a rule against it. Sometimes, though, we get a reminder that the blood continues to flow even…

Thirteen years ago, in 2012, I had what seemed to me at the time to be a fairly simple idea: What if we stopped calling this industry “workers’ compensation” and started calling it “Workers’ Recovery” instead? Now, before you dismiss this as merely semantic navel-gazing from an industry blogger with too much time on his hands, hear…

For the past seven months, I’ve been viewing the world through what I can only describe as several layers of industrial-grade Saran Wrap. My right eye, which had faithfully served me over numerous decades, decided last June that it had seen enough of my shenanigans and essentially went on strike. Two weeks ago, I had…

It is once again that time where I dust off my prognosticative pen, shake loose the cobwebs from my crystal ball, and pretend I have any idea what the coming year will bring. Regular readers of this blog, or anyone with a memory extending back more than twelve months, will recall that my predictive abilities…

I think we can almost all agree that technology has marvelous potential regarding overall improvement of our lives. However, from time to time we are presented with a cautionary tale that reminds us there are risks involved with advanced tech; and sometimes its deployment for certain functions can be downright stupid. My wife and I…

Folks, we have reached peak 2025. Just when I thought we’d run out of ways to complicate workers’ compensation, along comes “time blindness” – a condition that apparently makes chronic lateness a medical condition rather than what my father would have called “a lack of respect for other people’s time.” According to the latest from the…

For years, those of us in the workers’ compensation trenches have watched claims spiral out of control not because of the severity of the physical injury, but because of what’s happening between the injured worker’s ears. Now WCRI has done us all a favor by quantifying what every seasoned claims professional has suspected: psychosocial factors…

Well, it finally happened. Scientists have managed to study what every HR manager has suspected since smartphones became ubiquitous: those 20-minute “bio breaks” are literally becoming a pain in the ass. And I mean that in the most medically accurate way possible. Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center—who apparently had nothing better to do…

I spoke at a conference last week in Montana. The Governor’s Conference on Workers’ Comp, held this year in Billings, MT, is an annual event that I have had the honor of speaking at several times. It is a great group, where their western hospitality makes one instantly feel at home.  But this missive isn’t…

A Note from Bob: While writing this article I decided to get AI’s take on the topic. The response was prescient, on point, and damn frightening. Turns out I wasn’t needed for this article at all. It is enough to scare the crap out of anyone… ________________________________________ While it has not yet been defined as…