What’s going on in Oklahoma? Ever since the Workers’ Compensation Commission ruled that parts of the state’s opt out program were not being applied properly and may even be unconstitutional, there has been much speculation about the state of the state’s opt out laws. Now a ruling from the Oklahoma Supreme Court has affirmed the earlier decision from the Workers’ Compensation Commission on at least a portion of the opt out laws.

Recently the Oklahoma Supreme Court stepped in and struck down part of the law, agreeing with the workers’ compensation commission that parts of the law deprived workers of their rights and was not really a fair bargain for the workers. The case came to the Supreme Court by way of four separate cases in Oklahoma which had gone through the system claiming that parts of the opt out laws were unconstitutional. There was a part of the law that allowed employers to defer payments to workers who were on permanent partial disability if they knew they were going to go back to their jobs at some point. According to the Supreme Court that portion is unconstitutional because a worker might not receive any compensation for their injury, or for potential wages they might lose in the future as a result of their injury-even if they went back to their same job. They might not work for their employer forever and they are not guaranteed the same wages at another job if their injury limits what they are able to do. Justice Noma Gurich said that it was “upending the entire purpose of the workers’ compensation system”. They also determined that in some cases the American Medical Association (AMA) guidelines for evaluating the level of permanent impairment were improperly applied, which would leave workers without the correct amount of compensation. In one of the cases brought to the high court, the injured worker had her permanent partial disability reduced to 70 percent of her average weekly wage because she had returned to her job once she reached her maximum medical improvement. The decision was 7-2.

Along with striking down a portion of the law, the court’s decision asked the workers’ compensation commission to recalculate the compensation that the workers involved in the suits should now receive. An attorney who represented two of the four workers, Bob Burke, said there were at least 15 other cases in the Supreme Court system questioning the current law.