Making a claim on the state: The experiential accounts of repetitive strain injury sufferers in different policy regimes

This thesis is a comparative analysis of workers who suffer with a repetitive strain injury and their experiential accounts of being faced with the process of claiming workers' compensation in the Netherlands and Ontario.; Comparative policy regime theorists tend to examine policies between jurisdictions at the structural or policy level. It is at this level that they assess social citizenship rights within social policy regimes. I argue, however, that it is misleading to observe the structural level alone. It is also revealing to examine the experiences of those who have the option of making claims on the state. The process of their claims-making activities qualifies the realization of social citizenship.; Two social policy regimes are compared. Each approaches the issue of worker injury policies in a very different manner. The policies in place at the structural level differ in significant ways between these two jurisdictions. In the Netherlands the system seems relatively more generous. An injured worker, prior to accessing the workers' compensation system, is afforded a paid fifty-two week waiting period. This is not the case in Ontario. Given this it would then be reasonable to expect that the process of claiming workers' injury benefits would differ at the individual or experiential level across these two jurisdictions. A more detailed look at the experiential accounts of injured workers in both policy regimes, however, finds that workers who suffer from a repetitive strain injury and who opt to make a claim have similar experiences in both jurisdictions. This is accounted for by the practice that both policy regimes use medical gatekeepers to govern the access of injured workers to the process of making a claim.; Based on this finding, I contend that researchers interested in comparative analysis of welfare states should not focus solely on the manifest policy differences at the structural level but should also investigate the processes by which individuals access policies and their experiences in terms of the procedural practices with these policies, so that a deeper understanding of barriers to the realization of social citizenship rights can be achieved.