Mr. Dawson (New York): In opening this discussion I am going to pass the legal question, because if it is necessary to limit the bill to hazardous employments, there are not two sides to the question.
It would appear that it ought not to be necessary for us to repeat all of the baby experiments that have been made in other countries. In other words, having delayed nearly thirty years longer than Europe, why should we not begin where the European countries left off, instead of where they began. It may, however, be necessary for us to confine ourselves to certain classes of employment, but I do not think, personally, that those classes ought to be selected with strict reference to the question of their being hazardous. For instance, if it should transpire that the employers of domestic servants and the farmers are bitterly opposed to any system which will apply to them, it may be necessary to leave them out, but we ought, if possible, to cover all manufacturing establishments, all mercantile establishments and all transportation industries, and generally to proceed on broad lines.
There is a practical objection to confining this sort of thing to the really more hazardous employments. It is this: The rates for employers' liability insurance are already very high in those industries, and they will probably be doubled or possibly tripled or even quadrupled. It would be difficult to imagine anything which would render workmen's compensation more densely unpopular than to apply the principle exclusively to the more dangerous manufacturing industries of a particular State. On the other hand, an increase in the rate payable by a dry goods merchant, for instance, might not amount to an advance on the payroll of more than one-half of 1 per cent. or 1 per cent., and, therefore, might not seriously place the employer at a disadvantage in competition with employers of other States. That is not true where the hazards of the occupation are very serious. You then have the situation that every manufacturer affected may be able to establish that he cannot carry on his business at all in competition with these other manufacturers if he is thus burdened.
James A. Lowell (Massachusetts): This matter of how many trades shall be covered is a pretty serious one for Massachusetts, because I do not think a scheme in Massachusetts would work unless we covered practically all the trades. We have an employers' liability law in Massachusetts now which excepts agricultural employment, which is a small matter in Massachusetts, and domestic servants, and I should assume that those two exceptions would be made in any law which was passed, and incidentally that has been held to be a proper law. So I do not apprehend any difficulty on the constitutional part of it through leaving out those two classes of workers.
But in Massachusetts by far the greater part of the industry there is in manufacturing, the lighter trades, and, I think, in order to get a law which would be of much service in Massachusetts, we would have to cover practically all industries, so we are up against the proposition there that we cannot do much along the line that has been followed in New York.
The experience in England under the employers' liability law has been that the premium on insurance in mines is twice what it cost under their former laws. In hazardous risks, as Mr. Dawson has said, the rates are from three to four times higher, and in those lighter trades it is very much greater than that; it is six or eight times more than it was under the old laws, and the chances are that if we adopted a law in Massachusetts with anything like the scale there is in England, it would be six or seven or eight times as much for insurance as it is at the present time. So that is a very practical difficulty which we have to face in Massachusetts.
As I said before, in order to have a law there that is to be of any value, you must practically cover all of the trades, and the only way you can do that, as far as I can see, is that you would have to have your scale of compensation under the law very low. I do not think that that would work out badly in Massachusetts, because most of the injuries which will be found in the factories will be minor injuries. There are not a great many very serious injuries in the cotton factories as compared with the mining and bridge-building industries, but there are a great many small injuries. If you put on some kind of a scale which would be relatively quite small, the result, it seems to me, would be that the workmen, as a whole, would be very much better off than they are now. As it is now, one man out of every twenty, we will say, or possibly one out of fifteen, will get a fairly good-sized amount, and all the other fourteen will not get anything. Putting it on a moderate scale in the cotton factories would give everybody something; probably not as much as we would like to give them, or as we perhaps should give them, but, I believe, the result would be much better than the present situation. For that reason on the point we are now discussing, I believe the thing for Massachusetts to do is to try and get some kind of a law which will cover practically all industries.
Charles A. Sumner (Missouri): I naturally would like to see the bill cover all industries, but the legal question arises, and unless we can get around it, as this tentative bill seems to succeed in doing, I do not know what we would do down in Missouri. Missouri is largely an agricultural State, and the Legislature is in the control very largely of the farmers and the representatives of the smaller cities in the agricultural districts. We have the initiative and referendum, however, and it occurred to me, in listening to the discussion here, that if it were the opinion of this Conference that it would be better to attempt to get a bill adopted which would include all trades, that it would be worth trying in Missouri, where the initiative and referendum are in existence. I believe that if a proper bill were put to the people direct, it would very likely get the support of the people in Missouri, particularly if it was a bill that the best judgment of this Conference had evolved. I believe, however, that we would prefer to have the bill include all trades.
Chairman Mercer: Mr. Sumner, the farmers may have a considerable influence in the Legislature, but so have the other interests, and legislation is very largely a matter of trade anyway, when you get into the majorities. Don't you think that would work itself out all right and take care of the farmers?