Making Capitalism Safe: Work Safety and Health Regulation in America, 1880–1940 (review)

In early 2011, the national news media headlined stories about Wisconsin’s government proposing legislation that would curtail workers’ right to collective bargaining. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker defended the bill, which passed despite widespread protests and a lack of Democratic support within the state legislature.

The scenes from Wisconsin illuminated the ways in which state governments can influence workplace environments and workers’ rights. Donald W. Rogers’s timely book, Making Capitalism Safe: Work Safety and Health Regulation in America, 1880–1940, provides insight into the historical roots of states’ involvement in the workplace, specifically their development and enforcement of health and safety regulations. Tracing the emergence, impact, and eventual decline of state labor programs in the first half of the twentieth century, Rogers argues that state labor programs, though often overlooked, were critical to the development and passage of the national Occupation Health and Safety Act (OSHA) in the 1970s.

Making Capitalism Safe primarily focuses on Wisconsin and its Industrial Commission, to which Rogers compares the health and safety programs in New York, Illinois, California, Ohio, and Alabama. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Rogers devotes his first two chapters to the transition from court-based, due-care common law to executive-produced safe place statutes. Rogers notes that although courts held workers primarily responsible for their personal safety, the due-care doctrine obliged employers to provide some measure of safety for their employees. He contends that the establishment of new factory laws, such as machine safety laws that required protection from dangerous apparatus, extended employers’ responsibility in this arena. The formation of state-based administrative health and safety programs in the early twentieth century further solidified this shift by creating and enforcing statutes that mandated safe environments for industrial workers.

In the following three chapters, Rogers examines the major innovations of states’ administrative health and safety committees in the early twentieth century, including educational campaigns, the creation of safety codes, the enforcement of workplace regulations, and workers’ compensation. Rogers provides a textured discussion of the ways in which industrial commissions worked with employers to create safe environments. Drawing on films, traveling exhibits, educational pamphlets, health and safety conferences, and public hearings, Rogers argues that state administrators promoted safety by educating middle managers on potential technological and personnel hazards. Additionally, Rogers contends that administrative groups used workers’ compensation programs to compel employers to ensure safety, noting that keeping workers healthy was cheaper than paying them compensation following injury.

In chapters six through nine, Rogers argues that state-based industrial safety programs remained active during the interwar years, although they were weakened due to budgetary cuts, new political leadership, and a shift toward business control over the workplace. In this period, Rogers notes that while some states’ educational campaigns declined, other key components of the system continued, including technocratic approaches to work-place safety and safety-code production and enforcement. Rogers also argues that contrary to many historical accounts, states developed occupational disease laws by the 1940s, although they varied by state and were often fragmentary. In the years following World War I, Rogers traces the increasing turn toward national standards for health and safety, setting up his epilogue in which he discusses the development and institutionalization of OSHA.

One of the strengths of Rogers’s work is his ability to illuminate the state-contingent nature of health and safety reform. Emphasizing what he terms “labor law in action,” (4) Rogers is at his best when describing the Wisconsin Industrial Commission (WIC) and the local conditions that influenced its work. He provides a nuanced picture of the political and economic landscape of Wisconsin in the early decades of the twentieth century, which he contrasts to other states, like New York and Illinois. This comparison enables readers to understand how state-specific political and industrial cultures impacted state governments’ development and implementation of health and safety policies.

The WIC’s influence on...