1. There is a sufficient distinction between coal mining and
other hazardous employments to justify a state legislature in
applying its workmen's compensation system to the one compulsorily,
while leaving it permissive or not applying it at all as to the
others. Pp.
255 U. S. 146,
255 U. S.
149.
2. Neither in this respect nor in applying to all employees of
coal mine operators, whether engaged in hazardous work or not, does
the Indiana law invade the rights of a coal company under the
Fourteenth Amendment.
Id.
3. Nor does such law offend §§ 21 and 23 of the Indiana Bill of
Rights, in failing to distinguish between those employees of coal
operators who are and those who are not in the hazardous part of
the business. P.
255 U. S.
149.
4. The policy of workmen's compensation acts, unlike that of
employers' liability acts, goes beyond the mere element of hazard,
and admits of a broader range of reasonable classification in the
public interest. P.
255 U. S.
150.
Affirmed.
The case is stated in the opinion.
Page 255 U. S. 145
MR. JUSTICE McKENNA delivered the opinion of the Court.
Appellant, the Lower Vein Coal Company, is a corporation of the
State of Indiana. The Industrial Board of Indiana is a board
created by an act of the General Assembly of Indiana, approved
March 8, 1915, known as "the Indiana Workmen's Compensation Act."
Laws 1915, c. 106. The personal appellees are members of the
board.
This suit was brought by the Coal Company to enjoin the
Industrial Board, the Governor, and Attorney General of the state,
from enforcing in any manner § 18 of the Workmen's Compensation Act
of the state, as amended by the General Assembly in 1919, from
asserting that plaintiff is compelled to operate under the
Compensation Act, from hearing any claim for compensation asserted
by any employee of the plaintiff so long as plaintiff elects not to
come within the provisions of the act from making any award to any
injured employee, or his or her dependents, during such time, and
from doing any other act or thing prejudicial to the rights of the
plaintiff so long as it elects not to be bound by the act.
The grounds for this relief were set forth in a complaint of
considerable length to which the defendants separately and
severally answered. After trial of the issues thus presented, the
district court entered its decree dismissing the bill for want of
equity. This appeal was then prosecuted.
The Compensation Act is very long, and declares its purposes to
be to promote the prevention of industrial
Page 255 U. S. 146
accidents, to cause provision to be made for adequate medical
and surgical care for injured employees in the course of their
employment, to provide methods of insuring the payment of such
compensation, to create an Industrial Board for the administration
of the act and to prescribe the powers and duties of such board, to
abolish the State Bureau of Inspection, and provide for the
transfer to the Industrial Board certain rights, powers and duties
of the Bureau of Inspection.
The original act, passed in 1915, was elective, and left
employer and employee the option of rejecting its terms with
certain exceptions. It was amended in 1917, and railroad employees
engaged in train service were exempted from its provisions.
The amendment of 1919 made the act mandatory as to all coal
mining companies of the state and its political divisions and as to
municipal corporations. To all other employers, the act remains
permissive. They may elect to operate under its provisions.
Railroad employees engaged in train service are not within
them.
The sole question presented is the validity of § 18 as amended
-- that is, the compulsion of coal companies to the operation of
the act, while to other employers it is permissive, or does not
apply at all. The grounds of attack upon it are that it violates
the due process clause and the equal protection of the laws clause
of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United
States and §§ 21 and 23 of the Indiana Bill of Rights.
Specifically, the question is, as the Coal Company expresses
it:
"Whether the Indiana General Assembly may pass a general
compensation law, applicable to all employers within the state, and
make it compulsory as to one hazardous employment, and elective as
to all others (many equally as hazardous) except railroad employees
in train service, to which it does not apply at all."
And the insistence is "that such a classification rests upon
no
Page 255 U. S. 147
sound or just basis," and hence is inimical to the Constitution
of the United States and that of Indiana.
The principle of law involved and the power of a state to
distinguish and classify objects in its legislation have been too
often declared, too abundantly and variously illustrated, to need
repetition, and we pass immediately to the contention of counsel.
It is that the act is addressed to hazardous employments, and,
where in employments that character exists, sameness exists, and a
law which ignores such sameness discriminates in its operation and
offends the Constitution of the United States. It may be that the
Coal Company does not contend for so broad a principle, but may
assert protection by a comparison of its business with other
businesses equally hazardous, or even more hazardous, than coal
mining, and that necessarily the exemption of the businesses so
compared from the law taints it with illegal discrimination. To
support and justify the comparison, statistics of accidents are
given in the complaint, and, in the number of accidental injuries,
coal mines are made to run fifth. Notwithstanding those other
companies may go in or out of the law, coal mining companies must
stay.
The answer replies with counter-assertions and statistics and a
detail of the methods of coal mining and what their methods cause
of accidents to the miners, and to these are added, it is said, the
risks that come from the generation of noxious and explosive gases.
And there is evidence in the case addressed to the conflicting
statistics and the conclusions to be deduced from them which
occupies about ninety-three pages of the record. In this evidence,
occupations and businesses are compared with estimates of accidents
in each and their character, severity and consequences, fatal and
otherwise. There is also testimony of the wages that mine workers
get and of their prosperity, and that they have a legal department
and paid attorneys. And there is averment and testimony
Page 255 U. S. 148
of two organizations of mine owners who retain officers and
attorneys to defend suits and secure releases from personal injury
claims.
The length and character of the reports and tables of statistics
preclude summary. It may be conceded that different deductions may
be made from them, but they and the controversies over them and
what they justified or demanded of remedy were matters for the
legislative judgment, and that judgment is not open to judicial
review. Indeed, there may be a comprehension of effects and
practical influences that cannot be presented to a court and
measured by it, and which it may be the duty of government to
promote or resist, or deemed advisable to do so. Degrees of
policies if they have bases are not for our consideration, and the
bases cannot be judged of by abstract speculations or the
controversies of opinion. Legislation is impelled and addressed to
concrete conditions deemed or demonstrated to be obstacles to
something better, and the better, it may be, having attainment or
prospect in different occupations (we say occupations as this case
is concerned with them) dependent in the legislative consideration
upon their distinctions in some instances, upon their identities in
others, and as the case may be, associated or separated in
regulation. And this is the rationale of the principle of
classification and of the cases which are at once the results and
illustrations of it.
There are facts of especial pertinence that make the principle
apply in the present case and justify the legislation of the state.
That coal mining has peculiar conditions has been quite universally
recognized and declared. It has been recognized and declared by
this Court, and is manifested in the laws of the states where coal
mining obtains. There is something in this universal sense and its
impulse to special legislation -- enough certainly to remove such
legislation from the charge of being an unreasonable or arbitrary
exercise of power.
Page 255 U. S. 149
The action of the Coal Company indicates that it considered the
coal business distinctive. Other businesses, though according to
the Coal Company's assertion as hazardous as coal mining, accepted
the law; the Coal Company and other coal companies rejected it. To
this, of course, the coal companies were induced by comparison of
advantages, but the inducements to reject the legislation might
well have been the inducement to make it compulsory. At any rate,
there is, taking that and all other matters into consideration,
grounds for the legislative judgment expressed in the amendment of
1919 under consideration -- that is, § 18 as amended. And the fact
is to be borne in mind that there are 30,000 employees in the state
engaged in coal mining.
The Coal Company further contends that the law includes within
its terms all the company's employees whether engaged in the
hazardous part of its business or not so engaged. In other words,
it asserts that the conditions of those who work underground may
justify the law, but do not justify its application to those who
work above ground. The contention has a certain speciousness, but
cannot be entertained. It commits the law and its application to
distinctions that might be very confusing in its administration,
and subjects it and the controversies that may arise under it to
various tests of facts, and this against the same company. The
contention is answered in effect by
Booth v. Indiana,
237 U. S. 391.
Appellant invokes against the law §§ 21 and 23 of the Indiana
Bill of Rights which respectively provide that no man's property or
particular services shall be taken without just compensation, nor
except in the case of the state, without compensation being first
assessed and tendered, nor shall there be a grant of privileges to
any citizen or class of citizens that shall not belong to all
citizens.
Appellant, however, while admitting -- indeed, citing
Page 255 U. S. 150
cases to show -- that the classification of objects of
legislation under the Bill of Rights of the state has the same
bases of power and purposes as the classification of objects under
the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States,
yet contends that the supreme court of the state has strictly
construed the Bill of Rights of the state, and has observed a
precision in classification not required or practised in the
application of the Fourteenth Amendment -- citing for this
Indianapolis T. & T. Co. v. Kinney, 171 Ind. 612, 617;
Cleveland, etc., Ry. Co. v. Foland, 174 Ind. 411;
Richey v. Cleveland, etc., Ry. Co., 176 Ind. 542 at
558.
These cases were constructions of the Employers' Liability Act
of the state. It was held in
Indianapolis T. & T. Co. v.
Kinney, supra, that that act was constitutional as to
railroads because it related "to the peculiar hazards inherent in
the use and operation of" them, and only applied to employees
operating trains. It is the contention of the Coal Company that it
is a deduction from that decision and the others cited which may be
said to be of the same effect that there must be a difference
observed between employees of coal mining companies, as they are or
are not engaged in the hazardous part of the business, and, as that
distinction is not observed in the Compensation Act, it infringes
the Bill of Rights of the state because it is made compulsory
"upon coal mining companies with respect to their employees not
engaged in the hazardous part of the business, and as to all other
private business enterprises within the state, except railroad
employees in train service, which are excluded, it is purely
optional."
The argument in support of the contention is that the act
requires all employees in the coal mining business to be paid
compensation under the act, whether employed above ground or under
ground -- that is, whether hazardously employed or otherwise,
whereas, in the cited cases,
Page 255 U. S. 151
it is insisted, the court considered such employment as a
material distinction, and that legislation which disregarded it
would have unconstitutional discrimination.
The contention only has strength by regarding Employers'
Liability Acts and Workmen's Compensation Acts as practically
identical in the public policy respectively involved in them and in
effect upon employer and employee. This we think is without
foundation. They both provided for reparation of injuries to
employees, but differ in manner and effect, and there is something
more in a compensation law than the element of hazard, something
that gives room for the power of classification which a legislature
may exercise in its judgment of what is necessary for the public
welfare, to which we have adverted, and which cannot be pronounced
arbitrary because it may be disputed and "opposed by argument and
opinion of serious strength."
German Alliance Insurance Co. v.
Kansas, 233 U. S. 389.
International Harvester Co. v. Missouri, 234 U.
S. 199.
Decree affirmed.