Most importantly, drawing on reforms first implemented in Germany, England, and France, workers' compensation statutes provided compensation for injured workers and created powerful incentives for employers to reduce accident tolls. In the 1910s, American workplace injuries began to fall in virtually every industry, except coal mining (where injury rates remained high for several decades).
Each of these innovations helped create an institutional infrastructure capable of dealing with the problem of work accidents -- and, indeed, with the wider social problems of disability, sickness, old age, and unemployment.
Why? Because workplace safety and industrial accident compensation turned out to be critical early tests of Western legal systems' administrative capacity to deal with the systemic problems of industrial free-market societies.
Of course, what worked for the US may not work for China. There are many different ways that legal systems can respond to occupational safety problems. The US, for example, never developed a powerful body of factory inspectors capable of providing effective enforcement of public safety standards. Other Western states, such as Germany, have successfully relied on centralized regulation and social insurance systems ever since Otto Bismarck reformed the German law of accidents in the 1880s.
China is obstructing all available paths to improved workplace safety. National safety standards and inspection regimes reflect the underlying pathologies of the Chinese state, in which lower-ranking officials report only positive information up the bureaucratic food chain. At the same time, limits on workers' ability to organize independent unions have inhibited grassroots forms of safety monitoring. Even Chinese media have come under fire for uncovering the kinds of workplace hazards that US journalists revealed a century ago.
Lawsuits are apparently increasingly common, but they are notoriously cumbersome, and judges are not independent from factory bosses. Compensation awards to injured workers and their families are pitifully low and fail to give employers incentives to make their workplaces safe.
The lesson of the US and European experiences is that improving workplace safety depends on the development of basic rule-of-law standards in courts, workplaces and administrative bureaucracies. Edicts and exhortations from the State Council are all well and good. But only effective legal institutions, not Chinese Communist Party fiat, will reduce Chinese workers' risk of death or injury on the job.
John Fabian Witt is an associate law professor at Columbia University and author of The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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