COLUMN LEFT/ TOM HAYDEN : No One Brings Clean Hands to This Affair : On workers’ compensation, it’s Wilson’s bullying versus the Democrats’ obligation to the party’s ‘anchor tenants.’

The special session called by Gov. Pete Wilson on workers’ compensation is not designed to help either hard-pressed businesses or injured workers. Instead, it is a special-interest special session, an embarrassing example of deadlocked government at its worst.

There is no dispute about the facts: The $11-billion workers’ compensation system is riddled with middleman fraud while perpetuating what are among the highest premiums to firms and the lowest benefits to injured workers in the whole country.

What the political Establishment does not say is that the present system, so irrational to the innocent eye, perfectly reflects the current standoffs between the interest groups involved: insurance companies, attorneys, doctors, labor groups and the vocational rehabilitation system. Each of these opposes reform unless it reforms someone else.

In other words, if Sacramento were a petri dish, the interests profiting from this crisis would be opportunistic infections.

Wilson’s proposal would hurt injured workers by allowing no increase in their disability benefits until employers statewide net $1 billion in savings. This gain would have to be “independently documented,” which could take years.

Wilson also demands that most injured workers receive health care only from doctors approved by their employers, a return to a company-town mentality.

Most parties want to reduce stress claims, which now can be filed if only 10% of an alleged disability is job-related. But Wilson would end all stress claims, even those substantially related to the workplace.

Workplace injuries increased in the ‘80s, especially in occupations using new computer technology, where many workers lose their wrists to carpal tunnel syndrome--not by a sudden injury but through repetitive keyboard strokes. Wilson’s plan leaves these workers less able to redress their grievances.

Wilson’s plan is one-sided and partisan. Why else call a one-day, take-it-or-leave-it session? He is openly mobilizing the business community to blister Democrats in November. For Wilson, this session is the year’s biggest GOP fund-raiser.

Democrats long have fought for worker safety. But, as often happens with reform, their efforts have fostered a bureaucratic haven for abuse. They are limited as reformers by their ties to the trial lawyers and organized labor, groups that Speaker Willie Brown calls “anchor tenants” of the Democratic Party. In making this analogy of a political party to a shopping mall, the Speaker means that these “tenants” generate the base income in campaign contributions to keep his business alive.

The trial lawyers, for example, have promised a considerable amount--some say $500,000--to the Speaker’s coffers. That they are a decent liberal group defending workplace safety--and whom I support 90% of the time--does not make them any less a special-interest cog in the workers’ compensation gridlock.

For the same underlying interest-group reasons, the Assembly Democrats were able to fight Wilson over school funding during this year’s long budget crisis. The California Teachers Assn. is another “anchor tenant” that supplies Democrats with dollars. The teachers get staunch Democratic support in return, although as a consequence they sometimes are ensnared in webs of intrigue far removed from classroom interests. For example, CTA allowed itself to be used in television ads against increased alcohol taxes in 1990, when the Speaker was protecting the alcohol lobby.

These hidden forces are worth remembering when the blame over workers’ compensation begins intensifying in the next two weeks. An internal Senate memo admits that “historically, the Legislature has relied on the ‘parties’ . . . to present deals to the Legislature. This process has not worked well for some time.”

Without reforms of campaign finances and lobbying practices, California will continue to be a special-interest state, and small businesses and workers will bear the cost.