Power Resources, Institutions and Policy Learning: The Origins of Workers' Compensation in Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. This paper seeks to explain the origins of Quebec's system of compensation for workplace accidents, which was established in 1909 and functioned as the first component of Quebec's welfare state. Besides being an important example of early social policy, workers' compensation was also part of a transformation of liberalism that embodied a significant change in liberal jurisprudence, from a system of employer liability based on individual fault and responsibility to a system of compensation regardless of fault. This paper argues that Quebec's first Workmen's Compensation Act can only be understood in terms of the interaction of three factors that are more commonly seen as alternatives in the theoretical literature on policy development. The first is the differential power resources of capital and labour, where the interests of the former predominated over those of the latter in shaping the provisions of the act. The second involves a structural dimension, where the institutional autonomy of the legal process and jury system in employer liability cases started to cause problems for capital accumulation and provided a stimulus for change. And third, the acceptance of the new idea of workers' compensation depended on a widespread process of policy learning by both state and societal actors. Theoretically, the paper tries to go beyond one-dimensional explanations of policy development and to integrate analyses of interests, institutions and ideas into a wider framework. Résumé. Dans ce texte, l'auteur s'intéresse à l'origine du régime québécois d'indemnisation en cas d'accident du travail instauré en 1909. Premier jalon de ce qu'on appellera plus tard l'État-providence, le régime d'indemnisation s'inscrivait dans une transformation du libéralisme et allait marquer un tournant dans la jurisprudence : on passait en effet d'un système où la responsabilité de l'employeur se limitait à la faute patronale à un régime d'indemnisation sans égard à la faute. Cet article postule que l'analyse de la Loi concernant les responsabilités des accidents dont les ouvriers sont victimes dans leur travail et la réparation des dommages qui en résultent doit s'appuyer sur la corrélation de trois facteurs, que la théorie de l'élaboration des politiques tend plutôt à considérer comme distincts. Le premier facteur a trait au rapport de force inégal entre la main-d'œuvre et le capital, l'intérêt de ce dernier ayant prédominé dans la formulation des dispositions de la loi. Le second facteur est, quant à lui, d'ordre structurel, car l'autonomie du processus judiciaire et la présence d'un jury dans les causes portant sur la responsabilité de l'employeur compromettaient l'accumulation du capital et incitaient par le fait même au changement. Enfin, le troisième facteur souligne que le principe d'indemnisation des travailleurs était à l'époque tributaire d'une nouvelle conception tant sociale que gouvernementale de l'élaboration des politiques. Pour s'éloigner d'une compréhension unidimensionnelle de l'élaboration des politiques, l'auteur entend utiliser un cadre théorique qui tienne compte de l'analyse des intérêts, des institutions et des idées.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".