Safety First: Technology, Labor, and Business in the Building of American Work Safety, 1870-1939

Mark Aldrich

ISBN 10: 0801854059 / ISBN 13: 9780801854057

Edité par Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997

A propos de cet article

A volume in the Studies in Industry and Society from Johns Hopkins. Illustrated. Index. 415 pages.

N° de réf. du vendeur ABE-1700400974104

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Safety First: Technology, Labor, and Business in the Building of American Work Safety, 1870-1939
• Éditeur: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Date de parution: 1997
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0801854059
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780801854057
• Reliure: Hardcover
• Édition: 1st Edition
• État de l'article: Fine
• État de la jaquette: Near Fine
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • Cultural Studies
  • Radicalism and Labor History
  • History

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

In 1907, American coal mines killed 3,242 men in occupational accidents, probably an all-time high both for the industry and for all laboring accidents in this country. In December alone, two mines at Monongah, West Virginia, blew up, killing 362 men. Railroad accidents that same year killed another 4,534. At a single South Chicago steel plant, 46 workers died on the job. In mines and mills and on railroads, work in America had become more dangerous than in any other advanced nation. Ninety years later, such numbers and events seem extraordinary. Although serious accidents do still occur, industrial jobs in the United States have become vastly and dramatically safer. In Safety First, Mark Aldrich offers the first full account of why the American workplace became so dangerous, and why it is now so much safer. Aldrich, an economist who once served as an OSHA investigator, first describes the increasing dangers of industrial work in late-nineteenth-century America as a result of technological change, careless work practices, and a legal system that minimized employers' responsibility for industrial accidents. He then explores the developments that led to improved safety-government regulation, corporate publicizing of safety measures, and legislation that raised the costs of accidents by requiring employers to pay workmen's compensation. At the heart of these changes, Aldrich contends, was the emergence of a safety ideology that stressed both worker and management responsibility for work accidents-a stunning reversal of earlier attitudes.

À propos de l?auteur

Mark Aldrich is the Marilyn Carlson Nelson Professor Emeritus of Economics at Smith College and the author of Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1829–1965; Back on Track: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1965–2015; and Safety First: Technology, Labor, and Business in the Building of American Work Safety, 1870–1939.