The Hindu Business Line : Know negligence to be secure against claims

Property losses such as burned home or damaged car are too dramatic to defy comprehension. Not so with financial impact of lawsuits, says Mark S. Dorfman in Introduction to Risk Management and Insurance, from Pearson Education (www.pearsoned.co.in).

He cites www.tillinghast.com, when discussing the costs of the US tort system: $205 billion in 2001, or $721 per capita, registering a 14.3 per cent increase compared to the previous year. "At current levels, US tort cases are equivalent to a 5 per cent tax on wages." We may need to compute how much our legal system costs per capita.

Dorfman puts liability loss costs in context by quoting statistics from the US Fire Administration (www.usfa.fema.gov): "Direct property losses due to fires was estimated at $11 billion in 2000."

Liability insurance is what is of relevance to professionals. A trigger that sets the claim in motion is `negligence.'

Litigious societies never run short of negligence lawsuits. Among the many examples in the book, is this one about a child who is injured while playing some outdoor equipment in a neighbour's backyard. Interestingly, the doctrine invoked by the parents of the injured child was one of `attractive nuisance.' Dorfman explains that the attractively-named doctrine places "a very high standard of care on property owners whose property may prove attractive to children."

Secure read!

Meaningless work

What is the single common feature of many workplaces? Answer: "Within them, work has largely become meaningless." Thus write Ted Scott and Phil Harker in The Myth of Nine to Five, from Viva (www.vivagroupindia.com). Dysfunctional workplaces are all around us. To these, people don't come to work, but to earn a living, rue the authors. "They might come to enjoy the camaraderie of their workmates. They might even come to gain gratification from the games they play to distract themselves from the mindless labour they would otherwise perform."

There, you may find that employees spend `much effort and intelligence' to do something sickening: "Strategies to minimise the amount of work performed." A common strategy is the enforcing of rigid demarcations. "The work is partitioned into small skills related parcels that individual classes of workers claim exclusively for their own, to the exclusion of all other tasks." That's when you can find, for example, that to do a small maintenance job, "it may well take six or seven workers who will, for most of the time, be standing around waiting for others to do their particular part of the job." The positive fallout is employment for many, but the flip side is that planning and coordination become difficult.

Bitter truths.

Tailpiece

"I don't have anything to show in the cash flow section of the new Saral!"

"BPL?"

"No, I use card."

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

D. Murali

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