Industrial Diseases and Hazards. America's rise to industrial supremacy came at great human cost. Throughout the technological revolution that unfolded between the 1820s and
World War I, mechanization and the harnessing of steam and then electric power, for all their benefits, also created new productive processes and new occupations that jeopardized the health of working men, women, and children. This revolution both generated novel acute and chronic diseases and increased the incidence of preexisting occupational disorders. In particular, the expansion of natural resource–based industries, like tanning and mining, fostered considerable morbidity.
Workplace hazards of all sorts sickened American employees during the era of
industrialization. Among toxic chemicals, naturally occurring substances posed the greatest risk. A host of dangerous elements, including arsenic, mercury, phosphorus, and especially lead, poisoned employees across the nation. Cotton, silica, coal, and other vegetable and mineral dusts threatened the respiratory functioning of millions of workers. Bacteria and other biological agents attacked not only health‐care workers but also construction laborers and slaughterhouse employees. Among the common physical agents of disease, extremes of heat and cold and nonionizing radiation menaced outdoor workers, while noise deafened workers inside mills, foundries, and other manufacturing plants. Repetitive and strenuous movements strained workers' musculoskeletal systems. On the endless range of psychosocial stressors, the tensions of experimentation with the pace of new
technology and the uncertainties surrounding devalued skills, arbitrary employer power, and a highly volatile
business cycle all contributed to illness in the workforce.
Scientific recognition and public reporting of work‐related diseases were very limited prior to 1920. Against this pattern of disregard, the pioneering early twentieth‐century investigations by the Chicago physician Alice Hamilton (1869–1970), a resident of Jane
Addams's Hull House, stand out as exceptional. Within working‐class culture, vernacular terms—“the jackhammer laugh,” “hatter's shakes,” “phossy jaw,” “brain strain,” “telegraphist's cramp”—reflected a widespread, if incomplete, understanding of industrial disease.
In the period commencing with World War I, a flood of synthetic chemicals transformed the working environment. Cracking petroleum, splitting coal‐tar molecules, and other
chemical‐industry processes yielded substances to which human beings had never before been exposed. At the same time, increased resistance to infectious
diseases meant that workers generally survived the long latent periods preceding the onset of
cancer and other insidious chronic conditions. By the 1970s, federal officials estimated that work‐induced illness accounted for approximately 100,000 deaths per year and that approximately 2 million Americans were living with disabilies stemming from such maladies.
With countless new solvents, dyes, plastics, pesticides, and other synthetic chemicals producing toxicity, and with thousands of these substances exhibiting some carcinogenic potential, employees far beyond the chemical industry and, indeed, far beyond the manufacturing sector routinely encountered significant risks. Moreover, innovative materials and processes sometimes combined with older hazards, like asbestos and lead, to create dangerous new formulations. Mortality from asbestos‐related cancers in the last quarter of the twentieth century has been estimated at more than 200,000. Though the threat of some biohazards receded for workers in health‐care and other human services, the threat of others, such as hepatitis B virus, grew. Among the physical agents, radium, uranium, and other sources of ionizing radiation endangered diverse groups of employees. The rise of
computers fostered hazards of repetitive motion and related ergonomic problems. The spread of so‐called
scientific management split many jobs into fragments, leaving workers with neither control over nor fulfillment in their work. Combined with job insecurity, such powerlessness and alienation became a scientific‐managerial prescription for employee stress.
Clinical, toxicological, and epidemiological researchers clarified innumerable adverse effects of human‐made chemicals, often despite industry obstruction. Hamilton's
Industrial Toxicology (1934) and Wilhelm Hueper's
Occupational Tumors and Allied Diseases (1942) represented significant early breakthroughs in extending awareness of the scope of this problem. With the passage of the landmark Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970, attention by public and private institutions to the full spectrum of workplace hazards accelerated. Unions and their allies pressed initiatives to give workers a right to know about the probability of occupational disease.
The late twentieth century witnessed the resurrection of a holistic perspective and a retreat from the long‐standing preoccupation with seeking a single, specific cause of work‐related ailments. Instead, the multifactorial nature of workers' afflictions, commonly involving both occupational and non‐occupational causes, was increasingly acknowledged, as were the varied, often indistinct, syndromes resulting from complex combinations of risk factors. Phenomena such as ergonomic disorders, stress‐induced disease, building‐related illness, multiple chemical sensitivities, and workers' hypertension challenged the single cause–singular effect paradigm.
See also
Carson, Rachel;
Consumer Movement;
Factory System;
Labor Movements.
Bibliography
David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, eds., Dying for Work, 1987.
Ronald Bayer, ed., The Health and Safety of Workers, 1988.
David Rosner and and Gerald Markowitz , Deadly Dust, 1991.
Allard E. Dembe , Occupation and Disease, 1996.
Christopher C. Sellers , Hazards of the Job, 1997.
Alan Derickson , Black Lung, 1998.
Alan Derickson
