The Fight for the First Workers' Compensation Law
A labor advocate makes a passionate plea in Olympia for a state-managed fund to support injured workers, framing it as the only path away from corporate exploitation and legal poverty.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Every day, statistics prove that twenty men give up their lives as a sacrifice to the digging of coal for this nation. Of the twenty that die, at least ten will leave dependents. This great number is thrown upon society, and we know what society has done with them in the past. There has been no systematic way of taking care of the victims of our industries, but this law provides a system whereby every dependent will be taken care of by the state of Washington, and given a livelihood until he or she is prepared for the struggle of life. We believe it is an injustice on the workmen of the state to rely on private assessments for relief while the entire profit goes to the employer. While I believe there was and never will be enough money coined in gold to balance the scales against one human life, we are living in a practical, industrial world where accidents must occur. We have arrived at a solution that can rightly make the state a father of a system that will compensate for industrial accidents. We ask the legislature to give it their unanimous support.
“I believe there never was and never will be enough money coined in gold in the whole civilized world to balance the scales against one human life.”
This speech outlines the birth of Washington's Industrial Insurance Act of 1911. The core argument—that employers should bear the cost of workplace injury rather than the public or the victim’s family—remains the foundation of our modern L&I system, though the battle over private 'casualty companies' and lobbying persists in today's gig-economy labor debates.
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