University of Cambridge
The cost of workplace injury in Mauritius, Barbados, and the Gold Coast, 1925-1943
Abstract
dc:description.abstractIn 1928, the colonial government of Mauritius drafted a Workmen’s Compensation Ordinance (WCO), a law designed to hold employers liable for compensation to employees in case of workplace injury. Despite Great Britain’s non-ratification of the International Labour Office (ILO) convention on injury compensation (1925), in 1930 the Colonial Office circulated the Mauritius WCO as a model bill to all British colonies, protectorates, and non-self-governing territories. The governors of the Gold Coast and Barbados were notably resistant to its implementation and held off enactment. In the Gold Coast, resistance to the WCO came under scrutiny when in 1934 a major workplace accident at Ariston Gold Mines sparked public and political interest in workplace accidents in mining. In 1937, island-wide protests in Barbados led to a critical review of the lack of progress with a WCO. In the same year, workers in Mauritius went on strike and argued for a reformulation of the WCO. In all cases, injury compensation was framed as part of a wider challenge to profits made at the expense of workers. The costs of injury, workers argued, should also be carried by employers. This dissertation asks what the costs of injury were in Mauritius, the Gold Coast, and Barbados from 1925 to 1943. These dates mark the moment the ILO formulated a convention on injury compensation and the year Barbados implemented a WCO which included agricultural workers. Following from the theory that political decisions influence precarity and that protest draws from precarity, the dissertation analyses the history of the WCO alongside workers’ experiences of injury and protest. The WCO addressed a specific inequality in employer-employee relationships by holding employers accountable for wages that could have been earned in the future. By acknowledging the long-term socio-economic impact of injury, the law marked a shift from compensation as a privilege to a right. In absence of a WCO, workers found alternative ways of managing the costs of injury and turned to protest. Through an analysis of workers’ experiences of injury before and after the implementation of the WCO, the dissertation argues that workplace injuries had a social and economic cost which prompted everyday- and organised protest. A socio-economic history of injury complicates existing understandings of injury as a proxy for colonial violence and exploitation, occupational health, and socio-cultural constructions of the concept of disability. Much like disability scholarship, this dissertation understands disability as socio-culturally informed and historically specific. Disability histories have shown that colonial rule created new meanings of disability. This dissertation argues that disabled workers and their relatives were not passive recipients of colonial concepts of disability but were themselves important to the realisation of rights in a colonial context. Disability historians also tend to make statements on precarity without quantifying them, but this dissertation demonstrates that simple forms of counting can help understand how common or uncommon experiences of injury were. Workers did not just cite precarity in protest as a form of rhetoric, their claims can be related to economic realities.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2024
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Van Dam, Stephanie
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Austin, Gareth
Subjects
dc:subject × 10Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.118241
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/384124