![]() ![]() ![]() Rather, we explore here the cross-class coalitions of labor activists, lawyers, government bureaucrats, journalists, medical clinicians, social workers, some unions, and others from various social strata that at different moments in history sought to improve the lives of working people, their families, and communities. Nor does it fully explore the uneven roles that unions and public health have played in promoting safety and health. This is not a comprehensive history of the various social movements, professional developments, governmental actions, or individual actors that have contributed to what is a centuries-old and ongoing effort to provide security and well-being to workers and their families. This brief review of the history of occupational safety and health on the occasion of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA’s) 50th anniversary explores the ongoing struggle by labor and its allies to address workplace inequalities that have resulted in injuries and disease among workers over time. ![]() In the workplace specifically, the courts often enshrined the terms “master” and “servant” to encompass a host of formal and informal relationships between worker and owner. ![]() But the law was also instrumental in maintaining the power relationships of the landowner over the sharecropper, the manager over the employee, the husband over the wife, the White over the Black. The physical exploitation of the powerless by the powerful, slavery itself, was literally engrained in the Constitution as a tenet of American political, economic, and legal culture. “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.”Ībraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered 41 days before his assassination, is rightfully remembered for its powerful statement on the moral underpinnings of the American Civil War: slavery was a system of exploitation in which owners wrenched “their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” Lincoln contended that the war was God’s retribution for “all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil” and might righteously continue “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” 1 Industry argued over what constituted good science, shifted the debate from health to economic costs, and challenged all statements considered damaging. From the 1970s onward, industry developed a variety of tactics to undercut OSHA. In the 1960s, unions helped mobilize hundreds of thousands of workers and their unions to push for federal legislation that ultimately resulted in the passage of the Mine Safety and Health Act of 1969 and the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. The New Deal profoundly increased the role of the federal government in the field of occupational safety and health. In the early decades, strikes over working conditions multiplied. OSHA’s history is an intimate part of a long struggle over the rights of working people to a safe and healthy workplace. As this short history of occupational safety and health before and after establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) clearly demonstrates, labor has always recognized perils in the workplace, and as a result, workers’ safety and health have played an essential part of the battles for shorter hours, higher wages, and better working conditions. ![]()
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