His mission was to distribute the compensation fund for the victims of the attacks. Kenneth Feinberg’s work asks a cardinal question: what is the dollar value of a human life?
We are on September 22, 2001 when George W. Bush signs the bill that establishes the creation of a compensation fund for the victims of the September 11 attacks. The fall of the Twin Towers and the attack on the Pentagon generated unprecedented trauma for the United States and the world: nearly 3,000 people lost their lives in the attacks. The government wants, by urgently releasing billions of dollars in compensation, to assure loved ones of its full and complete support in this moment of national unity. But this program is far from simple to put into practice. How, indeed, to compensate for the loss of a life? Is it possible ? In the attacks, business bankers, janitors, firefighters died… A plurality of backgrounds, personal stories which makes the task all the more difficult.
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This delicate mission is entrusted to Kenneth Feinberg, a lawyer specializing in mediation. During a mission pro bono lasting 33 months, its objective will be to convince as many families as possible to accept help from the compensation fund. Thus, the US government wants to provide support but also to avoid years of collective action (class actions) and lawsuits against, in particular, the airlines involved in the attack. This could lead them to serious financial problems.
The role of this lawyer, central in the years following the attacks, earned him the interest of Netflix, which tells the story of the compensation fund in a film called Worth directed by Sara Colangelo. It is inspired by the book What Is Life Worth?: The Unprecedented Effort to Compensate the Victims of 9/11, written by the lawyer himself and published in 2006. He, a technocratic lawyer, recounts his confrontation with the shock and raw emotions of the families of victims. “I hadn’t fully realized how quickly this program was launched after the attacks, he relates. So there was a degree of anger towards me that I hadn’t anticipated.“.
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“What is the right thing to do?”
Despite these challenges, Kenneth Feinberg set up a process to estimate the amount of compensation paid to each family of victims. The main calculation criterion is an estimate of the assumed future income of the deceased person. This obviously results in a significant gap between the victims who occupied very well paid positions and those who received modest incomes. “Every day in the United States, juries take into account the financial situation of victims. The broker who is injured in a fall earns more than the server injured in a car accident. This is the American way“, he explained in a column published in 2004 in the Los Angeles Times. With a team of lawyers and accountants, however, Feinberg worked to narrow the gap between the highest and lowest compensations, as a matter of principle. The objective being that 85% of the compensatory sums are not paid to the 15% of families mostrich“.
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Kenneth Feinberg has, for a year, chained one-on-one meetings with families to explain the details of the compensation fund and convince them to consent to it. Because the accounting exercise is far from sufficient, and is sometimes in conflict with the complexity of family relations. Some secrets are revealed after death. During a conference at Duke University (North Carolina) in 2019, Kenneth Feinberg recounts the case of a widow, mother of three children whose husband was a firefighter present on the scene. The compensation for the loss of the father seems to be able to obey the calculations established by the lawyer, until he learns that the person concerned had a mistress and two hidden children. “Should he tell his wife that he had a double life, a mistress, two other children? asks Feinberg. Law studies do not help answer the question: what is the right thing to do?“.
After several weeks of reflection, the teams of the lawyer make their decision: the wife will not be informed. She receives a compensation check. Then a second check is prepared for the mistress and her two children. “In this type of program, we can never escape the ethical issues“, he believes. At the end of the compensation procedure, 97% of eligible people accepted the amount offered. 7 billion dollars were thus distributed to some 5,560 people. Relatives received between $10,000 and $1.5 million each.
A series of mediations
This compensation fund set a precedent in American history, and the system has sometimes been replicated to provide relief to victims of other disasters. Kenneth Feinberg was thus asked by Barack Obama in 2010 to become administrator of the compensation fund supplemented by BP after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform and the oil spill it caused.
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Similarly, it was Feinberg who supported the Virginia Tech University shootings (2007), the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings (2012), the a movie theater in Aurora (2012) or even the compensation linked to the double attack in Boston in 2013, which killed 3 people and injured 264. During a meeting with the victims of this attack which had targeted a marathon, he thus very pragmatically explained to the victims the various compensations provided for depending on the amputation of one limb, both, or in the event of brain damage.
During these different programs, Feinberg was regularly asked by many families of victims for a one-on-one meeting. They didn’t necessarily want to ask for more money, but often “evacuate anger, (…) or share something of the deceased loved one“, he explained in front of the students of Duke University. A wedding video, or the recording of the last phone call exchanged. So many sadnesses that are so difficult to convert into dollars without some degree of arbitrariness. A lover of good formulas, Kenneth Feinberg, now 75, likes to say that “these questions would be a challenge for Solomon himself“.
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