Lancaster, Pennsylvania – Finding the first bit of evidence that Gene Cooper’s job damaged his brain and destroyed his health was the easy part. That only took his wife four years, eight doctors and at least a dozen tests.
The hard part: Getting his former employer to pay.
Eight years have passed since Sandra Cooper filed a workers’ compensation claim on her husband’s behalf. She prevailed after 4 ½ years of wrangling, when a judge agreed that chemical exposure on the job at a flooring factory was the reason Gene Cooper – a bright father of two with a quirky sense of humor – had transformed into a nursing-home patient who couldn’t speak and sometimes stared into space when his family visited. That was 2012. Sandra Cooper is still trying to get medical bills and lost wages covered today, nearly two years after he died.
The trouble Cooper has had isn’t unusual for this type of case. What’s unusual is that she’s gotten anything out of workers’ compensation at all.
Americans hurt at work have a difficult enough time with the state-by-state system when their injury is so obvious and immediate – such as an amputation – that it can’t be blamed on anything but the job. When it comes to chemically induced illnesses and other job-triggered diseases that creep up over time, according to researchers and the federal agency overseeing occupational safety, workers’ comp rarely works at all.