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an officer is an agent or employe, and therefore a fellow servant with all other employes, although the courts have usually not so held. Except in the case of executive officers, however, the rule has been applied so sweepingly that, for instance, a scrubwoman washing out railway coaches might be held to be a fellow servant with the superintendent of the road, and, therefore, without a good claim against the company for negligence attributable to him.

The "fellow servant" rule grew up in the courts out of the simplicity of the common law, which in its origin did not know employers and employes in the modern industrial or commercial sense, but only "masters" and "servants." The law did not hold the master liable, even on the ground of negligence. It certainly would have refused to require him to compensate one servant for the negligence of another. This principle manifestly has little or no suitability for the uses of a commercial and highly organized industrial community, in which much the larger part of the service performed by employes is not for the direct enjoyment of the employer but is part of the aggregate cost of products or services sold by him to the public at a price to cover all the costs. In recent years the "fellow servant" rule has been much relaxed, first by the courts and later by legislatures. In many states an employe who supervises the work and controls the workman is held to be a "viceprincipal" and to represent the employer, so that his negligence is treated as if it were the negligence of the employer.

Under the rules of law just outlined, a very large proportion of the accidents which occur in the industries of the country go uncompensated. In some cases, on the other hand, the employer is held for substantial amounts, and occasionally very large verdicts are recovered, but in only a small percentage of the cases is the compensation adequate.

265. The Incidence of Work Accidents12

BY E. H. DOWNEY

Work accidents, in the nature of the case, are sustained principally by wage-earners, who are substantially propertyless as a matter of course, who have no savings to speak of, and whose incomes, for the most part, are too small to leave any adequate margin for accident insurance. The almost total absence of property or savings among wage-workers is abundantly demonstrated by tax returns and the records of savings banks and life insurance companies.

12 Adapted from History of Work Accident Indemnity in Iowa, 6-8. Published by the State Historical Society of Iowa (1912).

But wages statistics are yet more conclusive to the same effect. A recent investigator of this subject, Professor Scott Nearing of the University of Pennsylvania, concludes that one-half of the adult male wage-workers of the United States receive less than $500 a year; that three-fourths of them get less than $600, and that only 10 per cent are in receipt of more than $800 annually. As to women wage-workers, three-fifths are receiving less than $325 yearly; ninetenths are paid less than $500, and only one in twenty is paid more than $600. These estimates are well substantiated by the findings of other investigators. More than half of the workmen injured in the Pittsburgh district in 1907 were earning less than $15 weekly (making no allowance for unemployment) at the time of injury. Of the men sustaining industrial injuries in Minnesota in 1909-10, 47 per cent were receiving less than $12.50 and 78 per cent were receiving less than $15 weekly.

It needs no argument to show that families in receipt of incomes such as these can have neither property, savings accounts nor insurance. And this conclusion, finally, is corroborated by investigations into the insurance actually carried by wage-workers. Of 132 married men killed in Pittsburgh, only 6 had insurance in substantial amount and only 25 out of 214 left savings, insurance, and trade-union and fraternal benefits to the amount of $500 each. In New York state 175 working men who suffered fatal or permanently disabling accidents had insurance in the aggregate sum of $18,635. Nor are these extreme instances selected to make out a case. The average value of 13,488,124 "industrial insurance" policies in force. in 1902 was only $135. The unvarnished fact is that the wageearner neither does, nor can, provide for the contingencies of sickness, accident, and unemployment.

To the wage-worker, then, even when no one but himself is dependent on his earnings, the loss of a few weeks' wages means serious privation, and permanent incapacity means beggary. But quite half the victims of work accidents are married men, and a majority of even the unmarried contribute to the support of others. For example, of 467 fatal accidents in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, 258 were sustained by married men and 129 others by regular contributors to the support of relatives; whereas only 80 of the 467 dead were wholly without dependents. Of 285 fatal accidents investigated in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, 176 were suffered by heads. of families. Of 1,476 men killed on the job in New York state, 679 were the sole supporters of 1,775 dependents, 167 were the principal supporters of 520 dependents and 252 contributed to the support of 668 relatives-leaving but 378, or 35 per cent of the whole number

of deceased, entirely without economic responsibilities. In Wisconsin 43 per cent of the injured workmen whose conjugal conditions could be learned by the State Bureau of Labor were married.

A serious work accident, therefore, commonly deprives a necessitous family of its sole, or chief, or at least a very important, source of income. The inevitable result, in the absence of systematic accident indemnity, is poverty, and the long train of social evils that spring from poverty. It is not only that victims of unindemnified work accidents suffer prolonged incapacity and often needless death from want of means to obtain proper care, not only that families are compelled to reduce a standard of living already low, and that women and children are forced into employments unsuited to their age and sex, with resultant physical and moral deterioration; but it is that the ever-present fear of undeserved want goes far to impair that spirit of hopefulness and enterprise upon which industrial efficiency so largely depends.

266. The Necessity of Employer's Liability13

BY ADNA F. WEBER

It must be clear, upon reflection, that the conditions under which modern industry is carried on preclude the possibility of explaining every accident by somebody's negligence. This much was dimly understood when various countries took the first step of shifting the onus probandi from employee to employer. If, now, the employees are not to blame for the innumerable injuries to which they are subject, why should they be made to bear the financial burden of those injuries? Why should not that burden be distributed over the community instead of being concentrated upon a certain number of families who, in any event, will have to bear the physical and mental suffering involved in the death, crippling, or maiming of men? The risk of fire is undeniably greater in a gunpowder mill than in a brewery, but the owner of the mill does not bear the burden by contenting himself with lower profits than the brewer's; he simply pays for the greater risk by higher rates of fire insurance and passes the cost on to the consuming public in a higher price for his product. If the additional expense imposed upon a gunpowder manufacturer through the more frequent losses by fire can be thus recouped from consumers, why should not the expense of indemnifying his workmen for accidents be likewise made a part of the cost of production,

1aAdapted from an article published in the Political Science Quarterly, XVII, 279–281. Copyright (1902).

and thereby be transferred to the community at large? Only one thing will prevent such shifting of the burden, and that is the ability of competitors to put their goods on the market without incurring like charges. Hence the law must require all competitors in a given trade to make the same compensation for the same injuries. This is what Europe has done; by compelling employers to compensate injured employees according to a fixed scale, it has taxed the community, through higher prices of goods, for the support of its injured members.

Many minds bred in the philosophy of individualism will undoubtedly see in such legislation nothing but injustice to the employer. In reality such legislation is in strict conformance with the innermost spirit of English and American common law. It recognizes the existence of undeserved distress among workingmen and undertakes to alleviate their suffering by giving them a claim upon. some person who is pecuniarily responsible. And that is precisely the principle embodied in the time-honored common-law rule that the principal is liable for the acts of his agent.

The course of reasoning thus followed to justify the principaland-agent theory of liability also justified the workmen's compensation acts adopted by all the leading countries of Europe, which require the employer to assume all the risks of the employment which he calls into being. But while the employer makes the primary payment, just as he pays for the wear and tear of his machinery or the loss of his plant by fire, the consumers ultimately pay the cost. The alternative to such a general distribution of the financial burdens of industrial accidents is the present method, by which the entire burden is put primarily upon the poorest classes, and when it crushes them, to the damage of the community, is at last tardily assumed by the latter through the public charities.

D. SICKNESS AND OLD AGE

267. The Industrial Cost of Sickness14

BY JOSEPH P. CHAMBERLAIN

It is important that we should consider the many shreds of information which may be pieced together to show the extent and need of sickness insurance in the United States. No figures exist from which we may estimate accurately the probable amount of loss caused by sickness in this country, but a committee of experts acting for the American Association for Labor Legislation has estimated

"Adapted from "The Practicability of Compulsory Sickness Insurance in America," in the American Labor Legislation Review, IV, 52-53 (1914).

that annually there are 248,750,000 days of sickness among workmen in the United States, costing $792,892,860. The United States Bureau of Labor reports that every workman in the steel industry has the expectation of 9 days lost by sickness in a year as against 4 days lost by accident, a significant proportion when we realize that it does not cover the cases of men forced by sickness to quit entirely, and that only the sick leave their work.

The burden is not borne entirely by the working people. Sums which would undoubtedly amount to considerable in the aggregate are paid by employers as wages to sick employees and to the different insurance funds in which both employer and employee are interested. The extent of the contribution of private charity may be guessed by the statement of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, that 40 per cent of the persons helped by it in 1912 became dependent on account of sickness, a proportion, which, according to most authorities, is rather higher than the average. The contribution of the state and the public, through the support of hospitals and dispensaries, is a large figure. Studies of social conditions in New York City show that the dispensary and the hospital are the principal resources in sickness of the poorest paid classes of workmen.

These sums, large though they must be in the aggregate, leave the huge bulk of the cost of sickness on the shoulders of the workmen themselves, and to lessen in individual cases its crushing weight, often increased by the cost of burial, a widely extended system of sickness and burial insurance has grown up. There are a variety of carriers of this insurance: (1) Industrial and assessment, sickness and burial insurance companies and associations; (2) establishment funds; (3) the lodges of large fraternal orders and small local societies frequently affiliated with a church in foreign communities; (4) labor-union locals, and, to some extent, national organizations. The usual form of benefit is a cash payment in the event of death and a weekly payment to a person who is unable to earn from sickness or accident.

268. Why Sickness Insurance Should Be Compulsory15

BY I. M. RUBINOW

The lesson of history is strongly in favor of the compulsory principle in connection with sickness insurance. The considerations which have led to this conclusion are as follows:

15 Adapted from "Standards of Sickness Insurance," in the Journal of Political Economy, XXIII, 226–227 (1915).

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