Workers Compensation

An extract from Hibbert, “The English: A Social History 1066–1945”, Paladin, 1988, (p474):

“Working long hours, commonly from dawn to dusk six days a week, workers suffered from a variety of industrial diseases for which there was no cure nor even treatment. ‘The collier, the clothier, the painter, the guilder, the miner, the makers of glass, the workers in iron, tin, lead, copper, while they minister to our necessities or please our tastes and fantasies,’ the Gentleman’s Magazine conceded in 1782, ‘are impairing their health, and shortening their days.’ Lead-miners contracted plumbism, butchers anthrax; coalminers – who spent more time underground as pits grew deeper and some of whom slept as well as worked underground – ran the risk of not only contracting silicosis but also of being killed when a pit prop – or a pellet of coal used as a prop – collapsed or when there was an explosion caused by fire-damp, as there was at Chester-le-street in 1708 when a hundred miners were killed and at Benscham in 1710 when eighty more lost their lives. And every where tired workers were being mutilated by primitive unguarded machinery”

There was no formalised workers compensation in the Eighteenth Century – things have changed!