Communism, slavery and social policy: Investigating the role of worker agency in the development of work-injury laws globally

This paper discusses the impact of worker agency on adoption of national policies to protect against work-injury. It uses the lenses of communist revolution and colonial forced labour to shed light on this relationship. Some common elements in the experiences, livelihoods, opportunities and structures among successful communist revolutions and colonially imposed production systems should lead to more or less collective risk-pooling in a society as a result of worker agency; thus, to faster or slower adoption of full-coverage work-injury policies. The main empirical analysis is a regression predicting how long it takes a country to transition from a first work-injury law to a policy that provides risk pooling and full-coverage for blue-collar workers. The test variables are whether a country was communist and the year that both slavery and forced labour became illegal. The sample is a cross-sectional analysis of 173 countries using data from the late 1800s until 2020. These findings have potential value in guiding if not motivating future work on worker agency in macro-comparative statistical research, and for filling in some empirical blind spots of macro-theories on social policy and work-injury law specifically.