The Law of Workmen's Compensation; The Workmen's Compensation ACT with Discussion and Annotations, Tables and Forms (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Workmen's Compensation CHAPTER I DEFINITIONS?HISTORY 1. Definitions. 4. Federal legislation. 2. Historical. 5. The new system of employers' 3. Constitutional amendments. liability. 1. Definitions. Workmen's Compensation is a ays- tern providing for partial, prompt and definite relief against disability or death resulting to workmen from industrial accidents, without regard to questions of negligence, including surgical, hospital and rehabilitation service and payment of benefits based upon a fixed percentage of the workman's earnings at the time of the accident, and is designed primarily to mitigate the economic shock which invariably results from an industrial accident. In considering the fundamental principles of the system, many of the words used in the above definition have special significance. For example, workmen's compensation is a system providing for "partial" relief. The system never contemplated the payment of damages on account of any liability resulting from negligence and it was, therefore, never intended fully to compensate the injured man or his dependents for the entire financial loss which may have been sustained by reason of the injury.1 Tinder the common law system an injured man (orcertain of his dependents) could recover only on proof of fault, and, of course, in such cases he was entitled to estimate all the damages he had sustained from loss of earnings, medical expense, pain and suffering, etc., and, as is well known, a liberal discretion was allowed juries in making awards, so that in many cases verdicts were returned largely in excess of the actual amount of the pecuniary loss. lln re Dove, 117 N. E. (Ind.) 210; 15 N. C. C. A. 1067. Also, under the common law system, the number of injured employees or dependents wh...