The French Workmens Compensation Act PDF Download

Excerpt from Workmen's Compensation and Insurance in France, Holland and Switzerland: A Series of Letters When the French statute was passed in 1898, its sponsors clearly understood that it was based on the idea of give and take. As one Senator defined it: The law is in the nature of a bargain; for, if it obliges the head of an industrial undertaking to make good the loss in curred by the victim, without inquiry as to the cause of the accident, on the other hand, it only makes the patron responsible for a part of the damage suffered. Unfortunately this original basis of the law has been more and more lost sight of, and the tendency is to construe and amend the act as though intended to make the employers the ones to be held re sponsible for any damages resulting from accidents. Disregarding the fact that the employees were to share the burden, too, both courts and legislature are daily more inclined to interpret and to change the law so as to aid the injured as much as possible in their efforts to obtain compensation from their superiors. The statute has come to be re garded more as a species of class legislation and as a measure directed against the employers in the interests of the workingmen. Hence the feeling that the poor and unfortunate should be favored whenever pos sible in their attempts to recover from the well-to-do masters and that the employees and physicians are acting quite legitimately and entirely within their rights in endeavoring to turn the law into as great a source of pecuniary profit to themselves as possible. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.