Between 1910 and 1921 forty two of the forty eight U.S. states passed Workmen’s Compensation legislation in response to a widespread perception that the United States was in the grip of an epidemic of workplace accidents. The epidemic of workplace accidents generated two phenomena which concerned policymakers and lobbyists: injured workers and lawsuits. Workplace accidents left many workers disabled and unable to find work, thus simultaneously increasing the burdens of these workers and their families while reducing their income prospects. Policymakers and lobbyists generally perceived lawsuits in response to workplace injuries as part of the problem. They saw lawsuits as creating greater conflict between employers and employees due to the adversarial nature of trials, as not providing compensation to injured workers at an adequate level or speed, and as costing a great deal of money. As a result, Workmen’s Compensation laws channeled claims by injured workers out of courtrooms and into commissions which sought to process injury claims in a manner which removed questions of fault, paid injured workers more quickly, and lowered costs per claim.
Workmen’s Compensation laws, as the name suggests, were written with men in mind. It appears that injured women may have fared better than men did under the common law system of handling workplace injuries. All male juries appear to have issued verdicts in favor of I injured women workers more often than injured men and to have awarded injured women higher damages. It also appears that the creation of Workmen’s Compensation in Wisconsin may have put the jobs of disabled workers at risk. In cases of injury employees were allowed compensation based on their level of capacity or incapacity after injury. This meant that compensation was not based on injury but based on the post-injury condition, so that a one armed worker who lost an arm would be compensated the same as a two armed worker who lost both arms. As a result, some employers appear to have become more hesitant to hire already disabled workers, viewing these workers as a greater financial risk to employ.
And of second drafts -
In the decade following 1910 one U.S. state legislature after another changed the legal and social environment for people who suffered workplace injuries, through the creation of Workmen’s Compensation legislation. Disability and gender took center stage in the nation-wide concern over workplace injuries. The name Workmen’s Compensation demonstrates the gendered character of these laws while the primary problem which the laws addressed was the creation of newly disabled people. Curiously, gender and to an even greater degree disability do not figure as major categories of analysis in historical scholarship on Workmen’s Compensation.
Placing gender and disability at the heart of our analytical perspective provides a different account of Workmen’s Compensation. While advocates for the laws spoke in an ostensibly neutral and universal vocabulary based on the work of statisticians and social scientists, the laws in fact further entrenched hierarchical norms of gender and ability/corporeality. Disabled workers and women workers experienced a change as a result of Workmen’s Compensation akin to that experienced by Mexican citizens residing in the territory the U.S. took in the late 1840s: the law changed around people in a way that altered their status as social and economic citizens.
Women appear to have fared better than men in the era prior to Workmen’s Compensation, when injured workers sought restitution through the courtroom. Injured women won their workplace injury lawsuits more often and gained higher monetary awards than injured men. Regardless of intention, policymakers made it harder for injured women to get money for their injuries and less money then they did so.
Workmen’s Compensation had negative effects for disabled workers as well. The new injury laws said that injured employees should be compensated for their total incapacity after injury, meaning that a one armed worker who lost an arm would be compensated the same as a two armed worker who lost both arms. In response employers began to view already disabled workers as a greater financial risk to employ. Workmen’s Compensation laws thus helped construct the legal and social condition of disability as someone whose body renders them incapable of work.
Workmen’s Compensation laws channeled claims by injured workers out of courtrooms and into commissions which did not have the lawmaking power that courts did. These laws effectively froze the dynamic process of common law with regard to workplace injuries. Workmen’s Compensation advocates treated juries and courts as problematic and ill-informed actors to be removed from the process of handling disabling injuries. Juries, however, were an important avenue for citizen participation in legality and politics as well as the main source of higher awards for injured women. The replacement of juries with an expert-based system of commissions meant a less democratic approach to legal responses to workplace accidents, one which inadvertently made conditions worse for disabled workers. Considered through the analytic categories of gender and disability, Workmen’s Compensation appears both politically technocratic in process and socially inegalitarian in its results.
Comment by Nate — March 20, 2009 @ 6:32 pm
Graveyards, you see, are a place where decay and death mingle with and nourish new life.
Thus:
Labor statistics were a partial belief system, a rhetorical cover story, and a useful tool for planning and managing
class relations.
The beginning of a reading list:
Carroll Wright and Labor Reform: The Origin of Labor Statistics by James Leiby
The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900
by Theodore M. Porter
The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century
by David Salsburg
Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France
by Andrea A. Rusnock
The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900
by Stephen M. Stigler
Classical Probability in the Enlightenment
by Lorraine Daston
Games, Gods & Gambling: A History of Probability and Statistical Ideas
by F. N. David
The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference
by Ian Hacking
The Taming of Chance by Ian Hacking
Historical Ontology by Ian Hacking
An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic by Ian Hacking
The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning
by Alain Desrosières
The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public
by Sarah E. Igo
Trust in Numbers
by Theodore M. Porter
A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society
by Mary Poovey
Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain
by Mary Poovey
Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864
by Mary Poovey
The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel
by Catherine Gallagher
Do Economists Make Markets?: On the Performativity of Economics
by Donald MacKenzie
The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life
by Gerd Gigerenzer
Statistics on the Table: The History of Statistical Concepts and Methods
by Stephen M. Stigler
*
Science at the Bar: Science and Technology in American Law
by Sheila Jasanoff (look for related works as well)
Risk
by Deborah Lupton (look for related works as well)
“On the Frontier of The Empire of Chance: Statistics, Accidents, and Risk in Industrializing America” by
Arwen Mohun
“The High Cost of Living in the Progressives’ Economy” by Eric Rauchway
Dicing with Death: Chance, Risk and Health
by Stephen Senn
Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
by Peter L. Bernstein
Comment by Nate — March 21, 2009 @ 12:27 am
I got into a minor disagreement recently about regional/state stuff with regard to W Comp law. I should say at the outset I’ve got a sort of regional chip on my shoulder. I live in the midwest and am from here and it seems to me that U.S. histories often overlook the midwest and that the region doesn’t always fit with national stories because of a sort of coastal bias. That’s neither here nor there, really.
The disagreement went like this - I said scholarship on w comp has overemphasized the east coast, my friend replied that if this is true then it’s probably justified because some states looked to a few leading states (mostly New York) and patterned their laws after these. I think the table on page 559 here -
http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_02_4_kantor.pdf - shows the variation in states’ arrangements of workmen’s comp. It’s a good question, though, to what degree states looked to one leading law or a small handful of such laws. One to look into…
Comment by Nate — March 21, 2009 @ 11:37 am
Law and administration and regulation differences…?
Workmen’s Compensation laws moved the administration of injury claims out of an arena which was able to revise the standards of what was compensable and of adequate levels of compensation.
Comment by Nate — March 26, 2009 @ 12:24 pm