Whose Health, Whose Safety? Historicizing Health and Safety Measures as Sites of Struggle in 20th-Century US Workplaces

AHA Session 215
Labor and Working-Class History Association 17
Saturday, January 9, 2027: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Napoleon Ballroom C3 (Sheraton New Orleans, 3rd Floor)
Chair:
Emily E. LB. Twarog, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Comment:
Emily E. LB. Twarog, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Session Abstract

Throughout the twentieth century, workers and management across the US used the language, practices, and law of health and safety in their struggles for control of the workplace, and the working class . The mobilization of health and safety created opportunities for capital to mold a productive and pliable workforce. Using novel scientific ideas and technological devices, management attempted to extend its control over social relations on the shop floor to individual workers’ bodies and behaviors. But workers also mobilized health and safety in their struggle for greater autonomy and workplace democracy, battling their bosses and, sometimes, their own union bureaucracy. The panelists implicate the power of capital and the state to discipline the working class through legitimizing some hazards as worth intervention while dismissing other safety concerns, while also emphasizing the resilience of workers in the face of dangerous workplaces. Their contributions put forward narratives of control and resistance, asking how management has launched incursions into workers’ lives and bodies, how (and whether) workers can mobilize the law in support of their claims to power, and to what extent “care” has been used to justify surveillance and control–in the workplace and beyond.

Richard A. Bachmann shows how, in the 1920s, proponents of “scientific management” operationalized concerns for employee health to expand their vision of rationalization and optimization in industry. They argued that attempts to achieve greater productivity through technological improvements and the regimentation of workers’ physical movements had limits. Instead, these “corporate liberals" advocated for workers and managers to cultivate healthy habits at work to create a more productive and collaborative workforce. Kat Brausch follows the litigation tactics of radical lawyers in support of a 1973 wildcat strike. The strike, in defiance of both Chrysler and the UAW, arose in response to the increasingly dangerous conditions in the Dodge Main plant; the litigation in the strike’s aftermath showcases the creativity of radical lawyers and the limitations of relying on the law to support workers. Jeremy Milloy charts the incursion of management into workers’ bodies, lives and homes in the 1980s by exploring the instantiation and impacts of workplace drug testing during the Reagan administration. Couched in concerns over drug use and safety in the workplace, drug testing created new regimes of surveillance, stigmatized drug users, challenged unions, and expanded a class of undesirable workers. Michael Brier places the origins of algorithmic management systems in the home, exploring the development of smart homes over the late twentieth century. This narrative, too, shows the imbrication of surveillance in the workplace and at home.

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