Making Capitalism Safe Workplace Safety and Health Regulation in America, 1880-1940
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Donald W. Rogers is a history instructor at Central Connecticut State University and Housatonic Community College and editor of Voting and the Spirit of American Democracy: Essays on the History of Voting and Voting Rights in America.Making Capitalism Safe Workplace Safety and Health Regulation in America, 1880-1940
"A first-rate political and legal history. . . . Recommended."--<i>Choice</i> "A wonderfully interesting book. <i>Making Capitalism Safe</i> is full of new information on the woefully overlooked and understudied state-level industrial safety apparatus of the twentieth-century United States. This study will be required reading for scholars in fields ranging from business and political history to law, political science, and more."--John Fabian Witt, author of <i>The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law</i>
Centering on the most important of these state agencies, the Wisconsin Industrial Commission, Rogers examines how Wisconsin's program operated in practice, what its results were, and how it compared to protective labor law arrangements in Ohio, California, New York, Illinois, and Alabama. He illuminates the achievements of these agencies, including their integration of workers compensation and commission regulation (two bedrocks of modern occupational safety law), as well as their establishment of worker-employer advisory committees, administrative safety codes, a "safety first" ethic, and "prevailing good practices" in modernizing firms. He also reveals the mixed success that these bodies met in their code enforcement efforts and industrial health initiatives.
Rogers shows how safety commissions reconciled technological progress with industrial efficiency, justice, and stability. Connecting this history to the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970, Making Capitalism Safe will revise historical understandings of state regulation, compensation insurance, and labor law politics--issues that remain pressing in our time.
Introduction 1
1. From Common Law to Factory Laws 11
2. The Administrative Transformation of Work Safety and Health Law 31
3. Selling the Safety Spirit 52
4. The First Safety Codes 68
5. The Club of the Law 85
6. Politics and Work Safety Education in the Interwar Economy 103
7. The Technocrats Take Command 119
8. The Limits of Law Enforcement 136
9. The Troubled Campaign against Occupational Disease 152
Epilogue: The Road to OSHA 172
Appendix 183
Notes 187
Bibliography 243
Index 265
Illustrations follow page 84
"A first-rate political and legal history. . . . Recommended."--<i>Choice</i> "A wonderfully interesting book. <i>Making Capitalism Safe</i> is full of new information on the woefully overlooked and understudied state-level industrial safety apparatus of the twentieth-century United States. This study will be required reading for scholars in fields ranging from business and political history to law, political science, and more."--John Fabian Witt, author of <i>The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law</i>
Centering on the most important of these state agencies, the Wisconsin Industrial Commission, Rogers examines how Wisconsin's program operated in practice, what its results were, and how it compared to protective labor law arrangements in Ohio, California, New York, Illinois, and Alabama. He illuminates the achievements of these agencies, including their integration of workers compensation and commission regulation (two bedrocks of modern occupational safety law), as well as their establishment of worker-employer advisory committees, administrative safety codes, a "safety first" ethic, and "prevailing good practices" in modernizing firms. He also reveals the mixed success that these bodies met in their code enforcement efforts and industrial health initiatives.
Rogers shows how safety commissions reconciled technological progress with industrial efficiency, justice, and stability. Connecting this history to the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970, Making Capitalism Safe will revise historical understandings of state regulation, compensation insurance, and labor law politics--issues that remain pressing in our time.
Introduction 1
1. From Common Law to Factory Laws 11
2. The Administrative Transformation of Work Safety and Health Law 31
3. Selling the Safety Spirit 52
4. The First Safety Codes 68
5. The Club of the Law 85
6. Politics and Work Safety Education in the Interwar Economy 103
7. The Technocrats Take Command 119
8. The Limits of Law Enforcement 136
9. The Troubled Campaign against Occupational Disease 152
Epilogue: The Road to OSHA 172
Appendix 183
Notes 187
Bibliography 243
Index 265
Illustrations follow page 84