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123 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 1 (1926)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0123 and id is 1 raw text is: Industrial Accidents in the United States By ETHELBERT STEWART U. S. Commissioner of Labor Statistics, U. S. Department of Labor T HE machinery for collection of adequate and reliable reports on industrial accidents in the United States unfortunately does not exist. In the first place six states having no workmen's compensation law do not report accidents at all. Other states report compensable accidents only, while from New Mexico we get only the report from coal mines. While it is quite generally agreed that an accident is an injury which results in the loss of time beyond the day or shift in which it occurs, compensable accident means an injury which entitles the injured to compensation in the state in which it occurs; hence each state has its own standard for compensable accidents. The waiting period in the various states is by no means uniform, running from none at all in two states to three days in four states; five days in one state; one week in thirty states; ten days in four states; and two weeks in five states. It must be clear that with this diversity in the waiting period there is essentially nothing comparable as between the states when reporting compensable accidents only. Accord- ing to Miss Outwater's accident table of the temporary total disability ac- cidents, the disability in 9.2 per cent of the cases does not last beyond one day after the day of the injury; in 25.3 per cent of the cases the disability lasts three days; in 37.1 per cent of the cases, five days; in 46.9 per cent, seven days; in 56.2 per cent, ten days; while in the five states that have a two- weeks waiting period 65.5 per cent of the industrial accidents would not be reported as compensable. In 1921 the Bureau of Labor Statis- 1 tics endeavored to get as complete a report from the states on all fatal and reportable non-fatal accidents as it was possible to secure. For the purpose of this article I have endeavored to secure returns from the states upon the same basis for 1923 and 1924. The results appear in the table on the following page. The incompleteness of this table, to say nothing of the incomparability of the returns from the states as a whole, gives no flattering picture of the in- dustrial accident situation in the United States. We are not a cruel people, neither are we indifferent to human life and suffering. Let a city be burned or a district be flooded, and we pour out our money to the distressed as no other peo- ple in the world. It seems necessary that the situation be spectacular, how- ever, before we become aroused. This is illustrated by our excitement over a coal-mine explosion and our utter lethargy over deaths and injuries in coal mines from falling roofs. The percentage of deaths and injuries in coal mines from explosions is almost nil as compared with those from falling roofs, but the larger numbers and the fact of greater negligence do not ap- peal to us. As a people we certainly like to go to the movies. The table does not in all cases con- tain the coal-mine accidents, and the U. S. Bureau of Mines reports for coal mines show only fatalities. These were for 1921, 1987; for 1923, 2458; for 1924, 2381. Again, some of the states report rail- road accidents in intrastate service, but do not report interstate railroad acci-

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