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“All agencies must submit plans to cut spending for the remainder of this fiscal year by an amount equal to 2 percent of your agency’s FY 2012 budget and 6 percent for FY 2013,” OMB director Mark Page said in a letter to department heads.

OMB said the agency reductions, which must be turned in by October 18, could be met by “personal service cost reductions,” such as in health insurance, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation and overtime.

If economic conditions worsen, Page said that further cuts may be needed.

Page also said that Mayor Michael Bloomberg had ordered a hiring freeze “for the foreseeable future,” adding that only jobs for health and safety positions could be filled.

“We’re looking at extreme economic uncertainty and state and federal governments that are likely to further cut funds they return to the city,” New York City Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway said in a statement. “We’ve preserved services essential to maintaining safety and quality of life to this point through prudent planning and a willingness to make the hard decisions, and we’ll do that again this year.”

(Reporting by Chip Barnett; Editing by Jan Paschal)

No matter how safe an employer tries to make the worksite, accidents can still happen. The National Safety Council (NSC) reports that a disabling injury occurs every 1.3 seconds in the U.S. (more than 63,000 every day), and the Social Security Administration predicts that 3 out of 10 workers entering the workforce today will acquire some type of disability before they retire.

Getting injured employees back to work quickly—and providing positive communication and assistance during the rehabilitation process—has always been an important aspect of successful workers’ compensation programs. Research consistently shows that injured employees whose companies offer return-to-work programs recover faster, are more satisfied with their care, return to their full-duty jobs sooner, and are released from medical care earlier than if no return-to-work programs are in place.

In addition to positively impacting employee morale and productivity, effective return-to-work programs can result in lower premium rates—an important consideration given the rising medical and benefit costs associated with workers’ compensation. The NSC reports that a single work-related disabling injury costs an employer an average of $48,000. The National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) estimates, based on 2009 data, that medical costs comprise 58 percent of the overall costs of a lost-time claim, and that number keeps climbing. (In fact, the number has risen 11 percent in the past 20 years.) High medical and pharmaceutical costs are driving this hike, but economic conditions—including workers worried about returning to jobs with an uncertain future—are supporting these increases.

Although employers may be reluctant to pay injured employees their full salary for modified or alternate work (especially because this type of work may carry a perception of decreased productivity), the alternative is to use those same benefits to continue to pay injured employees almost their full salaries but receive zero productivity in return. Worse, disability itself can be dangerous and self-perpetuating. According to the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM), the odds of an injured employee ever returning to work drop by 50 percent by just the twelfth week of disability.

Legal Matters
There is another important benefit for employers who offer medically appropriate modified or alternate work while an injured employee is recovering. If the employee declines this job offer, then the employer is in a much stronger position to prevail if the claim is litigated. It is tough to argue that an employee who rejected a reasonable offer to return to work should expect to receive long-term workers’ compensation benefits. Employers who routinely make good faith job offers have more favorable results in court. Conversely, the odds of having a judge remove an employee from workers’ compensation benefits drops significantly without a return-to-work job offer.Avoiding litigation altogether is the optimum position, and here again return-to-work programs can help. The Workers Compensation Research Institute released a study in 2010 that found that workers are more likely to seek legal help when they feel threatened. Return-to-work programs offer assurance to employees that their jobs are safe, help combat fraud, and provide timely, positive communication. According to the California Workers’ Compensation Institute, calling injured employees within a week after an accident to talk about their value to the company reduces the chance of a lawsuit by 50 percent.A Different Workforce
Returning injured employees to the workforce as quickly as medically possible has always been the intended goal of workers’ compensation insurance. While that objective has not changed, the workforce has.

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, small businesses today represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms, and employ just over half of all private sector employees. This includes 40 percent of high-tech workers such as scientists, engineers and computer programmers. Some of these employees are so highly engaged at work that they may tend to work through an injury and not report it, or delay reporting it.

Unfortunately, putting off seeking medical care can lead to an eventual claim that can take longer for the employee to heal, require more employer support, and cost the company far more than it would if the employee had sought help early. If employees know in advance they will have a job even if they are injured, then they are more likely to follow proper reporting and medical protocol. A strong return-to-work program can make a difference by providing employees with appropriate communication and education.

 

When 51-year-old domestic worker Samireh, an undocumented immigrant from Indonesia, wandered into a Nassau County Dunkin Donuts wearing little more than a towel back in 2007, she brought needed attention to the plight of thousands of underpaid and exploited household employees, the people who labor behind the scenes to keep American enterprise afloat.

As Samireh’s story unfolded, we learned that she and Enung, a 47-year-old coworker, had experienced years of almost unimaginable abuse by perfume manufacturers Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani: beatings with rolling pins and brooms; being fed table scraps in lieu of proper meals; and being forced to take repeated cold showers and eat hot chili peppers anytime they did anything their bosses deemed improper. Standard compensation for seven-day work weeks—with 18- to 21-hour workdays—came to a paltry $200 a month.

Prosecutors called it slavery and Varsha was ultimately convicted on 12 counts of forced labor and peonage. She was sentenced to 11 years in prison and had to pay a $25,000 fine. Mahender, who argued that he was blameless because he was at his factories when the worst abuses took place at his home, began serving a 40-month sentence in April of 2010.

The case catapulted the mistreatment of domestic laborers onto front pages across the region and pushed state lawmakers to finally pass the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights last summer. The bill represents an impressive and hard-fought victory for domestic labor, entitling household help throughout the state to the minimum wage. It also requires employers to provide overtime pay at one-and-a-half times the worker’s hourly rate after 40 hours and stipulates that they must receive one day off each week. In addition, the bill gives domestic workers three paid holidays after one year with the same employer, extends Workers’ Compensation protections to household laborers, and bars retaliation against employees who act to enforce their rights. Lastly, the law provides legal recourse when domestic workers are sexually harassed or assaulted.

While groups such as Domestic Workers United rightly hailed this important legislative win, they understood that their work was far from over. The new challenge? Ensuring that the law is enforced. According to attorney Elizabeth Joynes, head of the Latinas at Work Project (LAW) of Latino Justice, a 39-year-old Manhattan-based legal advocacy group, activists must now make sure that employers understand their obligations and employees understand what to do if the law is flouted.

Joynes, a 30-year-old Clinton Hill resident, began working with LAW—a two-year pilot program funded by the Skadden Fellowship Foundation—slightly more than a year ago. Enforcement of the Bill of Rights, she continues, requires a mix of tactics to educate not only household workers, but also other low-wage immigrant women employed in stores, dry cleaners, restaurants, delis, and laundries.

Among Joynes’s tools are community organizing in conjunction with Long Island groups including Sepa Mujer, The Workplace Project, and the North Fork Spanish Apostolate; face-to-face negotiations with employers; the filing of complaints with the New York State Department of Labor and the federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC); and litigation to ensure that rights on paper are treated as rights in fact.

LAW’s focus on female workers is intentional, Joynes explains. “When the funding for LAW came through, we targeted women because, even though there is a lack of adequate legal representation for all low-wage workers on Long Island, the resources that do exist are generally accessed by male laborers. We wanted to target a population that has had almost no access to legal representation.”

The task is not for the faint of heart.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, Latinos/Latinas presently account for 26 percent of New York’s labor force. What’s more, a November 2010 report by the Fiscal Policy Institute concluded that immigrants contribute an estimated $30 billion of the $171 billion generated by Long Island residents. Not surprisingly, approximately half of the area’s 351,000 Latino/Latina immigrants are concentrated in low-wage service or blue-collar jobs where mistreatment is rampant.

Joynes’s cases tell the tale:

There’s Consuelo, who has worked 11 hours a day, six days a week, for seven years. Her boss, the owner of a dry cleaning shop, has never ponied up a dime of overtime pay.

There’s Maria Elena, who left her job to have a baby. After 40 days of prearranged maternity leave, when she returned she was told that she no longer had a job. “You shouldn’t have gotten pregnant,” the manager told her.

And there’s Roxana, a homecare worker who did not receive her monthly paycheck from her employment agency. When she inquired, she was told that the payment had been issued and was subsequently cashed. When she assured the agency that she had neither received nor cashed the check, she was fired. Although Roxana was eventually reinstated and received the money she was owed, the upheaval caused her several weeks of turmoil and angst.

Then there’s sexual harassment and sexual assault. “I’ve met with workers whose supervisors have insisted they go to a hotel with them after work,” Joynes reports. “These women understand—sometimes the message is explicit and sometimes it’s implicit—that if they don’t go, they’ll be out of a job.”

Joynes’s voice gets slightly louder and she runs her hands through her long brown hair as she quickly ticks off examples of illegal workplace activity, from underpayment to physical battering. For a moment she looks tired, but then quickly perks up, making it clear that she is eager to expose the heinous conditions she’s encountered.

The problems are not only heinous, but pervasive. An email from Maritere Arce, a state Department of Labor researcher, states that as of September 15, 2011, 763 complaints—many of them on behalf of dozens of workers—regarding wage violations were pending for Nassau and Suffolk counties. Inexplicably, the department does not keep statistics on sexual harassment or sexual violence complaints, but Joynes assures me that these behaviors are more rule than exception.

“That’s why the Know Your Rights classes are so important,” she adds. “We believe that over time, when you train women, the information spreads. We may have 20 people in the room for a workshop, but when the participants go home, they tell their mothers, sisters, and friends what they learned. It’s an effective way to get the word out.”

What amazes her, she continues, is the bravery and commitment of the women she’s met. “These women are taking time out, after really long work days, to find out about workplace protections and are taking a leap of faith to speak out in support of their rights. There are risks because on Long Island public officials like Rep. Peter King are openly hostile to immigrants. Still, the women I speak to want to act. They know something is wrong, that it can’t be right to work so hard for so little, that it can’t be right to be subjected to such blatant sexual harassment. Every time a woman files a complaint because of harassment or to recover unpaid wages, it’s a small victory,” she says.

Joynes’s passionate commitment to using the law to better immigrant workers’ lives—something she says developed during a four-year stint working with indigenous land-rights activists in Ecuador—is quietly but fervently expressed. At the same time, she seems uncomfortable talking about herself, choosing instead to focus on the monumental task of winning justice for her clients.

“Our system as a whole is undermined when large segments of the workforce lack the means to exercise their rights,” she concludes. Similarly, she argues that the right to be paid adequately for one’s work, in a workplace that is free of environmental toxins and predatory coworkers and bosses, should be a given.

For the first time in five years, the frequency of workers’ compensation claims increased due in part to a confluence of factors stemming from the ongoing economic recession, according to a report released by NCCI Holdings Inc.NCCI is the largest U.S. provider of workers’ compensation data.

The report found claim frequency for workers’ compensation injuries increased by 3% in 2010, marking the first increase since 1997. 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.

But while claims frequency was up, the increase in average indemnity and medical costs per claim decreased in 2010.

NCCI attributed the increase in claim frequency to three key factors tied to the recession.

The first factor cited by the report was a shift away from the construction industry in 2010, which was significant because the construction industry generally has a lower frequency per premium collected when compared with other industries, the report said.

The recession also set off an increase in the average number of hours worked per week for the first time since 2008. After a two-year period that saw decreases in the average number of hours worked, that figure went up by 0.6% in 2010. An increase in hours worked per week is expected to generate an increase in claims, which, without a corresponding increase in number of workers, will put upward pressure on frequency, the report said.

NCCI estimated those two factors combined to increase claim frequency by just 1%.

The real reason for the increase in claim frequency was attributed to overstatements in final payroll estimates, which resulted in an increased number of audits and returned premiums.

“This change in the direction of premium audits had a significant impact on the calendar year earned premiums used in the denominator of the NCCI accident year frequency calculation. NCCI estimates that the calendar year 2010 premium understated the premium on actual exposures earned by 3%. In contrast, the calendar year 2009 premium overstated the premium on actual exposures earned by 2%. These distortions combined to produce a five-percentage-point overstatement in the claim frequency change for 2010, as measured using calendar year earned premium,” the report said.

Having children may drain a man’s testosterone, but a large family may also be an indicator of heart health, a new study finds.

Researchers led by Dr. Michael Eisenberg at Stanford University School of Medicine report in the journal Human Reproduction that men who didn’t have children were 17% more likely to die over a period of 10 years than men who were fathers. The more children a man had, the less likely he was to die of heart-related problems, the authors found.

Given that childlessness is a good marker for fertility problems, Eisenberg, a urologist who specializes in male infertility, was interested in using it to better understand how a man’s fertility might affect his health over the long term. Previous studies have shown that men who have difficulty conceiving have higher rates of cancer, particularly of the testes, and that they also tend to die sooner than similarly matched fertile men.

Eisenberg hoped his study would shed light on how infertility, which surfaces early in the course of a man’s lifetime, may serve as a warning of possible health problems down the road.

To do that, he and his colleagues consulted data from the National Institutes of Health­–American Association of Retired Persons Diet and Health Study, in which more than 137,000 healthy men were followed for 10 years. The researchers tracked the number of children the men reported having. To increase the likelihood that all the men included in the study actually wanted children, the researchers excluded those who had never been married; by including only men who were married or had been married at least once, the researchers could be reasonably sure they had the desire and opportunity to have kids. The study also focused on men who were relatively healthy and didn’t have a history of heart disease.

MORE: Is Sperm From Redheads Really Less Desirable?

The team then followed the participants for a decade, and tallied the number of deaths from about 70 different causes. Overall, the researchers found, childless men were more likely to die during the follow-up period than fathers, and most of the deaths were heart-related.

“All of the trends were a little surprising and concerning,” says Eisenberg. “We knew that infertile men are at higher risk of malignancies, especially in the testes. So we were expecting cancer deaths to be higher, but we were surprised that they weren’t.”

On the other hand, because infertile men tend to have abnormal testicular function, and the testes are responsible for making testosterone, it does make some sense that childlessness might be connected to heart disease. “There is solid evidence at this point that having low testosterone can increase the risk of all cause morality and heart disease deaths,” says Eisenberg (abnormal testosterone levels may cause HDL, or “good” cholesterol, to drop), “So perhaps this impaired testicular function, which is [showing up] as infertility early in life, sets the stage for a higher risk of cardiovascular events later in life.”

Of course, Eisenberg isn’t saying that having fewer children necessarily means that men are destined for heart disease. There are plenty of factors other than infertility that figure prominently in family size, such as cultural norms and financial pressure.

The study also did not track men’s cholesterol or blood pressure measurements, which are important risk factors for heart disease. And it did not gather information on the fertility of the men’s partners, which also could have affected family size.

Further, it’s possible that having kids — like being married or having a pet or a lot of friends — may have lowered men’s heart risk by boosting their health overall.

MORE: Why Dads Have Less Testosterone

Still, the study was large and its results may point to a potentially useful way to identify men who could have a higher risk of heart-related events later in life. Fertility problems and heart risk may share some underlying biological processes, which is why Eisenberg says he may counsel men who come to see him for infertility about their risk of heart disease as well. The good news, he says, is that “things that are good for the heart are good for reproduction as well — exercise, eating a healthy diet, and maintaining a normal body weight.”

Alice Park is a writer at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @aliceparkny. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.