During the middle of the 19th century, (61)Germany, along with other European nations,suffered from workplace deaths and accidents as a result of growing industrialization. (62) Driven in part by Christian love for the helpless as well as a practical political impulse to undercut the sup-port of the socialist labor movement, Chancellor Bismarck created the world' s first workers' com-pensation law in 1884.
By 1908, the United States was the only industrial nation in the world that lacked workers'compensation insurance. America' s injured workers could sue for damages in a court of law, but they still faced a number of legal barriers. (63) For example, employees had to prove that their in-juries directly resulted from employer negligence and that they themselves were ignorant about po-tential dangers in the workplace. The first state workers' compensation law in this country passed in 1911, and the program soon spread throughout the nation.
After World War II, benefit payments to American workers did not keep up with the cost of living. In 1970, President Richard Nixon set up a national commission to study the problems of workers' compensation. Two years later, the commission issued 19 key recommendations, inclu-ding one that called or increasing compensation benefit levels to 100 percent of the states' average weekly wages.
In fact, the average compensation benefit in America has climbed from 55 percent of the states' average weekly wages in 1972 to 97 percent today. (64)But, as most studies show, every 10 percent increase in compensation benefits results in a 5 percent increase in the numbers of work-ers who file for claims. (65)And with so much more money floating in the workers' compensation system , it' s not surprising that doctors and lawyers have helped themselves to get a large slice of the growing pie.