Chairman Mercer: The reason for heading that, "Workers' Compensation Code," was to cover the constitutional provisions in some of the States, which prohibit a bill from covering more than one subject, which shall be expressed in its title, and the fact that the term "code" means a system of law. By the adoption of that scheme it was our intention to raise the point, so that if you agreed to that general idea you could adopt a law with a heading sufficiently broad to codify the law of your State on that question, to allow you to repeal such portions of the common law as you wanted to repeal as a part of that chapter, and not be subject to the limitations of the constitutions of a number of States which would prohibit your covering more than one law. Do you care to waste any time on the heading?

Mr. Dawson: I would like to ask one question about the heading and that is why the word "workers" was used instead of "workmen?"

Chairman Mercer: Like everything else, that was used to provoke discussion. Workmen's Compensation, or Workingmen's Compensation, seems to have a technical meaning in this field of legislation. It seems to be understood generally as covering this whole subject, and yet when you come to define your bill and outline it and cover it section by section, you must either leave something to the construction of the courts, or else you must make provision to the effect that workmen shall cover workwomen and children and boys and girls and everybody connected with it. It seems to me it would cover that point (although it seems to be revolutionary in form) if we used the term "workers," because that would include everybody.

Mr. Dawson: Your idea then was, Mr. Chairman, that the word "worker" is believed to have more comprehensive significance than the word "workmen," and that it would be certain to be so held by the courts?

Chairman Mercer: That was my own idea. I think I am sound on it, but I have tried enough lawsuits to know that a fellow is never sound until he is done. Shall we pass to the first section and leave it without any expression as to the heading?

Mason B. Starring (Illinois): I would like to inquire in regard to Section 1, as to what extent that applies to farm workers. Supposing a man was driving a dredging machine in the field and his horses became frightened and ran away and killed him. Is the farmer liable under this act?

Chairman Mercer: He was intended to be, if you adopt that act.

James A. Lowell (Massachusetts): I should like to inquire why you say "every employer conducting an employment in which there hereafter occurs bodily injuries to any of the employes" shall be deemed to be conducting a dangerous employment? Is that from some idea that if you call an employment dangerous you thereby are allowed to change the terms of it by your constitution, and if you do not call it dangerous, you are not?

Chairman Mercer: The idea was that if you worded the first section the way we have, it would provoke discussion on all those elements. That was the first plan. The fundamental reason was that if the employer was conducting an employment which was capable of being dangerous, and he guarded his employes through the safety devices he employed and the grade of men he employed, so that the whole scheme of his business was conducted in such a way that he did not have any accidents at all, that until he had some accidents he would not be classified as being in a dangerous employment. In other words, two men might run exactly the same institution with the same machinery manufacturing the same article; one set of men will run it so there will not be any accidents maybe in ten years; the other set may have ten accidents in the first year by reason of the way they rush, and their carelessness, and the grade of men they hire and their failure to protect their machinery and all that sort of thing. It was the intention to make that as broad as you possibly could make it, so as to provoke discussion as to whether you wanted to say every industry that had an accident should be liable, or whether you wanted to limit it to some of the industries as they have done in New York and in some of the foreign countries.