5 - Insuring Injustice

Summary

Chapter 5 argues that employment discrimination against the disabled did in fact happen under compensation laws. Courts had hypothesized that this would take place, due to a new structure of incentives within the law introduced by the cases discussed in Chapter 4. This chapter shows that courts hypothesized correctly. The chapter explains that this incentive was particularly intense at large corporations because the political economy of those businesses made them especially risk-averse. Furthermore, the chapter argues that a cost-saving practice known as self-insurance, in which employers paid their own costs for employees’ injuries instead of purchasing an insurance policy, made employers especially likely to discriminate. The chapter shows that many of the largest and most successful businesses in the United States, including some of the largest companies in the world, practiced self-insurance. Finally, the chapter argues that ideas and terms drawn from the insurance world helped companies to defend discrimination against the disabled in impersonal, apolitical, and amoral terms.