Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 
 

Files

File List


case1057686103.pdf (10.92 MB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

From court room to board room: Immigration, juries, corporations and the creation of an American proletariat. A history of workmen's compensation, 1898-1915

Bellamy, Paul Brian
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1057686103

Abstract Details

1994, Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, History.
Traditionally, workmen's compensation is viewed as a munificent, worker-favoring reform, a paragon of Progressive Era American social policy, that deposed the "hidebound", fault-oriented, common law and court-based employer liability system, in favor of a new, administrative and rational system of no-fault compensation available to all injured workers, regardless of the old notions of liability. This thesis explores an alternative conception of the workmen's compensation reform by focusing on the pre-compensation litigation experience and in-house policy formulations of a Cleveland, Ohio-based subsidiary of the United States Steel Corporation, the American Steel & Wire Company, between its founding in 1898 and the final enactment of the compulsory Ohio Workmen's Compensation Act in 1914. Relying upon a variety of primary source materials, this study argues that a deeper and more substantial understanding of the social, political and economic forces driving the workmen's compensation reform reveals the following critical points: a primary motivating factor underlying the reform impetus included the influx of the supposedly problematic, "new immigrant" groups to the United States; that juries in the state courts had already abandoned the fault-based common law rules of tort years before the reform, effectively creating a "common law compensation" system that predated passage of workmen's compensation by at a decade; that large, finance capital corporations developed actuarially sound, in-house, compensation plans that both anticipated, and served as the working models for, the final state legislative acts; that the effect of the reform was to deprive workers of access to the courts where community-based standards of acceptable employer conduct and appropriate levels of injury compensation could be submitted for jury determination, thereby providing some measure of democratic control over the larger social and economic equation between the work-injured employee and his employer. The unacknowledged inheritance of the reform was, therefore, a constitutional readjustment of the American political economy that formally demoted the American industrial worker from the civil status of theoretical co-equal citizen with his employer, to a courts-disenfranchised, legal and economic dependant of his employer.
n/a n/a (Advisor)
323 p.
From court room board room Immigration juries corporations creation American proletariat history workmen's compensation 1898-1915

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Bellamy, P. B. (1994). From court room to board room: Immigration, juries, corporations and the creation of an American proletariat. A history of workmen's compensation, 1898-1915 [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1057686103

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Bellamy, Paul. From court room to board room: Immigration, juries, corporations and the creation of an American proletariat. A history of workmen's compensation, 1898-1915. 1994. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1057686103.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Bellamy, Paul. "From court room to board room: Immigration, juries, corporations and the creation of an American proletariat. A history of workmen's compensation, 1898-1915." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 1994. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1057686103

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

case1057686103
845
© 1994, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies and OhioLINK.