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The Watsonville Law Center serves a predominantly low-income, agricultural community, and focuses on providing services related to worker's compensation, consumer fraud, economic justice, and barriers to employment. The WLC delivers its services through one-on-one consultations, drop-in advice clinics, and direct representation. Services are available to all low-income residents of Santa Cruz , San Benito , and Monterey Counties . Services are available in Spanish and English.

AWAHP

The Agricultural Workers' Access to Health Project is a WLC project that focuses on health and safety. A WAHP addresses some of the key barriers that prevent immigrant workers from seeking medical care and obtaining workers' compensation benefits. The project involves a coordinated effort to provide outreach, education, legal and medical clinics, and direct representation to agricultural and low-wage workers who have experienced a work injury or illness. The project also addresses employer fraud through coordinated efforts with law enforcement .

In speaking with representatives from Watsonville Law Center about key aspects of their organizational strategy, Executive Director Dori Rose Inda highlighted the collaboration between legal and medical services as being the most unique aspect of AWAHP. Community and legal/workers' compensation clinics work jointly to serve primarily low-wage and agricultural workers in a structured, holistic, and comprehensive program. The most egregious cases seen by WLC have involved workers who have been severely injured and are in need of surgery, but have been forced to wait months, even years in some cases, because of denials. AWAHP has successfully brought in 300-400 workers' compensation claims from injured workers since its inception, which otherwise would most likely not have been filed without their assistance. WLC has faced a host of new challenges, primarily due to changes in workers' comp legislation. In a system that already exhibited frustrating complexity and discouraging bureaucratic delays, these new legislative changes have made it even harder for workers to receive authorization for needed treatment from doctors. Fewer and fewer attorneys and physicians are willing to accept workers' comp cases, without whom injured workers cannot navigate the system effectively. One initial goal of AWAHP had been to expand the program to surrounding counties by recruiting additional community clinics. Unfortunately, WLC has been unable to achieve this due to the clinics' concerns about the complexities such cases present and by the new changes in the workers comp law. They are reluctant to take on the significant challenges that come with handling these cases, such as dealing with how to code, how to bill, likely delays in payment, and the possible need for additional front-line staff.

In response to these obstacles, WLC emphasizes the need for change at the policy level. Dori Rose Inda points out that the intention of the ACOEM ( American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine) guidelines, those used by the Division of Workers' Compensation to determine the kind of treatment needed for job injuries, was to make it easier for injured workers to receive treatment. As a result of these legislative changes, however, injured workers have seen an increase in denials of treatment and more difficulty in connecting with an attorney. Another aspect of AWAHP involves collecting data on the workers' comp system. Acknowledging the need for legislative, systemic changes, WLC plans to possibly use this data and their direct experience in handling cases in advocacy efforts to amend the legislation.

Watsonville Law Center : The Agricultural Workers' Access to Health Project

AWAHP