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MELVILLE, N.Y., Oct. 10, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — As the jobless rate continues to hover around 9 percent and the economy struggles to improve, American workers indicate their relationship with their boss is strong and positive. Seventy-eight percent of employed Americans feel their boss would “go to bat” for them if their job were on the line.  Further, if given the chance to change something about their boss, a majority (59 percent) thinks their boss is great and wouldn’t change a thing, according to a recent survey from Adecco Staffing U.S., part of the world’s largest recruitment and workforce solutions provider.

The research, an omnibus conducted by Opinion Research Corporation on behalf of Adecco Staffing US, was conducted in honor of National Boss’s Day which is celebrated this year on October 17.  The survey was designed to gauge how American workers feel about their bosses.

American workers were asked to choose the country’s arguably biggest best boss – those potentially in the running for President of the United States in 2012 — President Obama easily topped the list with 37 percent of employed workers picking him over other candidates. This was especially true among women who chose Obama (43 percent) vs. men (32 percent).  On the other hand, men (15 percent) were more likely than women (7 percent) to think the best boss of the potential presidential pool would be Rick Perry, Governor of Texas.

Survey findings also revealed that employees were interested to know more about how their boss feels about their job.  When asked what single question they most would like to ask their boss, the No. 1 response was not compensation or career choice; rather, 25 percent of respondents wanted to know if their boss was passionate about his or her job.  That said, the boss’ salary did pique the interest of some (19 percent) and seemed to matter more to those with lower compensation. Employees making less than $75,000 were nearly two times more likely to want to ask their boss about their salary than those making more than that amount.

“It’s great to see that workers seem to have an overall good feeling about their relationship with their boss. It’s a strong indicator that employee engagement remains positive – or that connections have been effectively re-strengthened – between boss and employee” said Joyce Russell, president and EVP of Adecco Staffing US. “It may be a sign that as the economy continues to recover, American workers recognize the value of their work relationships.”

While American workers may think their boss is great, the survey did show that they want to keep a healthy barrier between their work and personal lives.  When asked to choose the most uncomfortable conversation topics between boss and employee, nearly a quarter of Americans (23 percent) said that the topic they’re most uncomfortable discussing is their relationship status. Coming in a close second and third were political beliefs (16 percent) and medical history (11 percent).  Surprisingly, zero percent of respondents said they would be uncomfortable discussing their age with a boss, and only five percent said they’d be uncomfortable discussing their weight.

In addition to conversation topics, American workers were also asked which activities outside the workplace would be most awkward to do with their boss – a majority (43 percent) responded that they would feel the most awkward going on a double-date with their significant other and their boss / boss’s significant other. Going to a movie with their boss came in close behind (38 percent), indicating that there are activities outside of work at which respondents draw the line.

“The boss/employee relationship will continue to play an important role in how productively the U.S. gets back to work,” said Russell. “It’s refreshing to see employees re-engage with employers; this sense of support and loyalty has a great impact on the employer-employee relationship as we all work together towards a stronger economy. Bosses cannot underestimate the value that a happy, productive employee adds to the workplace.”

About Adecco Staffing US

Adecco Staffing US is the nation’s leading provider of recruitment and workforce solutions. We are the pre-eminent workforce management partner for Fortune 500 companies and career advisement expert for American workers, serving all of the key industries and professions that drive our economy forward. Adecco has over 900 career centers and, on any given day, connects 70,000 talented workers to the best job opportunities across the country, making us one of America’s largest employers. Please visit us at adeccousa.com

About the Adecco Group:

The Adecco Group, based in Zurich, Switzerland, is the world’s leading provider of HR solutions. With approximately 33,000 FTE employees and over 5,500 branches, in over 60 countries and territories around the world, Adecco Group offers a wide variety of services, connecting over 750,000 associates with well over 100,000 clients every day. The services offered fall into the broad categories of temporary staffing, permanent placement, outsourcing, consulting and outplacement. The Adecco Group is a Fortune Global 500 company.

Adecco S.A. is registered in Switzerland (ISIN: CH0012138605) and listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange (ADEN).

About Opinion Research Corporation International

Founded in 1938, Opinion Research Corporation International (ORC) is a leading global market research firm with offices across the U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific region. ORC is an official partner of CNN, the most trusted name in news, on the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll.

Methodology

This omnibus telephone survey was conducted by Opinion Research Corporation International on behalf of Adecco Group North America among a nationally representative sample of 834 full or part-time employed American adults 18 years of age and older. The survey was fielded between September 8 – 12, 2011.  Results have a margin of error of +/- 3.4% at the 95% confidence level. For complete survey methodology, contact Vannessa Almeida at (212.843.1965) or vannessa.almeida@adeccona.com.

SOURCE Adecco Staffing US

It’s unlikely that workers’ compensation writers will see that line of business turn around anytime soon, despite large-scale workers’ compensation reform bills enacted in several states this year, said Edward Keane, a senior financial analyst at A.M. Best.

Keane said the deterioration that workers’ compensation insurance has seen during the past two years will continue at least until mid-2012, unless the economy makes a dramatic improvement before then.

“I think the way things are going, results are going to get worse before they get better,” Keane said, adding that for 2011, A.M. Best is projecting a 121.5% combined ratio. Last year, the combined ratio for the line was 118.1%.

The grim outlook for workers’ compensation insurance has also affected the ratings given to some insurers that write policies in that line of business, Keane said. Through mid-September, A.M. Best has issued 13 negative rating actions compared to six positive rating actions for companies that focus on workers’ compensation. “We expect that trend to continue into 2012,” he said.

However, the news on the workers’ compensation front isn’t all bad, Keane said. Premiums for workers’ compensation coverage are starting to rise in California, Florida and New York — three of the largest workers’ compensation markets in the country.

That is little comfort to industry observers who say the changes aren’t coming fast enough, especially because 2012 is an election year. “During election years, politicians and regulators tend to stay away from touchy issues like workers’ compensation” said Peter Burton, senior division executive for state relations at NCCI Holdings Inc., which tracks trends in the workers’ compensation industry.

The troubles facing workers’ compensation insurance garnered increased attention recently following a study released by NCCI, which found the frequency of workers’ compensation claims increased for the first time since 1997. The NCCI report attributed the increase to a confluence of factors stemming from the ongoing economic recession.

The report found claim frequency for workers’ compensation injuries increased by 3% in 2010. Prior to this year’s uptick, claim frequency had been declining at an average rate of 4.3% per year since 1990, with only 1994 and 1997 seeing increases (Best’s News Service, Sept. 28, 2011). While claims frequency was up, the increase in average indemnity and medical costs per claim decreased in 2010.

NCCI said the recession sparked several changes in the market that sparked an increase in claims frequency, including a shift away from the manufacturing and construction industries in 2010; an increase in the average number of hours worked per week for the first time since 2008; and overstatements made by employers in final payroll estimates.

“We have seen from some of our members that after conducting audits, insurers have had to return some premiums they had collected because employers had over estimated what their final payrolls would be. The down economy has created a number of factors that are acting together to create an overall precarious situation for the workers’ compensation line of business,” said Rita Nowak, assistant vice president for commercial lines at the Property Casualty Insurance Association of America.

That said, the industry did score some legislative victories in states like Illinois, Kansas, Montana and Oklahoma, all of which passed comprehensive workers’ compensation reform legislation during the 2011 legislative session.

But even those bills may have only a limited impact on the state of the workers’ compensation market, said Bruce Wood, the American Insurance Association’s associate general counsel and director of workers’ compensation.

The Kansas reform package was “primarily an effort to overturn some adverse case law that had developed in recent years” and in Illinois, “the jury is still out on whether that bill will actually save as much money as some have claimed it will,” Wood said. “That all depends on how the new fee schedule is implemented and how much of an optimist you are.”

The Oklahoma package that passed last month also included a new fee schedule for medical procedures that were designed to reduce costs by 5% and established specific reimbursement levels for certain procedures and services, including MRIs, durable medical equipment and prescription drugs. Those changes were enough for NCCI to recommend that the Oklahoma Department of Insurance lower the rate of workers’ compensation insurance by 1.7% (Best’s News Service, Aug. 26, 2011).

Aside from the new fee schedules adopted in Illinois and Oklahoma, workers’ compensation insurers are still facing financial pressures stemming from rising medical costs. That is especially true when it comes to pharmaceutical drugs.

Nowak said prescription drugs account for about 19% of all workers’ compensation medical costs, and in the past, many providers have engaged in “questionable” practices like prescribing repackaged medications that were sold at an inflated cost.

More recently, workers’ compensation insurers have begun pushing back against providers who have been prescribing compound medications, or medications that include more than one active ingredient and are therefore more expensive. Nowak said that trend was really an “opportunistic pricing scheme that only put more financial pressure on [insurance] companies.”

The California Legislature recently passed legislation that would limit how compound drugs could be prescribed and how much those drugs could be sold for. That bill, A.B. 378, is currently awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature.

“These pricing schemes aren’t about helping workers,” Nowak said. “We should be focusing on implementing positive controls to keep costs down while ensuring that we are giving injured workers the treatments they need.”

(By Jeff Jeffrey, Washington Correspondent: jeff.jeffrey@ambest.com)

The guideline recommends that doctors curb prescribing large doses of the opioid painkillers, which the federal government blames for a nationwide public health epidemic of addiction and deaths paralleling a rise in the number of prescriptions written along with an increase in dosage amounts prescribed.

Medical experts say Washington state’s guideline for chronic, noncancerous pain could serve as a model for other states looking to reduce deaths and addiction among workers’ compensation claimants and the general population.

They say such guidelines are called for because workers with relatively minor workplace injuries are ending up addicted or dying from overdoses.

“It’s one of the most tragic outcomes in work comp,” said Robert Malooly, former assistant director for the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries’ Insurance Services Division and current CEO of Claim Maps in Olympia, Washington. “Someone comes in with a back sprain that otherwise would have resolved on its own and they wind up dying of an overdose.”

Although Washington’s efforts are not without detractors, the state’s efforts also get high praise.

Washington state “should be commended for taking action where many other states have done nothing,” said Andrew Kolodny, president of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing and chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Maimonides Medical Center in New York.

Among other measures, Washington’s guideline recommends that doctors not increase opioid doses beyond an average daily morphine equivalent of 120 milligrams when a patient does not demonstrate improved functionality and decreased pain at lower doses or without first consulting with a pain management expert.

Colorado has had a workers’ compensation chronic pain prescription guideline for several years. It calls for measures such as testing claimants’ urine to help ensure they are not diverting painkillers, said Kathryn Mueller, an advocate of such guidelines and a professor in the department of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado Denver’s medical campus.

But unlike Washington, Colorado’s guideline does not suggest a specific opioid dosage that should trigger extra precautions by prescribing doctors. Studies on the detrimental impact of higher opioid doses available now did not exist when Colorado adopted its guideline, Mueller said.

It is anticipated, however, that an updated version of the Colorado Division of Workers’ Compensation chronic-pain guideline now under development will suggest a dose at which doctors should be particularly cautious, Mueller said. Many medical experts believe that patients are being put at risk when opioid dosages reach 100 milligrams to 120 milligrams per day, she added.

According to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the milligram-per-person use of prescription opioids increased 402 percent to 369 milligrams from 1997 to 2007.

Like Washington, Colorado’s new guideline dose amount would only recommend that prescription writers take certain steps, such as getting other doctors involved in making such decisions, when considering prescribing high doses of painkillers.

The guidelines are not a mandate. But Washington state was the first in the nation to suggest a specific dose at which doctors should take certain precautions and its guideline applies to all medical care, sources said.

The guideline was introduced in 2007 as an “educational pilot,” said Gary Franklin, a physician who is the medical director for the Department of Labor and Industries, which administers the state’s workers’ compensation insurance fund. The guideline was updated in June 2010.

Franklin told the audience at sister publication Business Insurance‘s recent Workers Comp Cost Control Strategies virtual conference that “there is now very strong evidence in at least three studies linking specific doses of opioids to increased morbidity and mortality.”

Meanwhile, research has found that patients given larger and larger doses merely increase their tolerance for the drugs without achieving improvements in function or decreased pain.

Data show Washington state’s death rate from unintentional opioid poisoning now exceeds the death rate from car crashes.

But since the 2007 implementation of Washington’s dosing guideline, the state’s workers’ comp system has experienced a 25 percent decline in average daily doses of morphine equivalence for opioid prescriptions, Franklin said.

In 2010, the state saw a 50 percent reduction in deaths related to opioid use among its workers’ compensation claimants vs. 2009, he said.

“For the first time in over a decade we have had a marked decline in [opioid] deaths in Washington state workers compensation,” he told the conference. “This is only one year [of data] and I won’t be really happy unless we see it again next year, but it’s hopeful.”

Not everyone thinks Washington state is on the right track.

The 120 milligram dose at which the guideline suggests that primary-care doctors consult a specialist is an arbitrary level, said Lynn Webster, a physician who is an officer for the Glenview, Illinois-based American Academy of Pain Medicine.

Additionally, the guideline suggests a dosage without appropriately considering why certain patients need higher doses, Webster said.

Dose puts patients at a greater risk of harm, he added, “but more important than dose is the reason why physicians have patients at 120 milligrams or more.”

“When we see guidelines that are somewhat arbitrary and don’t take into account individual responses to medications or their needs, to me its not addressing the appropriate issue.”

With employers pushing for relief from the rising costs of workers’ compensation insurance in a stagnant economy, several states made significant changes to their compensation laws this year–and more changes could be on the way.

Employers made substantial headway in Montana, Oklahoma and Kansas, which all have business friendly, Republican-controlled legislatures. The measures focused in particular on limiting an employer’s obligation to pay for medical treatment of injured workers and tightening eligibility for workers’ compensation disability benefits. In Montana, which has the highest workers’ compensation rates in the country, costs could be reduced by more than 20 percent in the first year alone.

Lawmakers in Montana “were trying to effectuate fairly major changes to bring costs more in line with the states as a whole,” says Trey Gillespie, senior workers’ compensation director at the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America.

Illinois and North Carolina also passed workers’ compensation legislation but with more equivocal results for employers. Things got so tense in Illinois that at one point the Illinois House voted to eliminate workers’ compensation altogether, a move opposed by both business and labor. Gov. Pat Quinn estimated that the final bill would save businesses at least $500 million a year in insurance premiums, but some experts believe further legislation is needed. “Illinois remains a very troubled system,” says Bruce Wood, director of workers’ compensation at the American Insurance Association.

Such large states as California, Florida and New York have shied away lately from major compensation legislation, but that could change soon–at least on the West Coast. “2012 is a year where there is going to be more of a focus” on workers’ compensation in California, predicts Nicole Ganley, spokeswoman for the Association of California Insurance Companies.

Compensation premiums across the country have been mostly flat or in decline, but any savings to employers have been offset by mounting bills for medical treatment. As a percentage of total compensation claims, medical costs rose to 58 percent in 2009 from 46 percent in 1988, according to the National Council on Compensation Insurance Inc.

Montana’s workers’ compensation bill is expected to generate nearly $100 million in savings in its first year, in part by locking in medical provider rates at 2010 levels. The law also provides that medical treatment of injured workers who are not permanently totally disabled may be ended five years from the date of injury.