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PIANH legislative update—March 2008
By Matthew Guilbault, Esq.
PIANH vigilant on workers' compensation
Despite PIANH's early and important victory for New Hampshire producers and their clients in peeling back an onerous Workers' Compensation Law, PIANH volunteers and staff remain focused on the workers' compensation arena for the remainder of the legislative session.
A number of bills have been introduced to modify the status quo in New Hampshire workers' compensation insurance system and PIANH will monitor all of them closely throughout the 2008 session. Measurers that have been introduced center around the much-debated exclusion from workers' compensation for certain persons. With this in mind, PIANH Legislative Representative Bruce Berke met recently with key legislators and representatives from organized labor, the homebuilders association and staff from the attorney general's office to discuss the merits of maintaining the current exclusion. PIANH stressed the importance of allowing the provisions of another recently passed bill to take full effect before considering other structural modifications of the statute.
New Hampshire S.B. 92, passed last year and signed into law, adds additional criteria to all labor laws an independent contractor must meet in order to exempt themselves from employee status. According to supporters, it will alleviate the problem of misclassified employees that many of the other proposals are designed to address.
The presumption that a person who performs services for pay is an employee for purposes of the Workers' Compensation Law may be rebutted by proof that the person meets several criteria set forth in RSA 281-A, VI(b)(1). Prior to S.B. 92, five criteria were required to be satisfied. Now that S.B. 92 has been enacted, 12 criteria must be satisfied before a person is considered an independent contractor, making it more difficult to classify certain workers as independent contractors. See QuickSource document QS28046, New Hampshire Insurance Department bulletin—Criteria to establish an employee or independent contractor for more details.
The argument, for now, seems to resonate in the State Capitol, but PIANH warns that additional regressive measures could surface at any time. 3/08
