If the worker could show the employer had been negligent, the worker still might not have received any compensation if the employer could rely on one of three defenses: assumption of risk, fellow-servant defense, and contributory negligence.
These common law rules were the ultimate guide for judges who adjudicated disputes between employers and workers. As in many civil situations, the vast majority of accident cases were settled long before they ever went to trial. The employers or their insurers typically offered settlements to injured workers. In samples of fatal accidents, about half the families of fatal accident victims received some payments for the loss of their loved ones.
There were a few cases where the accident victims and their families received substantial payments, but there were far more cases where no payment was made. To some extent workers received some compensation for accepting accident risk in the form of higher wages for more dangerous jobs.
Workers had relatively limited opportunities to use these higher wages to buy accident or life insurance, or pay premiums into benefit societies. As a result, many workers and families tried to rely on savings to sustain them in the event of an accident. The problem they faced is that it would take quite a few years to save enough to cover the losses of an accident, and if they were unlucky enough to have an accident early on, they would quickly exhaust these savings.
The system of negligence liability, although without the three defenses, continues to determine the nature of accident compensation in the railroad industry. Among industrial countries the U. The last state to adopt was Mississippi in The years that the law was permanently established are in parentheses.
New York passed a compulsory law in and an elective law in , but the compulsory law was declared unconstitutional, and the elective law saw little use.
New York passed a compulsory law in after passing a constitutional amendment. The Kentucky law of was declared unconstitutional and was replaced by a law in Another law passed in was defeated in a referendum in and an initiative on the ballot was again defeated in Maryland and Montana passed earlier laws specific to miners that were declared unconstitutional.
Most states also allowed firms to self-insure if they could meet certain financial solvency tests. Ohio and California in and Illinois later established compulsory laws. An injured worker typically had to sustain an injury that lasted several days before he would become eligible for wage replacement. Once he became eligible, he could expect to receive weekly payments of up to two-thirds of his wage while injured. These payments were often capped at a fixed amount per week. As a result, high-wage workers sometimes received payments that replaced a smaller percentage of their lost earnings.
The families of workers killed in fatal accidents typically receive burial expenses and a weekly payment of up to two-thirds of the wage, often subject to caps on the weekly payments and limits on the total amounts paid out. Many workers had faced problems in purchasing accident insurance at the turn of the century. Some were troubled by the uncertainties associated with the courts and juries applying negligence liability to accidents.
Some large awards by juries fueled these fears. Others were worried about state legislatures adopting legislation that would limit their defenses in liability suits. The negligence liability system had become an increasing source of friction between workers and employers. Under the negligence liability system, the insurers had not been selling much accident insurance to workers because of information problems in identifying who would be good and bad risks.
As a result, insurance companies saw a rise in their business of insuring workplace accidents. In the early s, literary muckrakers began penning genre-defying novels about the struggles of the common man in modern industrial society.
Perhaps most notable was Upton Sinclair, the author of The Jungle , a novel that detailed the hellish conditions faced by slaughterhouse workers in turn-of-the-century Chicago.
Thirty-six more states followed suit before the close of the decade. In fact, by , only six states had not authorized compensation for workplace injuries. These changes reduced benefits to employees and supplied business owners with tools to control medical costs. When you get down to it, workers' compensation, at its most basic function, is just taking care of people. The History of Workers' Compensation in California Workers' compensation programs were an outcome of the Progressive Era, when reformers responded to both labor and employer concerns about high rates of work-related injuries, insufficient compensation to injured workers, and continuing employer uncertainty about how to predict the costs related to these injuries.
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