Workers' Compensation: The Fire That Built Comp

How a one-day gap in March 1911 split the old balance of power from the one that gives injured workers their claim today, and what the fight over that balance means for workers' compensation practice going forward.

On her September 22, 2026 broadcast of Politics Chat, historian Heather Cox Richardson traced a hinge point in American governance: the moment the country moved away from a government whose job was mainly to protect property and freedom of contract, toward one built, as she put it, to be "a new way to look at the government" that worked for everybody. For anyone who practices workers' compensation law, that hinge point has an exact date on the calendar, and it is worth knowing cold.

A Court Closes a Door, and a Fire Opens One

On March 24, 1911, New York's highest court decided Ives v. South Buffalo Railway Co., striking down the state's first workers' compensation statute as an unconstitutional taking of an employer's property without due process. The court applied the same freedom-of-contract reasoning the United States Supreme Court had used six years earlier in Lochner v. New York, reasoning that requiring an employer to pay an injured worker without proof of fault crossed a constitutional line. The remedy for injured workers, the Ives court wrote, was "an appeal which must be made to the people and not to the courts."

The people answered the next day. On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Greenwich Village. One hundred forty-six garment workers, most of them young immigrant women, died because the exit doors were locked and the building's single fire escape collapsed. A court had closed the door on compensation one day; a fire proved the cost of that closed door the next. That juxtaposition produced exactly the shift in political philosophy Richardson describes: a demand that government exists to protect workers, not only property.

New Jersey Moves First

New Jersey did not wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to sort out the constitutional question. Governor Woodrow Wilson signed New Jersey's Workmen's Compensation Act of 1911 into law on April 4, 1911, ten days after the Triangle fire, making New Jersey one of the first jurisdictions in the nation to adopt a continuing, no-fault compensation program. Nine other states followed within the year, and every state adopted some form of workers' compensation within a decade.

New York itself amended its state constitution in 1913 to overrule Ives, and in 1917 the U.S. Supreme Court closed the door on the old regime for good in New York Central Railroad Co. v. White, upholding the trade that sits at the center of every workers' compensation statute in the country: the employer gives up the fault defense, the employee gives up the right to sue in tort, and the state administers the exchange through an agency rather than a jury.

That trade is the balance of power Richardson was describing on September 22. It replaced a system in which government's central job was to protect an employer's freedom to contract with a system in which government guaranteed an injured worker a defined, no-fault recovery, administered on a schedule, without anyone having to prove who was to blame.

Why This Matters for Claims Going Forward

The bargain struck in the spring of 1911 has survived for well over a century because both sides gave something up, and because it has never depended on a jury finding fault or a legislature defending a subsidy. It depends instead on three quieter things: a functioning administrative forum, an injured worker's practical ability to reach that forum, and a governing assumption that the state exists to answer the worker's need, not merely to referee a property dispute. Richardson's broader argument in the same broadcast, that this basic question of what government is for is being contested again in 2026, has direct and practical implications for claims practice:

Access to the forum. A no-fault system is only as good as a worker's ability to get before a judge of compensation. Immigration enforcement actions that leave injured workers afraid to file, or that remove a claimant from the jurisdiction before a claim can be litigated, do not repeal the workers' compensation statute, but they can defeat it in practice for the workers most exposed to hazardous, low-wage employment.
Administrative capacity. The 1911 settlement assumed a competent, adequately staffed administrative apparatus, an assumption built into New York Central Railroad Co. v. White. Funding and staffing pressure on state divisions of workers' compensation, second injury funds, and uninsured employer funds is a structural threat to the same degree that court access was in 1910, even though it draws far less attention.
The healthcare safety net. Workers' compensation covers only the work-related injury. Cuts to Affordable Care Act coverage widen the gap for the same injured worker's non-occupational conditions, comorbidities, and the periods between the end of authorized treatment and maximum medical improvement, increasing pressure on workers' compensation carriers and Medicare set-asides to absorb costs the statute never contemplated.
The recurring “fraud” frame. Richardson's account of officials casting a program that answers public need as a program riddled with fraud is a pattern practitioners will recognize. The same framing has periodically been used, in state legislatures and in the press, to justify narrowing compensation benefits or tightening eligibility, independent of the actual, well-documented fraud rate in the system.

Richardson closed her broadcast by arguing that the answer to this moment is not to rewrite the Constitution but to enforce the laws already on the books. For workers' compensation practitioners, the parallel is direct: the task ahead is not to reinvent the 1911 bargain but to defend it, claim by claim, forum by forum, against the same erosions that produced it in the first place.

Recommended Citation

Gelman, Jon L., The Fire That Built Comp, Workers' Compensation Law Blog (Sept. 23, 2026), https://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-fire-that-built-comp.html.

Sources

1. Heather Cox Richardson, Politics Chat, September 22, 2026 (Letters from an American, Substack).

2. Ives v. South Buffalo Railway Co., 201 N.Y. 271 (1911).

3. Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905).

4. U.S. Dep't of Labor, OSHA, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

5. New Jersey Dep't of Labor & Workforce Development, Celebrating 100 Years: New Jersey Workers' Compensation Centennial Booklet (2011).

6. New York Central Railroad Co. v. White, 243 U.S. 188 (1917).

About the Author

Jon L. Gelman of Wayne, NJ, is the author of NJ Workers' Compensation Law (West-Thomson-Reuters) and co-author of the national treatise Modern Workers' Compensation Law (West-Thomson-Reuters).

Blog: Workers' Compensation