Christina Lopez Owner San Fernando Beauty Academy Workers’ compensation insurance has always been pretty expensive. As it is, you have to pay a lot of payroll taxes and business taxes, and workers’ comp adds onto that considerably. In the last six months, I’ve noticed it increase drastically and it does have an impact. In my case, it does stop me from doing some things. For instance, I want to add more benefits for my staff and with this increase, it keeps me from doing it. Being a small business, things are already tight and I can’t add retirement plans, for instance. Marie Soloman Executive Vice President Smart and Friendly We have not had an increase, so we’re kind of lucky. I’ve heard a lot of others have. But we’re very careful about worker safety and we’re constantly educating them and we provide a safe environment. That’s the big thing. We are a manufacturing and assembly business, but compared to some of the industry, we’re more safe. Linda Lee Rambling Rose Florist My insurance has not gone up. I don’t think I’ve ever had a claim, which helps. And I have so many employees, I don’t want it to increase. David Dickinson Vice President Delta Scientific Yes, we have seen an increase. In fact, just a couple months ago we renewed our policy and the spectrum of quotations varied enormously. Some were two times as high as others. The state of California’s was twice as high as what we were paying. There’s a radical change going on. We went beyond our broker to find a broad range of prices. And no one gave us a bid until one or two days before our old policy expired. And we’re talking a couple hundred thousand-dollar decision. The increase does have an impact on business. It’s expensive to do business in California, and it’s tempting to look to another state to do business in. Robert Goodman CEO Box Brothers We haven’t seen an increase, knock on wood. We’ve had no claims for several years and it’s something we monitor very well. Actually, we might have even seen our insurance cost go down over the last year. We’ve really been on top of that. We’ve instituted some programs for training. The main thing is not for anyone to get hurt.
