David B. Torrey

November 17-19, 2004, Chicago, IL
The 13th Annual National Workers’ Compensation and Disability Conference & Expo was held recently in Chicago. It was convened at the Lakeside Center of the sprawling McCormick Place Convention Center. The conference is quite an ambitious undertaking and is organized by LRP Publications, the publisher of such familiar periodicals as the Workers’ Compensation Monitor and PAWCLR.

The editor of this newsletter, who attended, spied a number of fellow Pennsylvania lawyers at this immense gathering, including Ed Dixon (Zimmer Kunz) and Bill McKee (Chartwell Law Offices). The Attendee List also demonstrates that lawyers from Mintzer Sarowitz et al., Weber Gallagher et al., Marshall Dennehey, and Guard Insurance Group were in attendance. This same list shows that several Pennsylvania-based companies had representatives at the event: Aramark Corporation, Cardone Industries, F.L. Smidth Inc. (the cement people), USPS (Pittsburgh and Philadelphia Offices), and Day and Zimmerman.

The conference was not particularly aimed at lawyers, despite the highly legalistic character of workers’ compensation. This was reflected in the substantive course offerings, which were broken down into five tracks: Claims Management; Cost Reduction & Loss Prevention; Integrated Disability Management; “Key Injuries & Conditions”; and Legal Issues.

Most of the many companies with booths in the vast exhibit hall were vendors to the insurance industry. The exhibitors generally fell into the following categories: case management, claims investigations, consulting, cost containment, disability management, ergonomic solutions, healthcare management, injury prevention, insurance, managed care, medical/dental/pharmaceutical services, “processing solutions,” rehabilitation services, computer software (chiefly dealing with injury reporting and data analysis), return to work services, risk management, safety products and programs, third party administrators, vocational rehabilitation and--of course--surveillance. Notable Pittsburgh exhibitors were Expediter Corporation, Litigation Solutions (LSI Investigative Services), and the law firm Burns White & Hickton, which markets expertise in setting up Medicare set-aside trusts.

If my colleagues were like me, they went home with their blood red “Bermuda Insurance Market” tote bags full of the usual conference freebies. (The best thing this writer went away with from the exhibit hall was, however, an excellent lecture on the nuances of structured settlements.) The ubiquitous coffee offered was from Starbuck’s, and the crowd, fortified with this animating refreshment, seemed especially robust and lively.

Because the conference marked the editor’s first visit to Chicago, he also headed over to that great landmark of the social work and industrial hygiene movements, Hull House. Now a museum, Hull House was one of the most famous of the “settlement houses,” where socially-minded wealthy and middle-class folk would come and live among the immigrant poor, to perform social work, during the harsh days of the Industrial Revolution. While Hull House is most famous for the activities of social worker Jane Addams, it was also where the founder of American occupational medicine, Alice Hamilton, a physician, initiated her work.

Hamilton is famous for her decades-long campaign of education regarding lead poisoning of workers who labored in paint and other factories. Her approach was one of seeking to persuade industrialists to undertake safety measures voluntarily, by pointing out that empirical scientific studies--as opposed to anecdotal evidence and lay suspicions--proved that exposure to lead sickened many workers.

Hamilton later undertook investigations of work conditions in Illinois, and also for the federal government. In 1919 she accepted the offer of a position in the new Industrial Medicine Department at Harvard Medical School, and taught there for many years. Still, she often returned to Hull House. She never retreated from her concern for the working class and disempowered, lived to be 101, and even protested the Vietnam War.

What a hero. One senses that she would have cast a cynical eye on the glittering conference this writer had just attended, and would have passed on the souvenir tote bag supplied by the off-shore insurance company.

Still, she would have liked the coffee.

The editor highly recommends the National Conference, as well as a visit to the Hull House Museum! Next year the conference will be convened at the same venue, November 15-17, 2005. For more information, call 1-800-727-1227. For more on Alice Hamilton and the genesis of the occupational medicine and industrial hygiene professions, see Sellers, Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Service (UNC Press 1997). [Note: Hazards of the Job is fully reviewed in Issue Number 83 of this newsletter].