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158   THE COMMUNIST

provide safety devices. Most states provide 50 per cent of the wage loss incurred, a few as  high as 66 2/3 per cent. Thus if we take the average wage to be $26.50 per week, the maimed worker will receive from $13.25 to around $15 per week. How can he exist on it? He can't! If he is lucky enough to have a little savings it will be consumed sooner or later and before his wounds have had time to heal up properly, he or his children will be forced to enter the factory. Indeed, as the Department of Labor reluctantly admits, this is the very intention of the State bourgeois government. The labor market must be replenished at all costs.
Partial disabilities divide themselves into two groups: permanent partial, that is, "minor" injury for life, such as loss of hearing, loss of an arm, etc. and temporary partial, such as sprained wrists, dislocations, injuries to the face or body requiring various periods of healing. In the former cases there is a definite loss of functional activity, in the latter only recuperation is necessary. Do the States take the nature of the specific injuries into serious consideration? A few do. The vast majority are purposely ambiguous and vague, leaving the matter entirely in the hands of Industrial Commissions, who are invariably the friends and boon companions of the employers. Hence, in the table following we have indicated such vagueness in a separate column. 
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