This Day in Labor History: July 3, 1913

On July 3, 1913, an auto worker named Charles Weaver lost his eye after a crowbar struck him in the face at work. That was bad enough, but for Weaver that was the second eye he had lost on the job, having lost the other in 1906 while working in a dye factory. Now completely blind, he now relied upon the new system of workers compensation to survive. However, that system was a pro-industry “reform” that sought to undermine worker lawsuits over their injuries through regulatory means. As such, Weaver would not receive the necessary compensation to live the life he would have had he not lost his eyes at work.

Weaver naturally filed a claim for his loss. His employer contested the claim. The employer won. Let’s look at why.

Now one point worth making is that disabled people were all over the workplace in the early twentieth century. Since there was no social safety net, there was no alternative to not working, even for those seriously disabled. So if you were Charles Weaver and you lost your eye in 1906, you probably got some kind of small payout for it. But you still had to work. And if you were just a working person without any real skills or education, which was most of the working class at that time, you had little choice but take whatever job you could find in order to eat. So if that meant you had to go back to a workplace that was dangerous and could threaten your other eye, that’s what you did and just hoped for the best.

Meanwhile, the doctrine of free contract meant that the legal system routinely favored employers. When judges claimed, going back to the 1830s that individuals entered employment as part of an equal contract with the employer, it put all the onus for workplace accidents on the worker. After all, no worker had to take a specific job, even if in reality they did. But by this measure, the option to be unemployed and die of hunger is considered a choice. This also helps why so many anti-slavery activists were also anti-union extremists. It was all about how they conceptualized freedom and work. Rather, a free worker and free employer made a deal on their own terms. This of course completely ignored power, poverty, and all other forms of inequality. It was all an intellectual conception from people who really wanted to believe that capitalism was perfect as is, without any sort of regulation.

So for decades, when workers sued for compensation, either judges would throw it out or juries would find in favor of the employer. But this began to change after 1900. Part of the broader response to inequality and the extremism of the Gilded Age, both judges and juries began to find in favor of workers sometimes and granted them sizable awards. This fact freaked out employers, who did not think they would ever have to pay more than a pittance for dead or injured workers. So it didn’t take them long to want to regularize the system and take power out of the hands of judges and juries. This is how the worker compensation system was created, first in Wisconsin in 1911 and then spreading through most of the country by the end of the 1910s.

That system seemed like it was pro-worker, but it was not. It was absolutely pro-employer. First, the workers comp system paid out far less than any worker would make while working. The idea behind this was simple–employers believed that workers were slackers would loaf on the dole rather than work if they were kept above poverty. Second, staffed primarily by people at the state level sympathetic to the employer, the system often shafted injured workers.

Compensation law started with the point that the worker was not already disabled. But this of course ignored the reality of so many workers at the time who needed to labor while disabled to survive. Most states had written their statues this way. This opened the way for Weaver’s employer to contest his claim. Now, the Michigan workers’ comp board did initially grant Weaver his claim, $10 a week for the maximum of 400 weeks. After that, less than eight years, you were out of luck even if you won, so if you were, say 23, lost your leg on the job, and survived til 31, welp? Tough luck! Weaver’s initial salary was $21 a week. So even if he had won the case, he still would have made less than 50 percent of his already low salary. Making that gap up was entirely Weaver’s problem. The corporations and their political allies had written the laws to ensure that slackers like him would suffer for getting hurt.

Weaver’s employer, the Maxwell Motor Company, did not challenge the weekly rate. That was fine. It challenged the length of time it had to pay it. It wanted to reduce the compensation to 100 weeks, less than two years, based on the fact that it was not responsible for his entire disability. “Outside causes” that would never pay up also had responsibility and what happened to Weaver because of this was not the company’s problem. The company instead claimed it was being treated unfairly by a system biased against employers. Weaver’s lawyer naturally noted the lies here and laid out the claim so that anyone with a drop of common sense could figure out what to do here.

 “He can now do nothing that he could immediately do before the injury to this one eye. Before the injury he had full capacity to do his work; after the injury he had no capacity.” “With his one eye he did all the work. Without his one eye, he can do no work. It seems, therefore, an irresistible conclusion that his present total incapacity for work resulted from the injury received on the 3d day of July, 1913.

But this is the United States, where sense falls victim to ideology. And so, in June 1915, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled against Weaver. Since he had two partially disabling injuries, the employer should only be responsible for the one they were responsible for. The fact that Weaver was now completely blind and the fact that the first injury took place before any kind of workers’ comp system existed was not the court’s problem, nor the auto company’s. Totally Weaver’s problem.

And so Weaver lived the rest of his life poor and blind.

This kind of ruling would become fairly normal. In a very similar situation a few years later in Iowa, that state ruled for the company on the same grounds.

To this day, workers comp pays far less than it should, as it still fundamentally believes injured workers are slackers who need incentive to get back on the job.

I borrowed from Nate Holdren’s Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism and Law in the Progressive Era to write this post.

This is the 526th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.