Lost-Time Injury Rates: A Marxist Critique of Workers' Compensation Systems

Workplace compensation has become an industry unto itself. What are its relations of production and role in contemporary capitalism?

In Lost-Time Injury Rates Rodrigo Finkelstein examines the information-intensive operations of recording and processing work-related accidents, diseases and fatalities carried out by Workers’ Compensation Systems. Situated within the field of political economy of information, this critique contributes to the understanding of how injury rates service a specific sector of the economy by constructing lost labour power for sale.

Finkelstein convincingly argues that injury rates must be seen as grounded in the capitalist mode of production, and that they constitute a historical social relation that, by taking the semblance of inductive indicators, conceal specific capitalist relations that bring about the exchange and distribution of lost labour power among capitalists and wage labourers.

Rodrigo Finkelstein is an independant scholar. He is the author of several articles on labour health, including Riesgos laborales: una visión cultural [Labour Risks: A Cultural View].