Anyone who has been following the arcane politics of workers' compensation - the system of treating and supporting those with job-related maladies - found much to digest in the state's major newspapers last Saturday.

While one paper was reporting agreement on an "outline of a plan" to overhaul the much-troubled system, others were noting that Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and top Democrats had abandoned Sacramento for Easter vacations without nailing down a deal. They were all correct - kinda, sorta, maybe, perhaps.

Schwarzenegger and Democrats have agreed to agree on about a half-dozen broad approaches to reducing workers' comp costs and have tossed the ball to the lawyers and technicians for the various political factions to write specific language.

The caveat that the "devil is in the details" is absolutely applicable to workers' comp, which may be the single most complicated political issue in the Capitol, as well as one of the biggest in financial terms. Agreeing to tighten up the standards governing permanent partial disability, a huge cost factor, is one thing, but actually writing language that all parties can sign off on is very much another.

The politicians can reach broad agreement, but the exact language is left to lawyers and expert staff aides, and that's what's happening this week while the former work on their tans. And, in fact, there are even some broad areas left unsettled, such as whether workers' comp insurers should be re-regulated and if so, to what level. They were deregulated a decade ago, touching off a sequence of events that led to the current crisis.

Unions and workers' comp lawyers have contended that reregulation would bring down employers' costs, while insurers contend that they're already losing money on covering employers in California, thanks to skyrocketing medical and other costs, and will abandon the California market if they can't recover their expenses. The quasipublic State Compensation Insurance Fund, which writes more than half of workers' comp insurance in the state, is embroiled, meanwhile, in a bitter feud with Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi over the State Fund's financial viability, and any legislative deal may have to resolve it as well.

The staffers and lawyers are doing their line-by-line drafting of legislation under an April 16 deadline for submitting signatures on an initiative that would place the issue before voters in November. But even that date is elastic. It's the initial deadline for submission of petition signatures but could be stretched a week or two, perhaps more, if a deal appears imminent.

The threat of the initiative - and Schwarzenegger's pledge to pursue it if necessary - is driving the Capitol negotiations, but in reality no one really knows how the issue would play before voters when reduced to 30-second television commercials.

Proponents - employers and insurers, mostly - would argue that reforming workers' comp is vital to creating new jobs while opponents, such as labor unions and workers' comp lawyers, would contend that the initiative slams injured workers in the pocketbook.

The compromise now being considered would be far milder than the proposed initiative, and its enactment would be another mark for Schwarzenegger, who brags of his ability to bring comity to a politically gridlocked Capitol. But some employers and Republican legislators worry that Schwarzenegger is so enamored with deal-making that he will not be tough enough with Democrats. By the same token, the Legislature's top Democrat, Senate President Pro Tem John Burton, wants to make a workers' comp deal to keep the issue from competing in November with a referendum on his centerpiece political achievement, legislation to require employers to provide health-care coverage. And some of his allies worry that he, too, will give away too much to avoid a ballot battle.

Whether the deal is sealed, and whether it represents something that the contentious political and economic factions can embrace, all depends on how well a group of otherwise anonymous lawyers and technicians can draft the devilish details. "There's still a lot of moving parts," one person close to the detailed negotiations said Monday.