CASUALTY COMPANIES AND COMPENSATION
(From a personal letter to the editors of The Survey published with permission of the author.)
To the Editor:
Allow me to say that I absolutely endorse the article in a recent issue by Paul Kennaday entitled Big Business and Workmen’s Compensation.[5] I have been acting for the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association, a body corresponding to your National Association of Manufacturers, but more highly organized and representing a much larger proportion of its constituency than the American body. In fact, we represent about 85 per cent of all the manufacturers of Canada. I say this to indicate the probability that the Canadian body would not adopt any policy without the most careful consideration and investigation. This body has adopted the same view as that expressed in the article and is devoting a large amount of energy and considerable money promoting a workmen’s compensation system of the type of the Washington system.
There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that such a system is the only satisfactory solution ultimate or even temporary to the problem. This view is of course opposed by the liability insurance interests who are conducting a carefully planned and well financed campaign against “state insurance.”
Time and again we have had to deal with the representatives of these insurance interests in connection with the investigation in Ontario preliminary to the drafting of a Workmen’s Compensation Act for that province, and I am glad to state that, generally speaking, the motives and arguments (perfectly legitimate perhaps) of the insurance interests are understood and rated at their proper value. I think I have a pretty broad view of the situation in the United States and I am sorry to say that the true position of affairs does not appear to be generally appreciated by either the politicians or the leaders of labor and industry. I should think it might well be one of the functions of The Survey to open up this matter.
F. W. Wegenast.
[Counsel Canadian Manufacturers’ Association.]
Toronto.