Starting a employment law issue in Kentucky: discipline file, schedule change records, and before the record drifts

On January 9, 2017, Kentucky became the 27th right-to-work state in the United States — and the first in the South to do so since Oklahoma joined in 2001 — when Governor Matt Bevin signed the Kentucky Right to Work Act (KRS 336.130) into law. The signing came just seven days after the new Republican-controlled General Assembly convened, making right-to-work a first priority of the 2017 legislative session. The law made it unlawful for any labor-management contract to require union membership or the payment of union dues as a condition of employment. Kentucky's RTW passage was particularly significant because Louisville and Jefferson County had been among the most heavily unionized urban labor markets in the South — Ford Motor Company's Louisville Assembly Plant (which manufactures the Ford Explorer and Lincoln Aviator, employing approximately 6,000 UAW-represented workers) and the Kentucky Truck Plant (which manufactures Super Duty F-Series trucks, also UAW Local 862) represent some of the most economically significant unionized workplaces in any right-to-work state. The Kentucky AFL-CIO and UAW Local 862 challenged the right-to-work law in federal court, but the Sixth Circuit ultimately upheld Kentucky's RTW legislation as constitutional, consistent with the Supreme Court's approach in prior right-to-work cases.

Kentucky's workers' compensation system (KRS 342) provides coverage for all employees — the statute requires coverage for any employer with at least one employee, with very few exceptions. But Kentucky's workers' compensation landscape is defined in large part by the eastern Kentucky coal mining industry, which has generated a body of occupational disease and injury jurisprudence unique among American states. The Kentucky Supreme Court's interpretation of the occupational disease coverage provisions (KRS 342.316 et seq.) for coal workers' pneumoconiosis (black lung disease) has been particularly significant — Kentucky WC provides benefits for black lung disease that supplement (and interact with) federal Black Lung Benefits Act claims. A Kentucky coal miner who develops progressive massive fibrosis (the most severe form of coal workers' pneumoconiosis) faces a maze of federal and state claims processes, each with their own evidentiary standards, physicians, and administrative procedures. The University of Kentucky's Pulmonary Disease Research Foundation in Lexington and the NIOSH (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) coal mining surveillance program based in Morgantown, West Virginia, are the principal institutions studying black lung in Kentucky miners — and their researchers frequently serve as expert witnesses in Kentucky WC and federal black lung claims.