Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain, and: A Fair Day's Wage for a Fair Day's Work? Sweated Labour and the Origins of Minimum Wage Legislation in Britain (review)

Both books under review address how the British public and government responded to changing employment contexts in the nineteenth century: on the one hand, increasing industrial accidents, and on the other, the growth of sweated labor. Both argue that the proposed legislation—making employers liable for workplace injuries and regulating contracts to create minimum wages—were hotly contested for challenging the principle of free labor, opposing Britain's industrial interests, and creating sure steps to the downfall of empire. Male workers themselves were wary of state intervention regarding industrial hazards until the later Victorian years. Yet by the time the idea of a minimum wage had any substance in the early twentieth century, a very different context existed in which workers perceived state intervention much more positively.

Jamie Bronstein explores the evolution of what she calls the workers' compensation regime, or the ways that British (and, for comparison, US) society thought about and dealt with the problem of worker injuries and deaths on the job. She evaluates the legal, social, cultural, and political contexts in which information about dangerous workplaces was created, publicized, and debated. Relying primarily on newspapers, legal cases, and government documents, she is interested in excavating both the "culture of workplace injury" and the material implications of on-the-job injuries and deaths (2).

Bronstein begins her analysis by identifying the types of accidents that occurred in principal nineteenth-century industrial occupations such as railroad work, mining, and mechanized textiles. In sometimes gruesome detail, we learn of men and women pulled into machinery, limbs lost, and bodies exploded. Bronstein uses this evidence to highlight not just the dangers of nineteenth-century workplaces but also "the absence of the ideology that safety could or should be engineered into the workplace" (17). Indeed, she demonstrates that employers took very little responsibility for their workers' injuries; rather, workplace culture emphasized the individual worker's own culpability for accidents.

In a detailed examination of common law cases, Bronstein shows that the legal context that developed in the early Victorian years was heavily weighted against workers' use of the courts to bring claims against their employers. Because of the obstacles to legal redress, injured workers and their families could appeal to an alternative compensation regime made up of employer paternalism (only available when workers didn't demand too much), public subscription, mutual aid, and self-help. This compensation regime framed assistance as a privilege, not a right, with employers, the public, and workingmen's organizations requiring signs of deservedness as preconditions for aid.

The help injured workers received was closely related to a cultural struggle over how to define workplace accidents. Bronstein argues that the middle-class press represented worker injuries sympathetically, relying on melodramatic and religious narratives stressing either victimization or the ability to overcome. Yet these popular representations, while accenting the need for charity, individualized accidents rather than offering a structural critique of dangerous workplaces that could lead to political change. The labor press, by contrast, drew attention to the economic impact of workplace injuries on families, emphasizing the need for political reform.

Bronstein convincingly illuminates the "paradox of free labor" whereby men in dangerous trades were reluctant to give up their claims to free agency in order to argue for employer liability (97). Adult male workers resisted being associated with women, children, and non-whites (in the US) as a group in need of protection. The one exception was colliers, who throughout the Victorian period were likely to stress their vulnerability to the dangers of mines. Employers meanwhile...