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"Derickson, Alan"
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Naphtha Drunks, Lead Colic, and the Smelter Shakes: The Inordinate Exposure of Immigrant Workers to Occupational Health Hazards at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Derickson explores that period at the beginning of the twentieth century when, in the context of the high tide of mass immigration and the proliferation of toxic industrial chemicals, deepening social and political recognition of those hazards brought increased efforts to prevent occupational disease. He focuses on the pathbreaking state investigations that set in motion a reform drive resulting in new protections of which immigrants were major beneficiaries. Furthermore, he aims to expand our understanding of the lived experience of the wave of immigrants, mainly from Eastern and Southern Europe, that flooded into the United States at the turn of the century.
Journal Article
“A Widespread Superstition”: The Purported Invulnerability of Workers of Color to Occupational Heat Stress
This study explores the history of the denial of the vulnerability of non-White workers to risks of heat illness. Defenders of chattel slavery argued for the capacity of workers of African descent to tolerate extreme environmental temperatures. In Hawai‘i, advocates of racial segregation emphasized the perils to Whites of strenuous work in tropical climates and the advantages of using Chinese immigrants. Growing reliance on Mexican immigrants in agriculture and other outdoor employment in the early 20th century brought forth claims of their natural suitability for unhealthful working conditions. These efforts to naturalize racial hierarchy fell apart after 1930. The Great Depression subverted the notion that people of European descent could not endure hot work. More rigorous investigation refuted contentions of racial difference in heat tolerance.
Journal Article
Black Lung
In the definitive history of a twentieth-century public health disaster, Alan Derickson recounts how, for decades after methods of prevention were known, hundreds of thousands of American miners suffered and died from black lung, a respiratory illness caused by the inhalation of coal mine dust. The combined failure of government, medicine, and industry to halt the spread of this disease-and even to acknowledge its existence-resulted in a national tragedy, the effects of which are still being felt.
The book begins in the late nineteenth century, when the disorders brought on by exposure to coal mine dust were first identified as components of a debilitating and distinctive illness. For several decades thereafter, coal miners' dust disease was accepted, in both lay and professional circles, as a major industrial disease. Derickson describes how after the turn of the century medical professionals and industry representatives worked to discredit and supplant knowledge about black lung, with such success that this disease ceased to be recognized. Many authorities maintained that breathing coal mine dust was actually beneficial to health.
Derickson shows that activists ultimately forced society to overcome its complacency about this deadly and preventable disease. He chronicles the growth of an unprecedented movement-from the turn-of-the-century miners' union, to the social medicine activists in the mid-twentieth century, and the black lung insurgents of the late sixties-which eventually won landmark protections and compensation with the enactment of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act in 1969. An extraordinary work of scholarship,Black Lungexposes the enormous human cost of producing the energy source responsible for making the United States the world's preeminent industrial nation.
eBook
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.
Journal Article
“Gateway to Hell”: African American Coking Workers, Racial Discrimination, and the Struggle Against Occupational Cancer
This essay seeks to extend our limited understanding of the plight of endangered African American employees by considering the cancer that afflicted many coke oven workers exposed to numerous toxic chemicals, a plague whose cumulative toll far exceeded that of the Hawk's Nest catastrophe. To that end, this study examines the factors that generated high rates of cancer of the lungs, kidneys, and other organs and the forces that placed and kept African Americans most in harm's way. It also explores the process by which the enormity of the epidemic came to light and the consequent remedial efforts from the 1960s through the following decade that did much to control the hazards of coke oven emissions.
Journal Article
Dangerously Sleepy
Workers in the United States are losing sleep. In the global economy a growing number of employees hold jobs-often more than one at once-with unpredictable hours. Even before the rise of the twenty-four-hour workplace, the relationship between sleep and industry was problematic: sleep is frequently cast as an enemy or a weakness, while constant productivity and flexibility are glorified at the expense of health and safety.Dangerously Sleepyis the first book to track the longtime association of overwork and sleep deprivation from the nineteenth century to the present. Health and labor historian Alan Derickson charts the cultural and political forces behind the overvaluation-and masculinization-of wakefulness in the United States. Since the nineteenth century, men at all levels of society have toiled around the clock by necessity: steel workers coped with rotating shifts, Pullman porters grappled with ever-changing timetables and unrelenting on-call status, and long-haul truckers dealt with chaotic life on the road. But the dangerous realities of exhaustion were minimized and even glamorized when the entrepreneurial drive of public figures such as Thomas Edison and Donald Trump encouraged American men to deny biological need in the name of success. For workers, resisting sleep became a challenge of masculine strength. This lucid history of the wakeful work ethic suggests that for millions of American men and women, untenable work schedules have been the main factor leading to sleep loss, newer ailments such as shift work sleep disorder, and related morbidity and mortality.Dangerously Sleepyplaces these public health problems in historical context.
eBook
“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.
Journal Article
Surviving a “Carcinogen Rich Environment”: Steelworkers’ Democratic Intrusion into the Regulation of Coke-Oven Emissions
Developing stricter regulations for the potent carcinogenic mix of hazards found around coke ovens represented a significant advance in occupational health policymaking. OSHA affirmed its commitment to placing the primary burden of compliance on employers, rather than on workers. The agency also displayed a notable responsiveness to the racial disparities in hazard exposure by promulgating the first health standard for which the primary beneficiaries were workers of color. This study indicates that the lay activism in policy implementation previously brought to light by historians of civil rights and other movements did extend to the realm of workplace health standards.
Journal Article