This book is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation. It is the product of my six-year Ph.D. research at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. However, the topic of this book germinated a bit earlier. It came about in 2011 after my forced resignation from a workers’ compensation board due to my zeal in ensuring prevention and compensation benefits to my fellow workers as the president of the Joint Health and Safety Committee. This book is thus the amalgamation of my righteous indignation and my intellectual inquisitiveness. It aims to advance social justice as well as to lay bare the information-intensive operations of Workers’ Compensation Systems in their capacity to underallocate compensation benefits and underrepresent work injuries.
I owe my most intellectual debt to the work of Karl Marx. This book is firmly grounded in Marx’s historical materialism, materialist dialectics and socio-economic theoretical framework. I argue that only Marxian political economy offers an adequate theoretical foundation for the understanding of Workers’ Compensation Systems in capitalist societies. Also, I am intellectually indebted to the work of critical political economists of information/communication who have applied Marxist theory to the information sector. Among them, I owe much to Dallas Smythe and Vincent Mosco.
Aside from acknowledging my intellectual debts, I must express my gratitude to my Ph.D. supervisor Enda Brophy. I am also very grateful to Katherine Reilly for her criticism of and suggestions for many sections of my work. My thanks to John Calvert for introducing me to the Centre for Research on Work Disability Policy and serving on my doctoral committee. I am also very thankful to Robert Cahill for his careful copy editing.
I wish to thank the Centre for Research on Work Disability Policy for their financial support and their many activities that were paramount to my research. The provincial forums, cluster working meetings and partner/stakeholder meetings were priceless experiences. I am grateful to the student fellows and all the people at the Centre for Research on Work Disability Policy for accompanying me during this academic journey and the many ways they provided help. Thank you Andrea Jones, Piotr Majkowski, Mary Catharine Breadner, Kathy Padkapayeva, Sabrina Imam, Dan Samosh, Steve Mantis, Mieke Koehoorn, Emile Tompa, Ellen MacEachen, and John Calvert.
Finally, many thanks to the people involved at Brill. This book would not be in its current form were it not for the editors of this series: David Fasenfest and Alfredo Saad-Filho.