Failure and fulfillment: Agitation for employers’ liability legislation and the origins of workmen's compensation in New York state, 1876–1910

Asher, Robert

doi:10.1080/00236568308584705

Cited by 18 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Business support for workers' compensation did not only reflect the progressive attitudes of members of the business community. It was primarily a consequence of perceived interests (Asher 1969;Castrovinci 1976;Tripp 1976). Employers were upset over the growing financial and public image costs of personal injury litigation, its unpredictability, and its negative implications for labor relations.…”

Section: Welfare State Analysis and Workers' Compensationmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Case studies of the events leading to the introduction of state workers' compensation programs in the early twentieth century show that the programs primarily resulted from a major effort on the part of organized labor, social reformers, and progressive political forces. These actors sought to deal with the stark inadequacies of a previous industrial torts system and common-law defenses (Asher 1983). However, business was also very much involved in the adoption of this type of legislation.…”

Section: Welfare State Analysis and Workers' Compensationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Business and Social Policy: A Case Study of the Adoption of Workers’ Compensation in Israel

Gal

2005

Social Service Review

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Section: Welfare State Analysis and Workers' Compensationmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Welfare State Analysis and Workers' Compensationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Business and Social Policy: A Case Study of the Adoption of Workers’ Compensation in Israel

Gal

2005

Social Service Review

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“…Familiar, too, is the rise of workman's compensation laws that prompted so many improvements throughout American industries. 3,6,[9][10][11] But Alice Hamilton and the other government inspectors wielded almost no regulatory might, and their place in the public spotlight faded by the 1920s and 1930s, when most state workman's compensation laws did not cover occupational illnesses and unions struggled chiefly over bread and butter issues-when they weren't fighting for their mere right to exist. Yet, in this period of lax regulation and weak unions, overall conditions in the lead-using industries improved remarkably.…”

Section: Background On Occupational and Environmental Lead Poisoning mentioning

confidence: 99%

Little Pamphlets and Big Lies: Federal Authorities Respond to Childhood Lead Poisoning, 1935–2003

Warren

2005

Public Health Rep

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Late in 1935, Alice Hamilton, who a generation earlier had done more than any other government-sponsored researcher to expose and ameliorate industrial lead poisoning, wrote to Martha May Eliot, assistant chief of the U.S. Children's Bureau. 1 A young friend of Hamilton's, a new mother married to a third-year medical student at Harvard, had asked Hamilton how to be sure that paint on baby furniture was lead-free. Although Hamilton had always assumed "that furniture and toys were painted with enamel paint, lead-free," the Bureau of Standards informed her that in fact many enamel paints contained lead. Hamilton's purpose in writing Eliot, then, was to urge "that tests would have to be made of furniture paints and toy paints," and to suggest who should take on this task: "Do not you think that it is an important question and that it lies within the field of the Children's Bureau?" No such investigation was ever undertaken by the Children's Bureau, the federal agency charged with advocating for "the welfare of children and child life among all classes of our people." 2 Instead, the Bureau continued to field concerned parents' questions about safe paints, and periodically published leaflets listing the lead content of paints, data provided by the paint manufacturers themselves. If Eliot and others at the Children's Bureau did not see studying lead poisoning as within its field, the lead-using industries had certainly learned it was in their best interests to do so. Recent historical scholarship makes clear that for much of the twentieth century the lead industry dominated lead poisoning research, denied the potential health effects from exposure to lead, and successfully limited the public's knowledge of real harm to its workers and the general public, all in order to continue marketing its "useful metal." 3-6 At the time of this exchange of letters between Hamilton and Eliot, researchers at Harvard Medical School were in their second decade of research into the health effects of exposure to lead, research funded in large part by grants from the Lead Industries Association, a trade organization comprising most lead mining and manufacturing companies. 5,6 And at the University of Cincinnati, Robert Kehoe studied the physiology of lead absorption at the Kettering Laboratory of Applied Physiology, an institution established by and run with funding from GM and the Ethyl Corporation, the producers of leaded gasoline. Kehoe in Cincinnati and Aub and his team in Boston were establishing the standard interpretation of lead poisoning that would prevail for the next 40 years. This contrast between passive government agents and assertive defensive actions by industry had enormous health consequences both inside and outside the lead factory walls. This article focuses on childhood lead poisoning as distinguished from the other two particular modes of lead exposure: occupational and environmental-which might be more accurately termed "universal," since it is the uniform distribution (via leaded water

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“…Social scientists used this frame to gain the support of other social groups and to discredit the employers' liability option in a broad effort to reform "public sentiment and public opinion" (Neill 1911:169). Writing articles in numerous interest group journals and for the popular press, testifying before and participating in state commissions, and working within state bureaus of labor and statistics and within groups such as the AALL, social scientists consistently appealed to upper-and middle-class reform societies and organizations, charity and social workers, and labor unions (American Association for Labor Legislation 1908;Asher 1971). Their efforts were successful, for by 1910 the workers' compensation frame had become quite popular among these groups (Asher 1971: 673;Yellowitz 1965: 107-18).…”

Section: Employers' Liability or Workers' Compensation?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thirty-six states had joined in by 1917, and the remaining states enacted workers' compensation laws after the war. 2 The workers' compensation laws were pressed on state legislatures by cross-class coalitions, not by single political actors or groups (Asher 1971: 672-73;1973;1973-74;Reagan 1981;Siegel 1940;Tripp 1976). Capitalists, state labor federations, social scientists, charity workers, and upper-and middle-class reform organizations all joined hands.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Inventing Industrial Accidents and Their Insurance: Discourse and Workers’ Compensation in the United States, 1880s–1910s

Go¹

1996

Social Science History

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For an industrial worker in late-nineteenth-century America who lost a limb or an eye from a precariously assembled piece of machinery or who suffered some other work injury, compensation could be attained only through litigation. But under the common law, the courts assumed that workers who found themselves in dangerous work situations had the freedom to leave and find employment elsewhere. If they chose not to leave and were injured, the employer was not to blame legally. The doctrine of “assumed risk,” one of three “employers’ defenses,” made it difficult for a worker to win compensation. Only when an injured worker could prove that the employer had directly caused the accident and had done so alone was payment awarded (Downey 1912: 11–13).

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Failure and fulfillment: Agitation for employers’ liability legislation and the origins of workmen's compensation in New York state, 1876–1910

Cited by 18 publications

References 2 publications

Business and Social Policy: A Case Study of the Adoption of Workers’ Compensation in Israel

Business and Social Policy: A Case Study of the Adoption of Workers’ Compensation in Israel

Little Pamphlets and Big Lies: Federal Authorities Respond to Childhood Lead Poisoning, 1935–2003

Inventing Industrial Accidents and Their Insurance: Discourse and Workers’ Compensation in the United States, 1880s–1910s

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