Class, Agency and Action: The Class Distortion in Public Policy Formulation Respecting Workers Compensation and the St. Lawrence Fluorspar Mines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper will seek to analyze the impact of class relations on the policy making processes from 1949 to 1978 regarding worker’s compensation for the fluorspar mines in St. Lawrence. Using theories of power relations and class, this paper aims to clarify the exact role played by class as a determinant of policy influence in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland. This paper will focus primarily on the agenda-setting stage of the policy cycle, as this stage is the one that most readily incorporates the interest articulation and interest aggregation that occurs within the policy universe. The theoretical scope and framework will outline class analysis theory, which will then be applied to the fluorspar mines case through examining the key actors and their role in agenda setting. The paper will outline how the class relations characterizing the agenda-setting stage ultimately determined the fate of the policies of worker’s compensation as being consistently inadequate. The legacy of the fluorspar mines in St. Lawrence are known as a great industrial disaster in Newfoundland. There is no doubt that the total lack of mining regulations and standards permitted the workers of St. Lawrence to be blatantly exploited and endangered by the mining company (Leyton, 1975: 1-5). The moral and ethical implications of the public policies influencing the operation of the mine will not be outlined in this paper. While these implications are crucial to understanding the industrial disaster in St. Lawrence, this paper seeks rather to explain how the policy making process itself was inherently unjust based on class inequalities, and therefore the generation of inadequate policy was inevitable. This paper will begin with a theoretical analysis of class dimensions in public policy, and will then apply and interpret the meaning of this theory with regards to the St. Lawrence fluorspar mines and worker’s compensation in particular.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".