For too long interpreters have been voiceless in an increasingly hostile professional environment. While certain employers' representatives seek ever greater power to control (and abridge) costs of benefits for injured workers, other professionals in the workers' compensation regulated community; doctors, attorneys, nurse case managers, etc., have organized into associations to address these incursions into their ability to practice their professions honorably and economically. That all of these associations appear to continue to grow in membership and visibility is a clear indication that coming together for common cause in the face of adversity is working advantageously for their members.

Interpreters and the agencies that provide work for them have remained the only un-united and unrepresented regulated profession offering services to injured workers. As individuals we have had to stand by voiceless, while our professional status and right to equal regulatory protection has come under regular assault by forces seeking economic advantage at our expense. Until now, we have been too weak and unorganized to mount a response to these incursions, except by piecemeal means at WCAB hearings and trials.

New changes in WCAB Rules of Practice and Procedure, implemented in January of 2002, which make the appeal process more difficult and costly, have encouraged some underwriters and their contract payers to further deviate from previously protected practices to more self-serving policies, and weakened our expectations for fair and even-handed treatment in these settings.