When Systems Collapse
Today’s workplaces are almost unrecognisable. Once defined by physical risk, they now operate in an economy of precarity, digital surveillance, and emotional labour. Stress, burnout, and moral trauma outnumber broken bones. Yet the systems designed to respond, workers’ compensation, HR protocols, occupational health frameworks, still act as if we live in the industrial age. Perhaps we need to clean the lens and look out to what is really happening.
Sociologists call systems collapse, systemic drift: when institutions continue to operate long after their founding purpose has eroded. Like a ship still moving after its engines have failed, these systems run on inertia, sustained by procedure rather than purpose (Selznick, 1957).
Governance theorists describe a related pathology: bureaucratic entropy. Over time, layers of compliance and complexity accumulate, producing what scholars such as Michael Lipsky (1980) and James C. Scott (1998) warned of decades ago, systems that create harm faster than they deliver help. Every additional safeguard, audit, and reform can paradoxically deepen dysfunction.
The symptoms are everywhere: delayed claims, algorithmic decision errors, collapsing trust, and exhausted case managers. Multiple inquiries. It’s not only the injured who are breaking. The system itself is in acute distress.
Why They’re All Failing
1. Design Misfit
The architecture of today’s compensation and care frameworks was built for physical injury, not psychological harm. These systems rely on observable wounds, measurable loss, and binary outcomes. But trauma, moral trauma, and burnout are complex, relational, and continuous, not reducible to impairment percentages or diagnostic codes. As philosopher Ian Hacking (1999) notes, the “looping effect” between categories and people ensures that each attempt to quantify distress distorts it further.
2. Financialisation
Once a social safety net, workers’ compensation has become an investment vehicle. Treasury logic, not care, governs its operation. Premiums are pooled and invested, creating what economists call “the float.” This financial apparatus rewards delay: every day a claim remains unsettled, the system earns interest. Recovery becomes a cost centre, not a moral responsibility (Epstein, 2005; Krippner, 2005).
3. Digital Displacement
Algorithms now mediate human suffering at scale. In the name of efficiency, digital claims management systems automate triage, classify people by risk, and measure performance in seconds, not outcomes. Yet as Shoshana Zuboff (2019) argues, systems optimised for data extraction cannot deliver dignity. The metrics measure efficiency, not empathy.
4. Cultural Erosion
Where duty of care once guided decisions, fear of liability now dictates behaviour. This inversion of ethics, what Albert O. Hirschman (1970) described as the erosion of voice and loyalty, corrodes professional identity. Case managers, clinicians, and claimants alike are trapped in a culture of compliance rather than compassion. The moral fabric of service is unravelling, and the cruelest truth is this: no one truly understands the system, and no one truly complies with it.
5. Governance Fatigue
Reform has become a ritual. Each inquiry promises renewal; each reform adds new layers of remediation. The result is governance fatigue, a system too weary to self-correct, sustained by its own momentum. As Hood and Peters (2004) warn, perpetual “modernisation” can itself become a form of decay.
The Reckoning
When the systems meant to heal begin to harm, we face not just administrative failure but moral collapse. Institutions and the people who work within can experience betrayal too, when they act against their own values and can no longer bear witness to the suffering they cause (Litz et al., 2009).
Perhaps what we’re witnessing is not just inefficiency, but a crisis of meaning. A system out of time cannot evolve; it can only endure, until it breaks.
The evidence is undeniable: what’s broken will keep breaking until we face the truth — the system we rely on isn’t merely failing, it’s finished. Governments keep holding the purse strings, employers keep funding the float, and injured workers keep paying the human price. If we can invest billions of employer premiums into markets, then surely we can invest the same courage into repair. It’s time to bring every party: government, business, and the injured themselves into one room and confront what we’ve built. Until that happens, fractured engagement will keep the cycle of harm turning again and again, a system devouring its own.
References
Epstein, G. A. (Ed.). (2005). Financialization and the world economy. Edward Elgar.
Hacking, I. (1999). The social construction of what? Harvard University Press.
Hirschman, A. O. (1970). Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Harvard University Press.
Hood, C., & Peters, G. (2004). The middle aging of new public management: Into the age of paradox? Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 14(3), 267-282. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muh019
Krippner, G. R. (2005). The financialization of the American economy. Socio-Economic Review, 3(2), 173-208. https://doi.org/10.1093/SER/mwi008
Lipsky, M. (1980). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services. Russell Sage Foundation.
Litz, B. T., Stein, N., Delaney, E., Lebowitz, L., Nash, W. P., Silva, C., & Maguen, S. (2009). Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: A preliminary model and intervention strategy. Clinical Psychology Review, 29(8), 695-706. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2009.07.003
Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press.
Selznick, P. (1957). Leadership in administration: A sociological interpretation. Row, Peterson and Company.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power.PublicAffairs.
