Part of what I’m now thinking about all the workers’ comp and injury stuff I’ve posted about before.
Insurance spreads risks, or at least the financial aspects of risks, across a broader pool, blunting the impact of accidents. One term for this is socialization of risk.
With regard to workers comp and injury and law and all that, I’m interested in how the policies reflect and shape society to some extent. “Socialization of risk” - what (and who) counts as society, and as risk? Socialization risk happened/happens in some actually existing society. How do hierarchies within a society shape how it socializes risk? How does socialization of risk reflect and reshape those hierarchies?
Put simply, some people are in and others are out. Some fall someplace in the between, relatively close to in or out. These different positions map onto who gets protection and how (what sort of protection as well as what say they have in the process), and who doesn’t.
The Industrial Commission of Minnesota sent out a standard notice to employers, which read in part “Chapter 82, Laws of 1921, known as the Workmen’s Compensation Act, requires every employer of labor in this state, except those employing only domestic servants or farm laborers, to comply with its provisions” in one of thee ways:
1. Not be covered by Workmen’s Comp (part II of the act) and instead post a notice in the workplace, file a copy with the Industrial Commission, and thus have injuries dealt with according to the liability-litigation model (note to self: get clear on what that involved exactly, in Minnesota at the time; take notes on Asher; suits between employers and insurance companies; employer and insurance associations; some banks served as insurers according to the MNIndComm correspondence)
2. Carry their own risk, upon permission from the Industrial Commission
3. Carry insurance for risk with an authorized company
Stuff to look at -
the Socialization of Risks, by Fritz Karl Mann in the Review of Politics, 1945
DANGEROUS COMMERCE: INSURANCE AND THE MANAGEMENT OF
INTERNATIONAL RISKS
BY VIRGINIA HAUFLER
Governmentality
By Mitchell Dean
*
Edit:
- Free labor ideology, family wage, artisan labor, employers defenses; workplaces considered safe under proper behavior and injuries the fault of the injured, racial and gender disqualification/subordination of some workers, collective/mutual and private individual insurance
–>Formation of bureaus of labor statistics, tracking of accidents
- Increasing mechanization, increasing quantities of injury (qualitatively worse injuries?); workplaces come to be held inherently dangerous; changing demographics of industrial workers, continuing disqualification/subordination; legal defenses begin to erode due to juries, injured qualified women fare better
–> Commissions to study the accident problem, discussion of various remedies to the accident problem in workplaces and legally (the latter include increased inspection combined with mandatory safety measures, changes in employer defenses [employers liability], and workmen’s compensation; variations in each category) with variation in the preferences of different actors over time
—> Implementation of workmen’s comp, with some variations, renders previously independent free laborers now protected and dependent; racial and gender exclusions from the new protected-dependent status and closure of opportunities for women that had existed under juries; insurance/secondary injury leads to exclusions of disabled workers