Mark W. Bufton

“A Mere Matter of Rock”: Organized Labour, Scientific Evidence and British Government Schemes for Compensation of Silicosis and Pneumoconiosis among Coalminers, 1926–1940

The growth of statutory compensation for industrial injuries and illness has attracted considerable attention from historians of state welfare and students of organized labour in both Europe and North America. The rights of legal redress for disease and accidents in the workplace have become the subject of some debate among historians of occupational health and safety, most particularly in regard to asbestos-related illnesses. Among the most detailed and scholarly accounts of the subject in Britain are those by Peter Bartrip and his collaborators. In contrast to many accounts in labour and medical history which express strong empathy with the plight of workers who faced injury and death in the workplace, Bartrip adopts a model of industrial behaviour which is closer to rational-choice assumptions of mainstream economics. His recent account of government regulation of occupational diseases since the nineteenth century offers limited comment on the attitudes of trade unionists to accidents, though he broadly maintains that British unions have historically been more concerned with winning compensation awards than pressing for the prevention of hazards in the industrial workplace.

A Grieco, D Fano, T Carter and S Iavicoli (eds), Origins of occupational health associations in the world , Amsterdam and Boston, Elsevier, 2003, pp. x, 291, illus., €100.00, US

This volume looks at associations in twenty-three countries spread across four continents and rarely can any study in any branch of history claim such worldly breadth. Both the earliest and the latest industrialized countries are included. Unsurprisingly we see that the establishment of occupational health associations is in most countries dependent upon, and so usually lags behind, industrialization. The stark and curious exception to this is Singapore, which established an occupational medical society in 1966 simultaneously with the onset of rapid industrialization. One would expect those countries in which organized labour and capital have been around since the beginnings of industrialization to be those where trade unions and employer associations compete for, and have influence over, the framing and jurisdiction of occupational health institutes and legalization. In some cases, organized capital tends to comply only minimally with health and safety laws as in Ecuador; in others trade unions are a real partner in health legislation as in Norway. Occupational institutes and laws are located within the wider state tradition. A notable incongruity is France, with its strong state and bureaucratic tradition, which saw an impressive array of institutes established in the twentieth century to deal with the problems of industrialized work, but the law regulating them is and was very liberal. It was the big cities, Lyons, Lille, and Paris, which saw the first occupational institutes, the earliest was established in 1930 in Lyons. In another detailed and contextual chapter, Germany, like France is also shown to have a lineage of occupational health related initiatives trailing back into the nineteenth century. What disrupted the development of occupational health severely in Germany, as it did to a lesser extent in other countries, was the Second World War. After which one may say from reading this volume that it is only then that occupational medicine fully comes into its own with the onset of capitalisms “long boom”. It is also interesting to note the way in which institutes and organizations dealing with occupational health interact with existing medical disciplines, schools, and establishments. In many cases, the relationship is an unequal one with occupational health appearing as the Cinderella subject. In many of the chapters we see the driving individuals who have pushed forward the boundaries of medicine into the workplace, but this is not a story of “great heroic men”, for in most chapters they are nicely woven into the overall story. This volume also interestingly reveals the way in which the state places itself between labour and capital or in some cases sides with one vis-a-vis the other. All these issues are dealt with to varying degrees in the country studies. Although the task would have been difficult, it would have been nice to have seen a chapter drawing out comparisons and contradistinctions between all the countries. Some of the chapters are much richer in medical historical background than others, and it would have been better to have tried for a more even balance between them in this respect. Nevertheless, this volume is excellent in its breadth of coverage and wide sweep and, in conjunction with the companion volume Contributions to the history of occupational and environmental prevention also partially edited by Antonio Grieco and Sergio Iavicoli, makes excellent reading. The country comparative approach to medical history is too infrequent and the effort of Grieco and Iavicoli in bringing together so many different scholars from around the world is therefore to be highly commended.