Labor and Health ACCIDENT INSURANCE, SICKNESS, AND SCIENCE: NEW ZEALAND’S NO-FAULT SYSTEM

This article explores the process of seeking compensation for occupational illness under a no-fault accident insurance scheme. The author uses two case studies—firefighters who attended a fire at a chemical storage depot and timbermill workers who worked with pentachlorophenol—to illustrate how science can be used to deny compensation to sick and dying workers. The results of the studies suggest that a no-fault accident compensation scheme, considered to be a victory for workers, offers no guarantee of just outcomes for working people. And science can be co-opted and used to support business and state interests against workers; this ideological support is increasingly hidden behind the development of “objective ” systems of assessing com-pensation claims. New Zealand has two main types of accident insurance: the government’s Acci-dent Compensation Corporation scheme and private insurance. Since 1974, the country has had a no-fault response to adverse events associated with injuries. Civil claims for damages arising from personal injury due to accidents were abolished, so employers could no longer be sued for workplace accidents. This type of system is aimed at providing “for those in need rather than an acknowl-edgement of their individual rights to redress. While it deals with the economic needs of the patients, it does so on a basis of social goodwill rather than entitle-ment. The victim of an injury would, of course, still have to satisfy the eligibility criteria: the existence of the scheme, however, would represent the beneficence of medicine and state welfare. The tort system, on the other hand, is the social insurance of a market society ” (1, p. 60). The development of the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) scheme can be seen as a form of regulation restricting the market practices of business. This is in line with what Crouch and Streeck (2, p. 1) term “institutional capitalism, ” in which society is capable o