Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Employers' Liability and Workmen's Compensation Laws: An Address Delivered at the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Maryland State Bar Association, July, 1912
After seventeen years of experience under her employers' liability law, England decided that it was a failure; that it did not adequately meet theconditions of modern industry.. Indeed, this was the conservative opinion in the early nineties, when, in a memorandum from the Home office to the Royal Commission of Labor which bore the approval of Sir Frederick Pollock, we find it said: The truth is that to the workman litigation under the act has more than its usual terrors. It is not merely that litigation is expensive, and that he is a poor man and his employer comparatively a rich one, it is that when a workman goes to law with his employer he, as it were, declares war against the person; on whom his future probably depends; he seeks to compel hini by legal force to pay money, and his only mode of doing so is the odious one of proving that his employer or his agents - his own fellow servants - have been guilty of negligence. Add to this that the legal proof of such negligence is often extremely difficult, the broad result is that a legal claim for damages only answers where the injury is very great, and the workman is prepared to leave his master's services. (report of Wainwright Commission, New York, 1910, p. The feeling in England that the employers' liability law was inadequate culminated in 1897, in her first workmen's compensation act, which was limited in its scope to what were deemed hazardous employments. The act was extended later (1906) so as to embrace all occupations, including even domestic service. But the wisdom of this extension, in the light of experience under the act, may be open to serious question.
There iswn'o reason to suppose that the employers' liability laws in this country have been any more effectual than. The one in England. Those which are not modelled strictly upon the English Act, but which abrogate the fellow servant defense, are limited, in the main, to railroads; and this is only one of the many hazardous industries in this country. It is conservatively estimated that the number of industrial accidents resulting in death in this country approximates annually, whilst the non-fatal injuries exceed It is, of course, impossible to know in what percentage of these there is a substantial recovery; but, from cases studied by the State Commissions of New York and Wisconsin (ibid, p. 88, et seq.) it would appear that in not more than 20'per cent. Is there actually litigation, and} that as to the balance, in 60 per cent. Of the cases of death, and in a like percentage of the cases of non-fatal injury, the claimant has received either nothing at all or, at the most, only funeral or medical expenses.
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