Document 06RERG7oYQOoNj30gX5LMyzxd

WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION AND INSURANCE ment The change from hand tools to pow er-driven machinery and the movement of workers from the home workshop to the modern factory brought a tremendous in crease in the number of industrial injuries The employer now delegated supervision to others If a worker suffered an injury, he received little personal attention and was forced to seek a legal remedy for his loss The use of new and complicated machin ery, lack of skill on the part of the worker, little or no instruction, and poor supervi sion brought up the question "who is to blame" when an injury occurred Employ ers many times denied liability unless it was imposed by law The right of an em ployee to be compensated in the event of injury incurred on the job was based on the same common law obligations that an employer owed to any member of the pub lic Courts interpreted the rules strictly, and the employee rarely recovered damages for his injuries Under the common law, an employer has five responsibilities 1. To provide a reasonably safe work place 2 To provide reasonably safe tools and equipment 3 To use reasonable care m selecting em ployees 4 To enforce reasonable safety rules 5 To provide reasonable instruction re garding the dangers of the employment Although these restrictions might seem to place an urgent responsibility upon the employer, m practice the injured worker had few rights If the employee felt that the employer was lax in complying with these rules, and if such laxity caused him physical injury on the job, he could sue his employer for damages However, the em ployer had three important defenses 1 Fellow servant rule An employer could not be held liable lor injury caused by the negligence or carelessness of fellow employees 2 Contributory negligence The employer was not responsible if negligence of the employee contributed to the cause of the injury. 3 Assumption of nsk The employee, when be accepted the job, assumed all the-ob- vious and customarily associated nsks. Statistics indicated that in approximately 40 per cent of the industrial acc dents which caused disability to workers both the em ployer and the employee were at fault An additional 30 per cent were due principally, though not enbrely, to the fault of the em ployee Thus, because of the three defenses of the employer, approximately 70 per cent of all disabilities to employees were not compensated under the precompensation statutory and common law system Completely discouraged, woricers tended to settle their cases quickly out of court for much-needed cash, often m grossly inade quate amounts Long-drawn-out legal cases did not make for good feeling between employer and employee, and often an em ployee who used his right to sue for dam ages lost his job Lawyers' fees took a sub stantial part of the amounts recovered, and, in many cases, final decisions were de layed for long penods, during which in jured employees often were in senous need of financial assistance Early laws The first workmen's compensation act was a German law enacted in 1884 In the main, it was an administrative law setting up a self-supporting and self-directing in surance plan under government supervision In 1880, the Employers Liability Act, which merely limited the use of the fellow servant rule, was passed m England The first compensation act in Austria was passed about 1887, and the first one m England about 1897 In this country, as early as 1697, labor began advocating workmen's compensation legislation to replace the common law ap proach to liability The first compensation law in the United States was passed by the Federal Government in 1908 for its own employees The first state laws were ap proved a few years later The first laws ran into difficulty The courts held that neither the employer nor the employee had an option regarding cov erage and that compelling an employer to pay without fault on his part violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which prohibits taking a per son's property without due process of law. To overcome this difficulty, some states passed elective laws that granted both the employer and the employee the nght to de- 11-2