From the Triangle Fire to the BP Explosion: A Short History of the Century-Long Movement for Safety and Health

After thirty years of attacks by conservative and business critics, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is starting to show more signs of life. And it's happening none too soon. The catastrophic disaster at the BP oil rig left eleven men dead, and numerous others injured and traumatized; the 2010 explosion in West Virginia's Upper Big Branch mine left twenty-nine men dead. But this is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. As David Michaels, a renowned epidemiologist and labor advocate—and, most significantly, the new head of OSHA under the Obama administration—reminds us, "these catastrophic events are powerful reminders of the risks faced by workers across the country every day. Fourteen workers die on the job each day, far from the headlines, often noted only by their families, friends, and co-workers."¹

The constant hum of deaths on construction sites and among long-distance haulers is a dangerous harbinger of what's to come, as the captains of our shrinking industrial economy wring whatever they can from a susceptible, largely unorganized workforce. Deaths and injuries from accidents have been on a steady decline as jobs in steel and auto production, metal mining, and other heavy industries have been shipped overseas. But the ongoing incidence of long-term industrial diseases from exposure to dust, chemicals, and other toxins that are a part of high-tech industries has put new generations of American workers at risk. As Michaels points out, "every year more than four million workers are seriously injured or sickened by exposure to toxic agents."² Meanwhile, OSHA's infrastructure and funding have atrophied over the past several decades.

Workers' safety and health have always played a part in labor struggles, although they have usually been subsumed within broader campaigns for shorter hours, higher wages, and better working conditions. In recent decades, workplace safety's importance as a serious public welfare matter seems to have faded. But at the time of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911 (well before OSHA's establishment in 1970), there was already growing concern about safety and health in the wake of revolutionary social and economic changes in the United States. In little more than three decades, Americans had witnessed the rapid growth of cities and manufacturing centers. Speed-ups, repetitive motion tasks, exposure to chemical toxins and dusts, and unprotected machinery made the U.S. workplace among the most dangerous in the world. In response, workers, unions, middle-class reformers, muckraking journalists, and social workers created a movement that changed the nature of U.S. capitalism.³

At the beginning of the twentieth century, labor and social activists warned that the enormous wealth produced by the new industrial plants was achieved at an inordinate social cost. In 1907, journalist Arthur Reeve reported that "thousands of wage earners, men, women, and children [are] caught in the machinery of our record-breaking production and turned out cripples. Other thousands [are] killed outright."⁴ Reformers of the period compared the toll of industrial accidents to an undeclared war.⁵

Labor frequently expressed its anger at such conditions by organizing strikes at dangerous or substandard workplaces. One long and dramatic example of conditions that were sub-par enough to trigger labor-management discord is the nineweek general strike of New York City cloakmakers in 1910. The under-ventilated workspaces, absence of washrooms and clean toilets, and general unsanitary conditions promoted the spread of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. The settlement that was reached—at the end of an acrimonious picketing and public pressure operation—included the creation of a Joint Board of Sanitary Control, composed of both employers and employees. Over the course of one year, the cloakmakers' union called twenty-eight successful "sanitary" strikes in New York, and set the stage for the public outcry that followed the tragic deaths of 146 young women in the city's infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

Union campaigns to make shop conditions more sanitary were linked to broader public health concerns, particularly the battle...