Abstract

"Insuring Workers in a Time of War and Influenza: The Emergence of Group Life Insurance in the United States"

Thomas DeBerge, Loyola University Chicago (tdeberge@luc.edu)

Bringing about fundamental changes in the relationship between workers and their employers, new benefits for labor often emerge in contexts of tight labor markets, which necessitate the creation of novel incentives to attract and retain employees. The historical example of the now widely disseminated benefit of employer-sponsored group life insurance shows us how this new type of incentive developed in the midst of such a labor market in the United States, but also accelerated to wider acceptance by the contemporaneous political and social upheavals in the form of armed conflict and a global health pandemic. Accordingly, this paper proposes to explore the question of how group life insurance came to be adopted in its early years, despite skepticism from organized labor, old-guard insurance companies, and regulators, due to the growing public attitude towards thrift and, importantly, the ravaging of young life brought on by the First World War and the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic. Extending the existing narrative of the emergence of group life insurance to include the significant impact of these larger global events on labor relations, this paper adds nuanced depth to the adoption of employee incentives that resonates with the dramatic changes to worker benefits as a result of the Covid-19 global pandemic. The paper charts this early development, in which group life insurance became increasingly adopted by employers small and large, spurred by both labor market conditions and global upheaval, towards its wider acceptance even as these challenges subsided. Focusing on the United States, the primary sources used in this paper include documents from life insurance companies, articles in major national and regional newspapers, the proceedings of state labor federations, and Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, all of which were analyzed using historical research methods and supported by secondary sources through the lens of management theory.