by Philip Dray
In addition to enjoying substantial labor support, the OSHA legislation was also very much of the moment culturally, part of a wave of new environmental and public health–related laws including the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), which created the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act (1970), and the celebration of the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970. This surge in environmental awareness was a response to diverse influences–the back-to-the-land ethos of the sixties’ counterculture; a reawakened reverence for nature and wilderness, as well as troubling headlines about mercury poisoning in seafood, Southern California smog alerts, and the industrial pollution of the nation’s urban waterways. The new importance of man’s environment had been reinforced by recent photographs from outer space that for the first time allowed humanity to gaze back in awe at its sole planetary home, and by the general precariousness of the atomic age. Concerns about atomic radiation from bomb tests and nuclear reactor sites led inevitably to questions about other potentially harmful man-made substances that lingered in nature.
The publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a meticulously prepared account of the dangers of the commonly used pesticide DDT, served as a template for inquiry into other industrial products like leaded gasoline and food additives. Three years later another landmark book—Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed—exposed the inherent risks built into automobiles, eventually influencing laws and attitudes as had no other work since Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle a half century before. Venerable organizations like the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Audubon Society, and more recent arrivals such as Friends of the Earth and Zero Population Growth, were energized by a new sense of mission, while a tide of techno/environmental mass market paperbacks such as The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich, R. Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and Wesley Marx’s The Frail Ocean overnight became essential campus reading, joining Walden by Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. The concept of environmental public interest law—that citizens have legal standing to defend the environment in court—emerged from the seminal 1965 ruling in Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference v. Federal Power Commission, in which concerned residents of Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, won the right to challenge Consolidated Edison’s plans to build a power plant at Storm King Mountain in the pristine lower Hudson River Valley. All these developments contributed to the dawning idea that citizens, consumers, and workers had the right, even the obligation, to question the potentially detrimental effects of industry and public utilities, what they produced, and how they produced it, in the context of public health and safety as well as any aesthetic or environmental impacts.
The invigorated concern for public health and the environment that produced OSHA in the late 1960s had been decades in the making. Devotion to what could be made better, faster, and with the utmost profit had almost always trumped attempts to rein in new products, challenge their potentially hazardous side effects, or question the faith in technology generally. A sensational early example was the so-called Looney Gas Scare of the 1920s, in which industrial health experts Alice Hamilton of the Harvard Medical School and Yandell Henderson of Yale University squared off against the combined might of DuPont, General Motors, and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey over the manufacture and sale of lead-doped gasoline, marketed as Ethyl. Workers at DuPont who handled a concentrated form of tetraethyl lead had begun experiencing severe neurological problems (some had died or committed suicide). Once Ethyl went on sale, it was feared, millions of automobiles would begin belching leaded exhaust fumes that might be especially dangerous in enclosed areas such as tunnels or busy city streets.
Newspaper accounts of the DuPont employees who had gone mad or become incapacitated from exposure to tetraethyl lead stirred considerable worry among the public, and a federal commission was appointed to look into the matter. Hamilton and Henderson’s warnings about the risks of leaded gasoline before the inquiry were, as it turned out, prophetic, but the day was won by the corporations, which held out the availability of lead gasoline additives as “a gift from God” in terms of their potential to improve automotive acceleration and make possible the manufacture of bigger cars. The panel, and society at large, was seduced by the evidence that America was living through a dynamic age of invention and technology, and that the fruits of these endeavors were to be developed without succumbing to the paranoid warnings of “health cranks.”
To the frustration of Frances Perkins and other reformers from the factory safety movement who graduated to positions in the Roosevelt administration, the Depression also proved an inopportune time to advance workers’ health issues, as they were shunted aside for more pressing economic concerns. It required an especially horrific 1936 industrial health scandal from West Virginia to grab the attention of Congress and the nation. Near the village of Gauley Bridge, about twenty-five miles southeast of Charleston, several thousand black and white laborers worked for as little as 30 cents an hour on the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel, a Union Carbide project to divert water from the New River to create hydroelectric power. The workers called Hawk’s Nest “the Tunnel of Death” due to the prevalence of silicosis, a lethal respiratory disease they contracted because the three-mile-long excavation was being bored through rock, the drilling churning up fine silica dust against which the workers had inadequate protection. “The dust was so thick that workers sometimes could see barely ten feet in the train headlights,” reads one account. “Instead of waiting thirty minutes after blasting, as required by state law, workers were herded back into the tunnel immediately, often beaten by foremen with pick handles.”86 They also were warned never to speak of the company’s authoritarian methods. But employees knew of an unmarked mass grave in the nearby town of Summerville where the bodies of the dead were interred, “their only gravestones cornstalks waving in the wind, their shrouds the overalls in which they died,” according to a labor newspaper.87 “I don’t know what’s wrong but I’m a-goin’ to die,” one young tunnel worker confided to his mother. “I think it’s from my work. I want you to have me cut open. If you can get anything from the company, go ahead.”88
The situation at Hawk’s Nest went unnoticed for the same reasons government has always been challenged to adequately monitor workplace health and safety—the difficulty of gaining access to job sites for inspection, and the perennial lack of regulatory law backed by sufficient funding and manpower. The Walsh-Healey Act of 1936 gave Washington the right to establish safety rules for companies that had contracts worth more than $10,000 with the federal government, but fewer than 5 percent of the seventy-five thousand workplaces eligible under Walsh-Healey were ever examined.89 Inspections were procedurally involved and required a committed budget, and there were simply too many risks—poisons, explosives, industrial compounds, faulty machinery—for any single agency to fully catalog and investigate them. And while some issues were easy to spot, such as loose flooring in a factory, others might be slow in showing their detrimental effect; indeed, many workers’ health conditions—from inhaling cotton dust in textile mills, coal dust in deep mines, or “phossy jaw” from the manufacturing of matches—might take seven or eight years to develop, long after an individual worker had left the employ of a particular mine or factory, making the assignment of culpability difficult. Employers and employer associations also found the means to finesse these issues by supporting weak state enforcement and inspection regimes, or by funding their own scientific specialists to write articles or appear before government panels to counter the claims of safety and industrial health reformers.
The president of Rinehart & Dennis, Union Carbide’s chief contractor, dismissed the West Virginia silicosis allegations as “gross misrepresentation and falsehood,” but Congress would later determine that as many as 476 men had died and another 1,500 were severely stricken by silicosis at the Gauley Bridge tunnel. It also found that while tunnel inspectors were issued
masks before entering the site, none had been given to the workers.90 A lawsuit against Rinehart & Dennis resulted in payments of between $80 and $250 for blacks and $250 and $1,000 for whites stricken with the disease, although many long-term sufferers were denied compensation because the West Virginia statute of limitations had expired. In the wake of the Gauley Bridge hearings of 1936, Secretary Perkins suggested that other states act at once to investigate and produce legislation to address silicosis, but the main result of her pleadings proved to be the creation by industry of a pseudoscientific front group, the Industrial Health Foundation, designed to use “expert medical testimony and advice” to fend off claims of injury and inhibit reform.91
In lieu of sweeping measures on worker health and safety from the federal government, Perkins did bring about the creation in 1934 of the Division of Labor Standards (DLS), which sought to educate workers and labor unions about industrial hazards. The DLS had an activist bent, pushing organized labor to include health and safety demands in their bargaining efforts with employers, and assisting unions directly by giving them information on specific health issues. It also compiled fact sheets and wrote sample legislation for the states, urging them to increase factory inspections and retrain injured workers, while putting in place codes of workplace safety and health that would match those in the most Progressive states such as New York.92
Authentic industry compliance with Perkins’s DLS would not come until the onset of the Second World War, when the National Committee for the Conservation of Manpower in Defense Industries began sending volunteer inspectors into defense-related plants under the terms of the Walsh-Healey Act. Even formerly uncooperative plant managers had begun to display concern about health and safety issues due to the pressures of war production, and because many wartime personnel—women, blacks, and other unskilled workers—were entering factories for the first time.93 By war’s end the DLS had prompted the inspection of twenty-one thousand job sites, with many positive changes seen in on-site safety.94
IN THE POSTWAR ERA management resumed its resistance to government or employee intervention, business seeming to abhor health and safety regulation much as it did the threat of the closed shop. Reformers had to be content with occasional wildcat strikes or newspaper exposés related to specific problems such as poor mine ventilation. In 1952, however, Hubert Humphrey introduced a bill in Congress for the setting of national work safety standards and the provision of federal workplace inspectors, legislation that received the backing of the CIO. The press was generally supportive, one article noting that in the entire United States there were only sixteen hundred state workplace inspectors, half the number of fish and game wardens. But the Humphrey initiative was curtailed by a resistant AFL, which still favored a state-based approach; business lobbyists revealingly explained they opposed a federal solution because the risks involved in the nation’s industry were so numerous, as many as ten thousand inspectors would be required to investigate them; some manufacturing operations, they complained, would require a full-time inspector.95 Another familiar employer argument—that state safety laws might vary so greatly, they would “cripple” a business by forcing it to adopt costly measures a competitor across state lines could avoid—also served in fact as a strong rationale for uniform national standards.
The concept of a federal regulatory mechanism received a boost at the end of the decade, when an inquiry into previously mandated safety standards for longshoremen and harbor workers, occupations with unusually high levels of workplace injury, found that industry compliance had brought a sharp decrease in injuries. The dockworkers’ example moved the Labor Department in 1960 to announce that states would have to adhere to new, more stringent federal safety guidelines when inspecting any job site involved with a federal defense contract. Cries of outrage were heard from the Chamber of Commerce and the National Safety Council, infuriated they had been bypassed in the shaping of so consequential an edict, but the pressure for federal legislation continued to grow. In 1965 the Public Health Service (PHS) reported to the Surgeon General that a new chemical entered the workplace every twenty minutes, that some of these substances were carcinogenic, and recommended the PHS establish a program to reduce occupational health dangers.96 Organized labor, increasingly taking an interest in the possibility of a sweeping federal role and impressed by the PHS claims, urged the Surgeon General to pursue the matter. By May 1966 President Johnson added his voice to the demand for workplace health standards, assigning the task to Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner. Coal miners, hard hit by a respiratory ailment known as black lung, and uranium workers, diagnosed with workplace-related cancer, were also beginning to speak out. In March 1967 the Washington Post reported that as many as one hundred uranium miners had died of lung cancer in recent years and that as many as one thousand more such deaths might be expected. Uranium mining had begun in Colorado during the Second World War under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), but all relevant federal agencies had missed dealing with the industry’s health problems: the AEC neglected workers’ health issues in general, the Bureau of Mines did not inspect uranium mines, and the Labor Department had kept hands off despite the fact that Walsh-Healey permitted it to oversee safety in government-contract work. Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz was moved by the Post’s exposé to replace the AEC’s standards for safety in uranium mining with much tougher ones designed by his department. The problems facing uranium miners remained in the news for years as miners sought relief at the state and federal levels.97
Unions across the nation including the UAW and the Steelworkers began stepping up their efforts on workplace health. In the late 1960s Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) started visiting workplaces in the company of a physician to discuss with workers the health risks of industrial toxins that had the potential to harm them and their families. These were information-gathering encounters for Mazzocchi, who listened to myriad workers’ tales of recurrent respiratory problems, cancer clusters, mysterious illnesses, even the deaths of coworkers. Mazzocchi had begun his labor career in a perfume factory in Long Island City as a “colonizer,” a worker who takes a job with the intent to organize others, and was thus familiar with the lack of knowledge and safety protections among workers who spent their days handling, mixing, and transporting chemicals and industrial compounds. Mazzocchi tried where possible to stir up press interest in the stories he heard and urged stricken workers to write to their congressmen. He also encouraged labor to ally with the burgeoning environmental movement, disavowing the oft-cited antagonism between the two forces centered on the fear of job loss in industries affected by environmental restrictions. “We’re making the point that you can’t be concerned about the general environment unless you’re concerned about the industrial environment, because the two are inseparable,” he said in an appearance on NBC’s Today program. He also reminded industrial workers of their larger connection to the environment, in that most pollutants found there originated in factories. “Let’s face it,” he said, “we are responsible … we make them. When you … see what we’re putting into the water, which we ultimately have to drink and depend upon for life, and what we introduce into the air, you have a very frightening picture.”98
In January 1968 President Johnson, calling it shameful that fourteen thousand American workers were killed on the job each year and more than 2 million injured or sickened, told Congress that the time had come to produce comprehensive federal workplace safety legislation.99 Labor Secretary Wirtz proved a strong advocate in congressional hearings, urging efforts “to stop a carnage” that continues because people “can’t see the blood on the food that they eat, on the things that they buy, and on the service they get.”100 Most major unions voiced support for the bill, as did Ralph Nader, while industry spokesmen complained that such measures would hand excessive regulatory powers to the federal government. As Congress took up the matter, however, the Labor Department made an unfortunate stum
ble, publishing a booklet, titled On the Job Slaughter, that contained disturbing images of a variety of workplace injuries. The photographs were meant to shock, but business pounced on and trumpeted the fact that most of the photographs appeared to be at least thirty years old. The bill the president had encouraged and organized labor had backed did not make it out of committee.
Mazzocchi believed the legislation had died largely for want of public pressure, and after President Nixon took office in January 1969 Mazzocchi helped orchestrate a greater lobbying effort by the Steelworkers, OCAW, and other unions. The new round of congressional hearings focused on a more conservative bill, suggestive of a greater advisory and less regulatory role for government. A key point of disagreement was the extent to which the Labor Department would control the program. Unions wanted both standard-making and enforcement functions to remain in the department, while industry asked for two separate and independent boards to administer these functions, not trusting the Labor Department to be a fair arbiter of management’s interests. Organized labor feared this possibility because the choice of appointees to an independent agency would be too easily influenced by whoever sat in the White House. After several versions of the bill had been debated and amendments considered, it was agreed that the Labor Department would retain the important role of establishing standards and inspections, and a separate commission would hear violations and complaints and levy fines. A research entity, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), was created to conduct objective studies that would determine the severity of workplace threats.
