Alan Derickson

Making human junk: child labor as a health issue in the Progressive Era.

The adverse health effects of work on approximately 2 million employed children troubled many in the United States during the early 20th century. Advocates of reform initially built a rationale for protective legislation primarily from informal, lay observations of the broad developmental outcomes of premature employment. In this endeavor, they projected a dismal scenario of impending national deterioration. This argument received strong criticism for the inadequacy of its corroborating evidence. In response, Progressive reformers emphasized the specific, measurable consequences of particular occupations. Increasingly, liberal advocates of the exclusion of boys and girls from the work force drew upon statistical compilations of occupational injuries and illnesses diagnosed by physicians. Despite their turn toward scientism, Progressives remained somewhat ambivalent about the sufficiency of quantitative data alone to achieve their aims.

“Health for Three-Thirds of the Nation”: Public Health Advocacy of Universal Access to Medical Care in the United States

The public health community has made important, original contributions to the debate over universal access to health services in the United States. Well before the decision of the American Public Health Association in 1944 to endorse a health plan encompassing virtually the entire populace, prominent public health practitioners and scholars embraced universality as an essential principle of health policy. Influenced by Arthur Newsholme, C.-E. A. Winslow began to promote this principle in the 1920s. Many others came to justify universal medical care as a corollary of the traditional ideal of all-inclusive public health services. By the 1940s, most leaders in the field saw national health insurance as the best way to attain universal access. For the past 30 years, advocates of universalism have asserted a social right to health services.

“Nuisance Dust”: Unprotective Limits for Exposure to Coal Mine Dust in the United States, 1934–1969

I examine the dismissal of coal mine dust as a mere nuisance, not a potentially serious threat to extractive workers who inhaled it. In the 1930s, the US Public Health Service played a major role in conceptualizing coal mine dust as virtually harmless. Dissent from this position by some federal officials failed to dislodge either that view or the recommendation of minimal limitations on workplace exposure that flowed from it. Privatization of regulatory authority after 1940 ensured that miners would lack protection against respiratory disease. The reform effort that overturned the established misunderstanding in the late 1960s critically depended upon both the production of scientific findings and the emergence of a subaltern movement in the coalfields. This episode illuminates the steep challenges often facing advocates of stronger workplace health standards.

Take health from the list of luxuries: labor and the right to health care, 1915-1949.

Labor’ s emergence as a major force in the formulation of national health policy came suddenly. The occasion for this debut was the National Health Conference, convened by the Roosevelt administration in July 1938 in Washington, DC, to assess unmet medical needs across the population and to resurrect social insurance as the means to address those needs. Throughout the meeting, the traditional dominance of health-care providers, led by the mighty American Medical Association, came under unprecedented challenge from consumers and, more importantly, from those unable to afford to consume medical services. Workers’ organizations formed the largest contingent in the chorus of previously unheard voices, and the second largest of all the delegations to the conference, behind the providers. As one participant recalled, a The major result of three days’ deliberation was to show that, for the ® rst time, a political base had been established for a broad legislative program. This base was the united support manifested by organized labor.o The possibility of extending the Social Security Act to cover medical care had drawn unionists to the forefront of health reform. Labor also distinguished itself at the National Health Conference by its unvarnished style. One exchange in particular announced the arrival of impatient new forces. Olin West, secretary of the AMA, invited the uninformed laity to visit the association’ s headquarters in Chicago to observe its expert staff at their accustomed tasks of safeguarding the nation’s well-being. This self-satis® ed posture was too much for Florence Greenberg, chair of the Council of (women’ s) Auxiliaries of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. a I, too, want to extend an invitation to the delegates here to visit Chicago,o Greenberg ® red back, a but I want to show them another picture. I want to show them a sick Chicago, a Chicago of dirt and ® lth and tenements.o She went on to identify many ailments af ̄ icting workers in the city and to point out the inaccessibility of professional services to diagnose and treat those ailments. Such an evocation of

Inventing the Right to Know: Herbert Abrams’s Efforts to Democratize Access to Workplace Health Hazard Information in the 1950s

In the 1980s, the right-to-know movement won American workers unprecedented access to information about the health hazards they faced on the job. The precursors and origins of these initiatives to extend workplace democracy remain quite obscure. This study brings to light the efforts of one of the early proponents of wider dissemination of information related to hazard recognition and control. Through his work as a state public health official and as an advisor to organized labor in the 1950s, Herbert Abrams was a pioneer in advocating not only broader sharing of knowledge but also more expansive rights of workers and their organizations to act on that knowledge.