WORKERS’ COMPENSATION.

Otago Witness, Issue 3743, 8 December 1925, Page 7

WORKERS’ COMPENSATION.

VALUE OF HUMAN LIMBS (From Ouh Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, November 19 The Workers’ Compensation Bill, a drastlo measure which will be before Parliament shortly, reveals, incidentally, the strange method of departmental calculation of th© compensation payable by an employer in respect of am employee's injuries. It reveals also an innovation, which provides that an employee shall be entitled to compensation if he is injured on his way to or from fc.ia place of employment. In the value that is placed on human limbs under the Bill, there is a machine-like level of calculation which apparently will preclude the courts from taking all things into consideration. The loss of the little finger, middle finger, or ring finger, is assessed, for example, at £ll3 lOs* Here one sees an exactitude which brings the loss down even to precise shillings. This is shown again in the assessment of the loss of the lower part of a leg, which is valued at £562 10s, and of the loss of a part of a thumb, which, as in the case of a little finger, is valued at £ll2 10s. Even these sums may not compensate a man adequately for his injuries, but to reduce th© basis to precise shillings apears nt least a little novel. They were not nearly as exact as this in Samuel Butler’s land of Erewhon, where every crime had its money price, and where, for rendering a man deaf, for instance, an offender had to pay the injured one 60s, and for depriving him of the use of his finger. 15s. Limbs might have been cheap in tlioso days, but they did not at least make their calculations with the sam© exactitude as under this Bill, and assess an unfortunate man’s deafness at say, £3 10s 6d, They let it go at £3.