[7] In 1912 the Association for Labor Legislation prepared, in co-operation with the United States Bureau of Labor and the Library of Congress, a critical bibliography on industrial diseases. Fifty printed pages of titles were thus made available on this important subject. European countries have published volumes on compensation for industrial diseases, but, as far as can be learned, this is the first American article under this title.
Leading countries of Europe have already taken this step. Great Britain in her Workmen's Compensation Act of 1906, in addition to accidents, included in the first schedule six diseases of occupation. That schedule has been extended until it now includes no less than twenty-four distinct maladies due to peculiar conditions of employment. Germany, as a result of the experience of a quarter of a century, in her new imperial code expressly has declared for similar action. Switzerland, in her system accepted by referendum vote in February, 1912, makes like provision for insurance against occupational diseases. The government of Holland, in November, 1912, laid before Parliament a bill to regulate the insurance of workmen against industrial diseases in connection with the proposed sickness insurance.
DOUBLE WRIST-DROP
Hands of workman paralyzed for sixteen years as result of lead poisoning. Five of his fellow workmen were killed by lead poisoning before they were forty. Victims of lead poisoning are not compensated under American laws because technically an occupational disease is "not an injury."
The arguments used so effectively by advocates of compensation for accidents, and now so generally accepted by all men, apply with even greater force in the consideration of relief for the victims of occupational diseases. No one will doubt, for example, that placing the financial cost of lead poisoning upon the lead industry will promote greater cleanliness in the lead trades. It will pay to clean up. A considerable part of the money now paid to employers' liability companies and to ambulance chasers could, under a just system of compensation, go where it belongs—to the injured workman or his family. Expensive, annoying, and unsatisfactory litigation could be reduced to a minimum. Information concerning special danger points in industry would be automatically pointed out to the factory inspectors in a manner both prompt and sure. Unnecessary occupational diseases would then be prevented, and that is the real problem.
The principle is admitted that workmen should be compensated for injuries by accident arising out of their employment. It is only consistent that incapacity caused by diseases due to the employment should also be included. Some diseases are, in the ordinary use of the term, accidental. But many people work where trade diseases of an insidious nature are contracted and where there is constant risk of illness on that account. These diseases are as serious as accidents. There is no social justification for drawing an arbitrary line of distinction—the principle of compensation is no longer in an experimental stage. A compensation law should include, says Sir Thomas Oliver, the leading English authority on the subject, "industrial diseases, the consequences of which may be immediate or remote, and which are often more severe than accidents."
It must be admitted that even our discredited system of employers' liability has afforded occasional relief to the victims of accidents. But even this uncertain and irregular protection, poor as it is, has in most instances been denied to workers exposed to the creeping horror of industrial disease. The exact occupational cause of the affliction is, of course, more difficult to prove. The employee is thus placed at still greater disadvantage in dealing with his employer. American judges, basing their opinions on outgrown decisions of the British House of Lords, have declared that "industrial injuries" include only those afflictions of an accidental nature whose cause can be ascribed to a definite point of time, and have thus almost universally barred even from the occasional and expensive relief of employers' liability the victims of such typical maladies as the match maker's "phossy jaw," the lead worker's "wrist-drop" and painter's colic, the boiler maker's deafness, the glass worker's cataract, the potter's palsy, the hatter's shakes, and the compressed air worker's bends.
The public has not yet forgotten pitiful cases where match manufacturers, through the work of their attorneys, were able to deny all financial relief to their victims of "phossy jaw." And there are cases now pending in the courts where men totally blinded by the fumes of wood alcohol have year after year sued in vain for some financial relief from brewery companies which employed them to varnish the inside of beer vats.
Occasionally, however, large awards have been made. But they, as in the case of damage suits arising out of accidents, encourage further expensive litigation. One case of wood alcohol poisoning in Ohio (Joseph Frank vs. The Herancourt Brewing Co., 82 O. S., 424) is now a matter of record. The Supreme Court compelled the employer to pay $12,500, with interest and costs, aggregating over $15,000.
"After five years of litigation, six hearings in three different courts, including two trips to the Supreme Court, printing of several thousand pages of record testimony and briefs, taking voluminous depositions in different parts of the country involving great expense, during which the injured workman—in this instance rendered blind—was totally unable to support his wife and family, the wife being obliged to work at nights in downtown cafes, scrubbing floors after midnight, in order to provide scant food for herself and babies while the latter slept."