History of the Safety and Health Movement

Upon completion of this chapter the student should be able to  

Safety and health awareness has a surprising history that dates as far back as the time of the Egyptian pharaohs. The Code of Hammurabi, named after a Babylonian king circa 2000 BC, contained clauses that could be interpreted as early attempts at workers compensation. There is also evidence of concern for safety and health during the time of the Roman Empire. This chapter examines the history of the safety movement in the United States and how it has developed over the years. 

Improvements in safety and health in the future are likely to come as a result of greater awareness of the cost effectiveness of a safe workplace and the competitive advantage gained from a safe and healthy workforce. 

As in the rest of the newly industrialized nations, hazardous conditions were conunon-place in the industrial sector of the United States. The safety movement began in America just after the Civil War. A chronology of some important events follows. 

The persistent and continued increases in death and injuries in industry were the primary reasons behind passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSHA) and the Federal Mine Safety Act of 1977. These federal laws, particularly OSHA, represent the most significant legislation to date in the history of the safety movement. Table 2-1 summarizes some significant milestones in the development of the safety movement in the United States. 

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Reviewing the history of occupational safety and health conflicts in the United States is not like, say, surveying agrarian populism or the development of central banking. There are no more than a handful of historians who specialize in this area, and much of the relevant material emerges as a byproduct of other interests - labor movement history, public health, etc. Moreover, the studies that have been produced are, with few exceptions, narrative accounts of individual issues or episodes no one has yet attempted a general siunmary of this disjointed and widely scattered literature. It is not possible, then, to prove the existence of general patterns in the history of occupational safety. Nevertheless, anyone who reads a reasonably broad selection of works in this area cannot fail to identify two conunon themes. ... 

This brief history of the safety movement in the United States explains why engineering is the dominant paradigm in industrial health and safety (Petersen, 1991 Winn and Probert, 1995), with secondary emphasis on two additional "Es"—education and enforcement. Over the past several decades, the basic protocol for reducing injury has been to... 

While the trade union movement has a long history of campaigning to eliminate workplace exposure to toxic dust, the potential health and safety impacts of nanotechnology are a relatively recent cause for concern. 

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