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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Morley Gunderson and Douglas Hyatt, Workers Compensation: Foundations for Reform (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000) |
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WORKERS' COMPENSATION needs reform and reform requires knowledge. That is the spirit moving Workers Compensation: Foundations for Reform, a collection of studies of the practice and prospects for workers' compensation. Animated by a sense of crisis, operating from the policy insider's perspective, and premised upon the idea that reform is the reasoned, efficacious way a people respond to problems in public undertakings, the volume presents a package of expert deliberations to inform modifications. The authors offer insights that could be useful in that endeavour. Those insights hint, though, that there are further questions still more fundamental that should be asked. |
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Gunderson and Hyatt's clear, direct initial chapter presents a handy guide to the book. It poses the purpose of the volume, sets the bounds of inquiry concisely and revealingly in the agenda of concerns raised by recent royal commissions, and provides concise synopses of the arguments to follow. Recognizing that any overview must make choices, I think the book could be better served by complicating compensation's origins story here by providing more context on the system's important changes since 1980 — workers' rights in safety decisions, a new appeals tribunal, experience rating employers' premiums, and cuts in benefits in Ontario, for starters — to fully set the stage for current discontent. The recent developments are presented well, for example, in David Law's chapter later in the volume. The "historic compromise" origins story, on the other hand, does not get further consideration though it recurs throughout the chapters. It is a loaded narrative that, among other problems, submerges the contestation that frequented the policy's past and elides the asymmetry of power that has weighed heavily in it. If this seems niggling, it is not: that story effectively heightens the novelty and magnitude of current discontent as it minimizes its political essence and constricts "reasonable" alternatives, no small thing. The editors' other tasks are done well; they summarize, highlight, and connect contributors' arguments to the advantage of each piece and the collective enterprise. |
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Gunderson and Hyatt have enlisted contributors from the policy's key expertise constituencies — economists, administrators, and lawyers — to join their inquiry. Their studies explore the same ground by two sorts of approaches. Some take the philosophical path, ruminating in a hypothetical-deductive way about how abstracted workers, business, compensation systems, and reforms might act, according to conventional suppositions. Their chapters will be of most interest to readers of similar profession interested in arguing or extending prevailing assumptions. They might debate, for example, Peter Dungan's prediction of the effects of payroll taxation (like workers' compensation levies) on the encompassing economy. Dungan imagines four scenarios of tax increases, concludes that such increases could prompt businesses to put workers out of jobs and reduce production for years, and proposes therefore that policies shifting the tax directly to workers are economically preferable. Others might argue Donald Dewees' projections of the effects of interposing the insurance business where there is currently unified public provision of workers' compensation, especially in light of Jerry Thomason and John Burton's report elsewhere in the book. Though he cites evidence that seems to suggest otherwise, Dewees deduces from economics beliefs that such business intervention could reduce costs. Debate might also follow John Frank's look at limiting the costs of the "slow-moving epidemic" of lower back pain injury, suggesting that the "economic-oriented strategies of US managed care" could be helpful. |
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Other authors draw upon analysis of actual workings and effects of workers compensation in particular provinces and US states for their arguments. Most include Ontario's case, reflecting their proximity to and knowledge of it, the intrinsic interest of its diverse economy and unified public system, and, one suspects, the frequency of recent reform and intensity of current debate there. These experience-based pieces offer the book's keenest insights. Perhaps most striking is the report of Thomason and Burton that contrary to industry charges and economists' beliefs, the unified public provision of compensation in Ontario and British Columbia is more efficient (or conservatively, "at least no more costly") than comparable places' insurance-industry-based systems. By controlling for who is covered, to what extent, and with what provision of medical service and income replacement, they show Ontario's citizenry paying less overhead and distributing more compensation from their tax dollar. In a similar vein, Douglas Hyatt and David Law offer evidence that even after recent cuts to the adequacy of benefit levels, the alternative that some propose of a return to tort litigation would most likely not value injuries any higher than workers' compensation benefit levels in Canada. In a separate article, Law shows that the rise in litigation in Ontario has been in large part due to a deliberate opening of a previously insulated compensation decision process. Business concern about longer benefit terms and other slight changes in liability have also increased litigation, but to Law it is "most striking how low" the rate of appeals remains. Workplace safety and health have also been improved, Boris Kralj concludes, through worker rights to participate in safety decisions and employer experience rating as in Ontario. Kralj regards experience-rating as especially promising, mostly for its consistency with economic theory's beliefs about the power of cost incentives, though the evidence seems ambiguous and he notes that some reduction in injury claims under experience-rating might be the product of renaming away claims to keep premium rates low. If those studies might question the cries for reform in Ontario, others conclude that workers' compensation will indeed "have to change," as Schainblum and co-authors argue. They present significant changes afoot in work (Morley Gunderson) and injury (Esther Schainblum, Terrence Sullivan, and John Frank), and amplifying the challenges posed by those trends, identify the prospect of extended obligations to current workers "unfunded" by current payments. (Gunderson and Hyatt) |
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Reform is not inevitable, the authors recognize, and less foregone still, change through reflective reform. This book moves commendably to promote that end. Yet it could do more. Much of the best research here gives cause to probe further, to critically examine the construction of crisis and its sources, as it does to examine the premises, sources, and limits of reform, and of workers' compensation itself. Missing almost entirely from discussion are workers' concerns for sustenance and justice in work that were the genesis of — and critical scholars would argue, were blunted by — workers' compensation. The current focus is instead the cost to employers of that sustenance, justice, and safety. It has not always been so in Ontario, as the injury-reducing 1980s workers' rights innovations attest. Attention to workers' concerns must be reincorporated, as more recent compensation cutting in Ontario and elsewhere demonstrate. To recover and serve those concerns, what other alternatives within and beyond workers' compensation should Canadians and fellow North Americans explore? Schainblum and colleagues, and Law and Hyatt raise the issue, considering (and rejecting in the first instance) tort liability, strict liability of employers, and comprehensive public health and compensation policy as alternatives. Studies from a critical perspective and from a fuller historical perspective would prod further broadening, suggest further alternatives (and critically, their premises and problems), and enable better and undoubtedly tougher debate. Gunderson and Hyatt have launched a valuable project in Workers' Compensation that ought to be carried forward. |
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Randolph E. Bergstrom
University of California, Santa Barbara
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