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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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each firm on the basis of the number of accidents they had and the degree of disability that they had, including the number of weeks disability that they had, at any given time.

The effect that this had was never foreseen when the idea originated back around 1917 or '18, before I was on the Industrial Board because I remember meetings in my office when I was on the Committee on Safety. That was where some of those early meetings were held. There was a man named Hanson, a philosophical mathematician, who was engaged in working out what rebate you should give for certain types of machine guarding. I was cooperating on that. It turned out that in practise the insurance companies graded them on the degree of disability, the number of accidents and the amount of lost time, which had the effect of making the personnel officers in all the great companies sit down and figure out, “Why did he have so much lost time on that case? John Jones slipped on a greasy floor and broke his leg. Why did he break his leg when another fellow slipped on a floor and didn't break his leg? When he broke his leg, why did he lose more than six weeks, which is what it takes a leg to heal? Why did he lose twenty weeks? Well, he was elderly and had





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