Thank You, Dr. Burton

Dr. John F. Burton, Jr. died on August 12th at the age of 91. If that name does not immediately register with you, and you work in this industry, I would gently suggest that is a gap worth closing. Give me a few hundred words and I will try to close it.

Let me start with the part of the story I own, because it is the only part where I get to be the fool.

In 2015, Robert Aurbach, then the editor of the IAIABC Journal, asked me to write a piece called “The Case for Workers’ Recovery.” Then he sweetened it. He had invited a second author to lay out a competing vision for the future of workers’ compensation. We would each write our article, then each critique the other’s, and all four pieces would run together as a point-counterpoint debate. I thought this was a terrific idea. I accepted immediately. Only then did I ask the question I should have asked first, which was who I would be debating.

Aurbach’s answer was two words. John Burton.

My response was one word, and it was not a word I put in blog headlines.

Here is why. Burton chaired the National Commission on State Workmen’s Compensation Laws, appointed to that post by President Nixon in 1972. He was the founding dean of the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers, professor emeritus there and at Cornell’s ILR school, a law degree and a doctorate in economics from Michigan. The National Academy of Social Insurance called him one of the nation’s foremost scholars on workers’ compensation, and that was not a courtesy title. At the time of that assignment, I was a website guy who had backed into this industry sideways, with four years of blogging under my belt and a college transcript best described not as Magna Cum Laude but more along the lines of “Thank You Dear Laude.”

We both wrote our articles. We critiqued and responded to each other’s work. Then I waited. It would be four long months before the four articles were published and I could see his response. I spent a fair amount of that time imagining the public thrashing headed my way.

It never came. He was, in his response, remarkably generous to me. He was also entirely unconvinced. Burton read my argument for renaming and reorienting the system around recovery, acknowledged that we were after many of the same improvements, and then explained why he would go a different way. His ideal program put its primary emphasis on minimizing an injured worker’s actual loss of earnings, driven by hard economic incentives rather than by good intentions. He wrote that my approach relied to a large extent on admonitions to decision makers to do the right thing, and that as an economist his reaction to the likely effect of such pleas was skepticism.

That line stung a little. It also stuck. He was not wrong that a system does not change because someone asks it nicely, and much of what I have written in the decade since has been an attempt to answer him. He wanted incentives. I wanted a name and a purpose that people could actually understand, on the theory that you cannot build incentives toward a goal nobody has bothered to define. We were arguing about the route, not the destination.

That exchange is where Workers’ Recovery stopped being an idea I liked and became an idea with a structure. Being forced to defend it against a mind like his did more for the concept than a hundred friendly conference sessions ever could have. The soul of an idea got a body. Everything I have written on the subject since, including a book that exists largely because of that exercise, traces back to those four articles.

A year later, Judge David Langham and I organized the 2016 Workers’ Comp Summit, held in three meetings, in Dallas, New Orleans, and Orlando. It was an invitation-only gathering meant to kick off a genuine national conversation about where this industry was headed. Burton came. He did not have to. He had been having that conversation since before most people in the room were born, and he had every right to conclude that another one would not accomplish much. He came anyway, and he did in Dallas what he did everywhere, which was bring data into a room full of people largely arguing from anecdote.

Because that was the real work. The 1972 Commission report is what he is known for, and it deserves the attention. It found the protection then furnished to American workers to be, in its own words, inadequate and inequitable. It issued 84 recommendations and flagged 19 as essential. It gave the states until July 1, 1975, to comply and told Congress to act if they did not. The states moved, and some of what a claims professional today treats as unremarkable baseline, the medical benefit without a dollar cap, the death benefit that follows the survivor, exists because a young economist told fifty legislatures to fix it or lose control of it.

Congress never acted. And according to Burton friend and longtime legal advocate Jon Gelman, that is where Burton’s harder, longer, less celebrated work began. He understood that fifty separate programs with no federal floor would drift unless somebody kept score, so for the next five decades he kept score. He edited John Burton’s Workers’ Compensation Monitor, then the Workers’ Compensation Policy Review. He helped produce the National Academy of Social Insurance’s annual benefits, coverage, and costs report, still the only reliable national picture of what this system pays and what it costs. He put the full 1972 report on his own website and gave it away, because he wanted people to read the thing rather than cite it secondhand. Fifty four years on, no state complies with all nineteen essential recommendations. He made sure nobody could pretend otherwise.

I disagreed with John Burton in print, which remains one of the more improbable lines on my resume. I would disagree with him again today on the mechanism. But I never once disagreed with the question he spent his life asking, which was whether the injured worker ends up whole. He would not accept the machinery of the system as a substitute for its purpose. Neither will I.

He gave my idea its shape by refusing to accept it on faith. That is the highest compliment a serious person can pay you, and I did not fully appreciate it at the time.

Rest well, Dr. Burton. The fight will continue, and even though the route may be different than you envisioned, the destination remains the same.