Worker's compensation only applies to employees. Shrimp fishermen are not employees of BP; opiate addicts are not employees of Purdue Pharma; passengers are not

Worker's compensation only applies to employees. Shrimp fishermen are not employees of BP; opiate addicts are not employees of Purdue Pharma; passengers are not employees of cruise lines, and so on. Besides, worker's compensation isn't geared to handle large classes of plaintiffs either! The entire point of the mass tort / class action system is that it's a way of handling a large group of plaintiffs in a single case. Worker's compensation works with one plaintiff at a time, which means that a large group of plaintiffs (like the 40,000 alleged here) would completely overwhelm the courts.