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This chapter introduces the measures of working conditions and labor rights that are the focus of the book and shows how labor conditions changed in the late 20th century. The key working conditions are pay, hours of work, and workplace health and safety. The four key labor rights (emphasized in policy discussions by international organizations) are freedom of association, nondiscrimination, abolition of forced labor, and reduction of child labor. Evidence presented in this chapter shows that measures of these working conditions and labor rights improved during the late 20th century, a period of increased international economic integration. The data also show that countries that are open to international trade have superior labor conditions.

The coal industry employed large numbers of blacks and immigrants. This chapter examines the extent of discrimination against blacks and immigrants in terms of wages and earnings, workplace safety, and positioning in the job hierarchy. Although the national policy of the United Mine Workers of America called for equal treatment of workers of all colors and creeds, black workers for a long time faced barriers erected by local unions to their migration into northern coal fields. In West Virginia, the substantial competition for labor eroded most forms of workplace discrimination. The major exception was that blacks were denied management positions unless they supervised an all-black work crew. The extensive competition for black labor among coal employers reached beyond the workplace and even eroded discrimination by local governments in West Virginia. Coal employers were an important force in equalizing expenditures on education in West Virginia's segregated schools. This chapter also looks at segregation in housing, segregation across coal mines, and discrimination against black workers in Alabama.

This chapter explains that both Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) have had a discernable impact on workplace safety and health. The frequency of mine disasters and overall mine-related fatalities declined during much of the Laissez Faire Revival, but began to creep upward during the George W. Bush Administration, and shot up dramatically in 2006. From the outset of the Laissez Faire Revival, efforts by workplace safety advocates to induce OSHA and MSHA to promulgate protective rules of responsibility encountered stiff resistance from the regulated industries and serious roadblocks created by unsympathetic officials within the executive branch. Consequently, neither agency promulgated as many standards as Congress envisioned when it enacted their statutes, and the standards they did promulgate often did not measure up to protective policies embedded in those laws.

This chapter discusses the emerging labor market trends that will impact occupational safety and health. It mentions that the Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts two data programs to track injuries, illnesses, and fatalities that occur in U.S. workplaces: the Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses and the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries. The chapter assesses the impact of changes in workplace safety and health from 2004 to 2014 in the labor force distributions by age, gender, industry, and occupation. It suggests that the labor force shifts between this period will have perceptible impacts on the frequency and distribution of workplace injuries and illnesses. Aging of the workforce (and gender shifts) will result in an increase in more severe injuries, such as fractures and fatalities, while falls will become a more frequent event associated with workplace injuries.

This chapter investigates how large employers in the U.S. subvert workplace safety reform during the period from 1869 to 1930. It analyzes the variation across states and time to establish the relationship between the average number of employees per establishment and the extent of regulation. This chapter also provides analytical narratives that describe in more depth the extent to which employers shaped the legislation and the actual enforcement of the laws in various states.

This chapter suggests a way of enriching the normative theorization of the interface between labour law and criminal law in Canada. It homes in on the role of the criminal law in enforcing worker-protective labour standards, in particular with regard to workplace health and safety. Focusing specially on penal policy in respect of violations of health and safety standards by employing enterprises and by individual members of the staff of those enterprises, this chapter contends that there is real scope for bringing to bear the principles and tenets of restorative justice upon the practice of applying criminal or quasi-criminal sanctions in this regulatory domain. This might generate some more nuanced and creative regulatory approaches than those which are sometimes manifested in high-profile corporate criminal prosecutions and by the imposition of blockbusting fines upon such corporations. Moreover, the chapter argues that certain of the currently much-discussed human capabilities approaches to legal regulation might be deployed to develop and flesh out a methodology of restorative justice in this particular context.

In the United States, the period between the mid-1890s and the early 1920s is known as the Progressive Era. Many general studies of the period and biographies of leading reformers emphasize the economic and political reform movements. The economic reforms included expanded regulation, increased antitrust activity, establishment of an income tax, and the development of social insurance programs. This chapter examines the changes that took place during the Progressive Era as a kaleidoscope of interest groups pushed to establish new forms of government activity. Most of the changes were small steps that set the stage for larger expansions of government in response to three major crises. This chapter first provides an overview of the American economy during the Progressive Era and then discusses major policy changes of the period. It also describes the Progressives and looks at workers' compensation laws, protective legislation codifying preexisting trends, tariff reform, antitrust laws, and workplace safety regulation. The chapter concludes by discussing the legacy of the Progressive Era.

This chapter examines how corporate lobbies and their legislative allies have sought to undermine labor standards and workplace rights in the nonunion economy. It discusses the record of corporate-backed state legislation governing the minimum wage, including that for tipped employees, and child labor, overtime, wage theft, sick leave, occupational licensing, workplace safety, meal breaks and weekends, and workplace discrimination. It also considers issues such as the misclassification of employees as “independent contractors” and job-based safety-net programs like unemployment insurance. The chapter argues that the arguments put forward by corporate lobbies and state legislators have a sole objective: to restrict, weaken, or abolish laws governing wages, benefits, or working conditions; to preempt, defund, or dismantle every legal or organizational mechanism through which workers may challenge employer prerogatives; and to undermine people's ability to exercise democratic control over corporate behavior.

This chapter argues that the contribution of criminalization to better health and safety in workplaces has been limited by certain contextual features of this regulatory method. It focuses on the role of criminal law in the health and safety legislation and the corporate manslaughter offence. In particular, this chapter argues that criminal law interventions are gravitationally oriented towards individualized notions of fault, capacity, choice, and responsibility. Once the liability enquiry is structured in this highly personalized way, the regulatory capacities of the criminal law to secure effective and enduring structural change is limited. Thus, it remains an open question whether the criminal law can accommodate approaches to responsibility that are more attuned to structures, cultures, and organizational norms.

During the formative period of bioethics, the field of public health also directed attention largely away from infectious disease, to issues such as environmental degradation, workplace safety, smoking, and obesity. This chapter presents careful documentation of this development—as well as the virtually complete separation, until quite recently, of the fields of bioethics and public health. The past ten years, by contrast, have seen burgeoning development of public health ethics, including extensive efforts to link protection of public health with the right to health care and international human rights initiatives. The standard picture of public health ethics as utilitarian and bioethics as rights-based has shifted somewhat, especially with rights-based approaches to the HIV epidemic. Nonetheless, it is argued that public health ethics has yet to come to terms with the full theoretical challenges posed by infectious disease.

This chapter examines the difficulties that disability and labor activists have faced when working together. Disability and labor activists, today as well as in the past, have much in common. They share the goal of securing fair wage employment for all people. They also want to see safe workplaces created and maintained for all. Despite these common goals, the two camps—disability activists and scholars on the one hand, and labor activists and scholars on the other—differ profoundly in their understanding of disability. While both groups are interested in ensuring workplace safety for all laborers, the chapter notes that labor activists' emphasis on disability as a tragedy to be eliminated can be alienating for disability activists who do not see their lives as tragic. It argues that, despite the difference in conceptions of disability, scholars and labor and disability activists have much to learn from each other. Scholars of disability studies can help articulate new understandings that can ground more effective activist collaborations through engaged scholarship and activism.

This chapter examines how an important feature of Jencks' encouragement of rank-and-file engagement in union affairs was an ongoing concern about both worker health issues and workplace safety measures. Under Jencks' leadership the union persistently called upon mining management to meet their obligations to men who had “given their entire working lives” to the corporations. Even more important to Jencks and Local 890 leaders was the issue of safety on the job. He and his comrades were scrupulous about monitoring workplace accidents, which occurred all too frequently. The ultimate result was the creation of a permanent Union Safety Committee, which insisted on the right to have their voices heard and the inclusion of Jencks in all future inspection tours.

Work gives people dignity, income, and political voice but it also puts people at risk of premature death, jeopardizes self-sufficiency, and dominates workers’ lives. How a person experiences work profoundly influences well-being and lifetime success. How a society organizes work opportunities shapes public health, fairness, and democracy. This chapter describes how changes in modern capitalism have expanded a workforce that is low paid with few benefits, inadequately protected against workplace hazards, and lacking in economic security. It explains how deregulation, low wages, weakened labor laws, and the rise of the gig economy have worsened the life circumstances of millions of U.S. workers, threatening their physical and mental health. The chapter also describes how new forms of labor organizing and new coalitions have promoted pro-worker policies such as living wages, sick and parental leave, laws against wage theft, and universal health care and childcare.

Chapter 6investigates one outgrowth of the shift in journalism and politics: the rise of the concept of “job killers.” Conservative politicians have successfully coined the term “job killer” for the laws and policies that impede corporate autonomy and unchecked profit-taking. Ironically, these laws (e.g., minimum wage, health care reform, workplace safety rules) are designed to aid the working class. Yet, the term is often uncritically repeated by journalists. The durability of “job killers” as a public concept speaks to a major failure of the press.

New jobs created by innovative dynamism tend to be better jobs than old jobs destroyed. The new jobs are usually safer, cleaner, less routine, more creative, and more satisfying. Most factory jobs in the Industrial Revolution were steps up for those who had been scraping by in rural poverty. The replacement of the steam engine by the electric engine in factories made factories safer, cleaner, and better lit. From the late 1800s through the early 2000s, new jobs tended to involve less manual labor, less routine, more creativity, and more analysis. The trend accelerated with the flourishing of computers and the Internet in the 1990s and early 2000s. Innovative dynamism allows workers to choose jobs pursuing big, hairy, audacious goals (BHAGs) and the control, challenge, and satisfaction of being their own boss as free-agent entrepreneurs. We all benefit from allowing the choice of intense jobs, rather than mandating work–life balance.