WORKERS’ COMPENSATION.

Otago Witness, Issue 3773, 6 July 1926, Page 35

WORKERS’ COMPENSATION.

OUTCRY IN NEW SOUTH WALES. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, June 24. The outcry in the press and on the part of the business community and the underwriters against the Workers’ Compensation Act suggests rather the old story of locking the stable door after the horse is out. While the Opposition was fighting the measure in Parliament little or nothing was heard about it outside. The Opposition, in its attack, had to play a lone hand. Now. however, that tbe Act is right on the point of coming into law there is a wild outcry. It is too late. The Government is adamant. The phase of the Act which is being most bitterly attacked is that relating to compensation for sickness which is contracted during employment, and to which employment is a contributing factor. The gravamen of the charge against the Act in this respect is that workers’ compensation for injury should be confined to injury which they are liable as workers, not to injury to which they are liable in common with the rest of the community. As the Act stands, once a man’s health becomes below par, employment may be said to be a contributing factor to almost any disease which he may contract. Opponents of the Act regard it simply as national insurance under the guise of workers’ compensation, with this distinction, that industry, instead of the State, will be burdened with it. The underwriters are sorely perplexed. They fi i el that, until the commission gets to work and puts its own construction upon some of the present obscure provisions of the Act. they are very much in the position of a man who is tryiug to sell a commodity when he does not know exactly what It Is going to cost him. In short, they do not know what their risks are likely to be.