2 - Injury Impoverished

Summary

Chapter 2 focuses on social investigators and policy reformers who criticized the court-based system of employee injury law and called for compensation laws. The chapter argues that these investigators and reformers had genuine concerns with social justice and understood the personal and dignitary harms inflicted by employee injury. At the same time, they were most concerned with economic harms and their implicit theories of justice were largely centered on distributive concerns like inequality and poverty. As a result, advocates for social justice unwittingly ended up helping create a relatively one-sided picture of employee injury as a problem, a picture that ultimately neglected the non-distributive human costs of injury.