Mar
13
Workers compensation sounds like something that only could have been dreamed up in the good old USA, right? After all, didn’t we invent things like unions? Yea, we’re the good guys here, so we must have come up with something as great as workers compensation! Well this may just surprise you because this type of accident compensation did not start in the USA. We owe our modern view of it to the accident compensation Europe developed a long time ago.
It all started in the days of privateering (yea, that’s the nice way of saying pirates). They developed a system a long time ago that had set rates for various yet common injuries. For example, the loss of an arm was worth roughly 50 weeks of lost wages. That’s not too far off from what a typical settlement would be here in the US today!
Then more recently, but still in the 1880’s a German Chancellor introduced what he dubbed “workers compensation insurance.” This of course was Otto Von Bismark who later had a ship named after him as well as a pastry that we love to sink. And it was this model that led to the creation of other workers compensation insurance in Europe and then eventually right here at home in the USA.
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Hi, thanks for this potted history of worker’s compensation claims. It’s all too easy for us to assume that any thing good like that was an American idea in the first place.