Insurance-company lobbyists dressed up compensation-law gutting as reform
Evidence
And if Smith fought for Tammany’s bills, he did not stop fighting for the factory commission’s. By the end of the session, many of them had been passed, even a revolutionary workmen’s compensation measure. In 1914, the Republicans regained power. Albany was filled with high-priced lobbyists representing insurance companies. Amendments to the compensation measure were introduced that looked innocent but that would in reality tear out its heart. All the amendments did, their sponsors protested, was provide that there could be direct settlements between workmen and insurance companies instead of enforced resort to the machinery provided by the Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1913. All that they did was enable the working man to get money sooner. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 557
Categorization
- XREF: Reproduces the recurring legislative tactic of burying destructive provisions in innocent-looking amendments; recalls Milgrom’s work on institutions and law and contemporary policy fights. — connects to: Regulatory agencies’ rule-making lets lobbyists gut enacted laws; Complex legislation becomes a vehicle for corporate lobbying power — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1540; Finance industry lobbying eviscerated loan safeguards meant to aid the poor (+2 more)
- SEED: Angle: the ‘direct settlement’ ploy as an enduring template for how powerful interests quietly hollow out worker protections across history.
Broader Connections
- Regulatory agencies’ rule-making lets lobbyists gut enacted laws
#exemplifies(0.85) - Finance industry lobbying eviscerated loan safeguards meant to aid the poor
#corroborates(0.85) - Complex legislation becomes a vehicle for corporate lobbying power
#exemplifies(0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1540 - Industries disguise their lobbying by having proxies argue for them.
#corroborates(0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1769 - Partisan defunding incentives partly drove Republican adoption of tort reform
#complicates(0.75) — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 263