Employer Liability for “Take-Home” COVID-19

Workplace exposure to SARS-CoV-2 has sickened workers and, subsequently, their family members. Family members might be able to recover from the employer in a negligence action using “take-home” liability theory.

PECULIARITIES OF SUPERVISION OVER THE RECEPTION, REGISTRATION AND AUTHORIZATION OF CRIMES UNDER ARTICLE 145.1 OF THE CRIMINAL CODE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION BY THE PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION AUTHORITIES

The Constitution of the Russian Federation protects the right to work for remuneration not below the statutory minimum wage. Non-payment of wages is one of the most serious violations of worker's rights. In this regard, the current legislation provides for different types of employer liability for violating these provisions: civil, administrative and criminal. The Federal law “On amendments to article 145.1 of the Criminal code of the Russian Federation” dated 23.12.2010 No. 382-FZ tightened criminal liability for non-payment of wages. Thus, in particular, this law introduced criminal liability for partial non-payment of wages, while the former wording of article 145.1 of the Criminal code established liability only for its complete failure. In practice, this norm has not previously been brought to criminal liability for partial non-payment of wages. The paper deals with the issues of powers of the Prosecutor at the stage of reception, registration and resolution of reports on crimes provided for by article 145.1 of the criminal code. The problematic issues arising from the investigative authorities in conducting procedural checks on the specified categories of messages are analyzed. Suggestions on the improvement of criminal-procedural legislation are made.

Social Workers’ Compensation Models and the Czech Statutory Employer Liability Insurance

Czech workers’ compensation is “exemplified” by the adoption of the Worker’s Accident Insurance Act in 2006, four deferments of its effective date and then complete annulment of the Act. A temporary settlement aimed at resolving the incompatibility of the communist model of workers’ compensation for work accidents and occupational illnesses with the transition to a market economy after 1989 involved the implementation of statutory employer liability insurance for work accidents and occupational illnesses, outsourced to two private insurance companies; the current Czech government does not seem to have a know how to deal with it. The objective of this paper is primarily to advise the government using primarily the formulation and comparison of four basic social workers’ compensation models and furthermore considering the existing sickness, pension and health insurance systems. The choice of a social model is namely a matter of public choice, but intensive lobbying also constitutes part of these processes. The analyses result in a recommendation to “dissolve” the statutory employer liability insurance into a jointly collected social insurance contribution for sickness and pension insurance, and partly to transform the current accident benefits into increased sickness and pension benefit assessments and partly to cancel them.

Embarking: The Pittsburgh Survey, Workers’ Compensation, and the First Blush of Fame

In 1907, Crystal Eastman began a temporary job investigating industrial accidents with the Pittsburgh Survey, a comprehensive study of urban industrial life organized by Paul Kellogg and Edward Devine, financed by the newly formed Russell Sage Foundation. The project involved established leaders, such as Florence Kelley and John R. Commons, as well as young visual artists, including Lewis Hine and Joseph Stella, and brought a new generation of educated women into professional work in social welfare. Eastman’s study, later published as Work Accidents and the Law (1910), resulted in her appointment by Governor Charles Evans Hughes to chair New York’s new commission on employer liability in 1909. There, she proposed to overhaul common law standards, shifting to a no-fault distribution of risk and loss shared by workers, businesses, and consumers. The resulting legislation failed a constitutional challenge in 1911 but laid the groundwork for successful workers’ compensation laws in New York State and elsewhere.

Accident

This chapter explores some legal and literary ramifications of “accident” in British law and society from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century. This period saw changes in common law and legislation relating to accidents, including the emergence of negligence as a distinct tort and statutory provisions for employer liability and workplace compensation. The chapter turns on the institution of the deodand, a common-law rule that allowed inquest juries to assess liability for accidental deaths caused by non-humans. After such entities began to include industrial machines, the deodand was abolished by Parliament in 1846. Examining legal-historical cases and norms alongside literary-cultural representations, the chapter claims that the deodand’s disappearance, and concurrent transition to fault liability regimes, marked a loss in the understanding of accident. If the nineteenth-century emergence of modern accident law tended to simplify accidents into surrogates for human interaction, the deodand qua institution grasped how reckoning with accidents demands an alertness to human entanglement with non-human causality. Literary representations of vehicular accidents afford a glimpse of what was coming to be lost in this changing legal-cultural dispensation. From Thomas De Quincey to Thomas Hardy to E. M. Forster, the complex non-human, material, and affective dimensions of accident dissipate into the background, where they continue to supply narrative and formal motivation even as they leave human obligations and institutions in the light.