《事故共和国》中译本序言

The Accidental Republic 　　 　　A Preface to the Chinese Edition 　　 　　 　　 One hundred years ago, a muckraking American writer named Upton Sinclair wrote a scathing novel about the conditions of the American meatpacking industry. In The Jungle, Sinclair described horrific working conditions and breathtaking occupational hazards. Workers encountered such conditions as a matter of standard operating procedure in the United States of America at the turn-of-the-twentieth century. 　　 　　 Yet Sinclair’s novel did not lead to the improvement of working conditions, as he had hoped it would. Instead, the uproar surrounding Sinclair’s expose produced the Federal Food and Drug Act of 1906, a law designed not to protect workers but to protect consumers. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” Sinclair later remarked, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” 　　 　　 A century later, the working conditions in China’s industrializing economy look remarkably like those in the United States during Sinclair’s era. Until recent decades, one could safely say that between 1880 and 1910 the United States had the highest work accident rates of any industrialized nation in world history. Despite the absence of reliable statistics, it seems clear that East Asian economies including China’s are now experiencing comparable accident rates. And yet for the moment, as I write this in 2007, it seems likely that consumer safety concerns over products manufactured in China for export around the world may divert China’s regulatory attention away from workers’ risks and toward consumers’ risks, just the United States looked away from workers and toward consumers in 1906. 　　 　　 Yet in the long run, China – like the early industrial United States – will need to identify ways to govern workplace safety risks. What I learned in researching The Accidental Republic was that the problem of developing workable legal institutions for workplace safety became a critical testing ground for the development of the rule of law in industrial America. Extraordinary new institutional capacity was required to create laws that could reach into the far-flung nooks and crannies of the world of American industry, from deep under ground in the coal mines of Pennsylvania and West Virginia to the high-rise textile sweatshops of New York City, from the iron rolling mills of Pittsburgh to the railroads of Buffalo. A booming and decentralized industrial economy required legal institutions that could make a difference in myriad locations and in diverse industrial contexts – if the law was to make a difference at all. 　　 　　 Indeed, I have come to think that the creation of rule of law institutions for industrial problems such as work accidents was a precondition in the U.S. and elsewhere to tackling even more complex challenges such as the environmental risks posed by industrialization. The United States only began to confront environmental harms in the 1960s, in large part because environmental concerns raise acutely difficult questions of scientific evidence and statistical causation. As China begins to deal with the potentially crippling environmental effects of industrialization, workplace accidents may prove (as they did in the United States) to be a valuable test case in the creation of rule of law institutions for an industrial economy. 　　 　　 The central lessons of the American experience for industrializing economies of the twenty-first century are twofold. First, a crucial motivating idea in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century was that the right kind of workplace safety was not merely good for workers; it seemed to be efficient as well. Unduly dangerous working conditions slowed down production, produced costly labor turnover, and diminished workers’ incentives to acquire new skills. That’s why many of the most important actors in the American story were not do-gooder reformers but businessmen and engineers, men (and a few women) who realized that their dreams of ever-more efficient manufacturing systems could not be achieved absent efficiency in the area of work safety. 　　 　　 The second lesson of the American experience is that there is no one right path to industrial risk reduction in industrializing economies. There is more than one way to skin a cat, goes the old American saying. The institutions and systems that the United States has today in this area are made up of a mix of administrative compensation for injuries and disability, trial lawyer-fueled litigation, and a relatively weak inspection regime. This amalgam of policy institutions is the product of a historical development that took place against the backdrop of American conditions such as American federalism, the power of the judiciary and the practice of judicial review, the small size of the American civil service, and the long tradition of allocating authority to private institutions rather than public ones. Historical conditions shaped and directed the paths American policy took to achieve progress in work safety. 　　 　　 There should be no doubt that the United States has made extraordinary strides in the area of workplace safety over the past century. Beginning in 1910 with the enactment of workers’ compensation systems for work accidents, work fatality rates have dropped off sharply. A century ago, 23,000 American workers were killed each year on the job. Today that number is around 5,000, even as the American economy has grown by leaps and bounds and even as the population of the United States has tripled. 　　 　　 The ways in which today’s industrializing economies improve their working conditions will be as varied and eclectic as the many paths with which Americans experimented a century ago. No matter the path taken, the project of grappling with the difficulty conundrums of work safety questions will very likely shape the legal systems of the world’s developing economies in the century to come. 　　 　　 　　John Fabian Witt 　　San Marino, California, USA 　　August 2007