WORKERS' COMPENSATION.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVII, Issue 12, 15 January 1909, Page 6

WORKERS' COMPENSATION.

The principle that employers are to be held liable for the accidental injury of labourers in the course of their employment has been long accepted, with greater or less reservation; and the legal application of the principle has become familiar. The Workers' Compensation Act passed last year by Parliament cancels previous legislation on the subject, in order, chiefly, to extend the area of employers' liability. Compensation for accident may now be claimed from an employer by any employed person whose avei'age remuneration does not exceed £5 per week, and this whether the employer is negligent or not. In addition, and by extension of an English precedent, compensation may be claimed by labourers in certain industries on account of their loss by disease contracted in the course of employment. It is this lattei' provision that has caiised the existing dispute in the mining industry, which already has caused a considerable loss of wages and profits, and an irritating dislocation of trade. We have here another example of tho evil of blind and hasty legislation. The Workers' Compensation Act is one of the measures to which the late Parliament, in the hurry of its final session, gave almost perforce insufficient attention. The measure was introduced an&,,pressed forward by Government; and the Minister for Uabour appears to have had no more conception than another of its immediate consequences in the disorganisation of industry. The policy of the Act may be supposed to have been adopted not without a glance at its appeal to voters at the imminent general election ; but we^ give the Government full credit for an honest endeavour to improve the previously existing law. The misfortune is that the means were not accurately adjusted to the end in view ; and we are now told that, even before the Act has been applied, its provisions are found to be impracticable, and that an emergency session of Parliament will be needed in order to remove the grave difficulties which it has caused. The admission of employers' liability for labourers' accidents, due directly to their condition of employment, involves, to our mind, the admission of employers' liability for labourers' diseases, due directly to their condition of employment. There is no essential difference between the merits of a claim for compensation by a painter who falls from a scaffold and breaks a limb, and' of a miner who breathes impure air and injures his lungs. Or, if there be a- difference, it is rather in favour of the miner; since the accident may conceivably have been evitable by greater care on the part of the sufferer, while, if the air of a mine is loaded with impurities that cause disease, the miner has no choice but to breathe it. Thus, in principle, the one liability includes the other. Labourers are paid wages in order to do work, not to contract disease j and if their work is- of surb a nature that it involves an abnormal risk of disease, then the principle of employers' liability demands that the extra risk shall be borne by employers, and not by labourers. In other words, the profits of industries from which a disease specifically due to the industry cannot be dissociated, are, according to the principle, to be charged with the insurance premium required to protect labourers from the abnormal risk of illness or of death. The miner's special risk of disease, for example, is to be added to the cost of working the mine. It is evident that this principle, in any industry, tends to increase the price of the product of industry, and the ordinary result of an increase of price is a decrease of consumption, which in turn means a limitation of industry, and a consequent limitation of employment. In the case of the Heefton mines, the additional liability cast upon employers tends to the appreciation of gold. But, as gold is a world-product, and as New Zealand's comparatively small output of gold exercises little or no influence upon the world-market price of gold, the cost of miners' insurance against disease will merely be deducted from the profit of the mines. While the profit is good, the additional cost of labour can bo borne : as the profit decreases, or where expenses have already reduced profit to the current rate of interest upon invested capital, the industry is likely to be abandoned. In this case also, therefore, the additional protection given to the labourer must result in a iurther decrease in the volume of national industiy. That is a result which the country has already faced, in reaching the conclusion that the game is worth the candle, and that it is better to have a small population .engaged in highly pro-

fitable industries under good conditions of labour, than a larger population engaged in less profitable industries under conditions of labour less good. We represent the aristocracy of labour, and, as far as possible, leave labour's less pleasant tasks to less fortunate peoples. It is evident that an excessive adherence to this policy ■would leave New Zealanders a very small family indeed, unable to do 1 work much less profitable than picking up pence from Tom Tiddler's ground. In fifteen years of prosperity, however, we believe we have made an efficient compromise between an impolitic limitation of industry and an unreasonable burden upon labour. That is what the future has to test. Meanwhile, in Ihe present case, it is clear that the extension of the application of employers' liability has to be made, not without forethought as Parliament made it, but very and slowly. So much loss has already been caused by the Workers' Compensation Act that, in the interest of labourers as well as of employers, and granting that the Act in practice can achieve its aim of miners' protection, it would have paid better to postpone legislation for a year so that Parliament and the parties interested might have had leisure for full consideration. Given the principle of employers' liability for labourers' diseases, it does not follow that the principle should be applied to the whole area which theoretically it dominates. It is to be applied only, as far as it is in practice profitable — not to the labourers, but to the country ; and only as far as legislation can make it in practice profitable, without causing greater evils than those which legislation is intended to palliate or remove. The idea of the omnipotence of Parliament, or the idea that to decree a thing is equivalent to doing it, has been once more shown to be pure delusion.