Compensation Funds, Trials and the Meaning of Claims: The Example of Asbestos-Related Illness Compensation in France

Abstract

In France, occupational exposure related to asbestos has been responsible for nearly 200,000 deaths, leading to a massive scandal in the 1990s. In this article, I report the results of a qualitative empirical study, based on 50 interviews with victims, of how those affected by asbestos exposure interacted with two types of compensation mechanism: a compensation fund – a public administrative system subsidized by employers’ taxes – and the courts. Several scholars have asserted that, given that the employers are not judged to be guilty in this instance, compensation through such funds does not carry any moral meaning. In contrast to these arguments, I show that victims attribute a diversity of normative meanings to these mechanisms. The analysis highlights, in particular, how three factors affect the ability of victims to attribute normative meanings to compensation processes: the career paths of the victims; the trust of victims in their employer; and the type of legal intermediaries they meet – namely, doctors or victims’ associations. The article encourages scholars to analyze the role of these legal intermediaries in order to understand how victims make sense of a particularly complex public health scandal.