Miners, silica and disability : the bi-national interplay between South Africa and the United Kingdom, c1900-1930s

This paper investigates silicosis as a disabling disease in underground mining in the United Kingdom (UK) before Second World War, exploring the important connections between South Africa and the UK and examining some of the issues raised at the 1930 International Labour Office Conference on silicosis in Johannesburg in a British context. The evidence suggests there were significant paradoxes and much contestation in medical knowledge creation, advocacy, and policy-making relating to this occupational disease. It is argued here that whilst there was an international exchange of scientific knowledge on silicosis in the early decades of the twentieth century, it was insufficient to challenge the traditional defense adopted by the British government of proven beyond all scientific doubt before effective intervention in coal mining. This circumspect approach reflected dominant business interests and despite relatively robust trade union campaigning and eventual reform, the outcomewas an accumulative legacy of respiratory disease and disability that blighted coalfield communitie

Was health and safety a strike issue? Workers, unions and the body in twentieth-century Scotland

In February 1949, 5,000 or so asbestos miners downed tools and went on strike in a dispute which centred on excessively dusty working conditions which were considered inimical to the health of those breathing this toxic mineral into their lungs. This occurred in the mining town called Asbestos in Quebec, Canada, where Irish migrants were amongst the strike’s participants. The Catholic Church was drawn into the conflict, with the nearby Archbishop of Montreal supporting the strikers and organising fund-raising which quickly accumulated over $500,000. After a long, bitter and violent five-month struggle the strike was defeated and the men returned to working in the dust. Two decades or so later, in the 1970s, the legacy was evident in uncontroversial medical evidence of spikes in asbestos-related disease deaths amongst Canadian asbestos miners. This episode is revealing because it appears to be such a rare occurrence: a workers’ strike explicitly over occupational health where a substantial number of employees were responding directly to the threat towards their bodies of the labour process, the work environment and the materials on which they worked

Le travail en Grande-Bretagne : une étude historiographique

This brief essay aims to survey and critically reflect on some of the key landmarks in the historiography of work in Britain over the past fifty years or so

The textile firm and the management of labour: comparative perspectives on the global textile industry since c 1700

This paper focuses on the textile firm, providing a comparative examination of the changing patterns of organisation and behaviour amongst employers, managers, and others who controlled production in global textile manufacture since c 1700. Attention is concentrated on five issues: The first section explores labour control mechanisms within pre-industrial and proto-industrial modes of production, examining home-work, artisan and guild textile manufacture, together with the role of merchants in the 'putting-out' system. The second section investigates the textile firm in the era of the modern, mechanised factory system and the evolution of more direct and frequently authoritarian work regimes, tempered in some cases by traditions of company paternalism. The third section explores the responses of textile firms to the challenge of trade unionism and organised workers' protest movements, including the role played by employers' organisations in industrial relations, supported, in some cases, by the state. The fourth section evaluates the key changes in managerial practice in the textile firm associated with scientific management and the bureaucratisation of work in the twentieth century and the extent to which the textiles sector shared in this 'managerial revolution'. The final section makes some brief comments about international and multinational textile firms

Oral History

This is part of the series Essays on the Local History and Archaeology of West Central Scotland , commissioned for the Regional Framework for Local History and Archaeology, a partnership project led by Glasgow Museums, with representatives from the councils of East Dunbartonshire, West Dunbartonshire, Glasgow, Inverclyde, North Lanarkshire, South Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire and East Renfrewshire

'Bottom dog men' : disability, social welfare and advocacy in the Scottish coalfields in the interwar years, 1918–1939

This article builds on and connects with recent research on workmen's compensation and disability focussing on the Scottish coalfields between the wars. It draws upon a range of primary sources including coal company accident books, court cases and trade union records to analyse efforts to define and redefine disability, examining the language deployed and the agency of workers and their advocates. It is argued here that the workmen’s compensation system associated disability with restricted functionality relating to work tasks and work environments. Disability became more visible and more closely monitored and this was a notably contested and adversarial terrain in Scotland in the Depression, where employers, workers and their collective organisations increasingly deployed medical expertise to support their cases regarding working and disabled bodies. In Scotland, the miners' trade unions emerged as key advocates for the disabled

Occupational Health and Safety in the British Chemical Industry, 1914-1974

This thesis probes a neglected area lying at the interface between medical and labour history and is concerned with issues of occupational health and safety in the British chemical industry between the First World War and the passage of the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974. The research is presented thematically and draws on a wide variety of primary and secondary source material to reveal the causes of ill health, the politics of reform and the role of the key players, such as the government, medical profession, employers and trade unions. As such, it engages critically with hypotheses in this contested field of historical research. The results of open-ended interviews also provides new testimony to show how occupational health issues impacted directly on the workers themselves as well as on the lives of their families. It is argued that the outputs of the chemical industry had social, economic, and political benefits but that the human cost in producing these was often hidden by poor data collection, a lack of investigation and by the fact that the effects of exposure only became evident after latency periods of many years. Some of the obvious and insidious hazards to heath were addressed over time but only so long as the costs of these measures did not adversely impact on the profit making capabilities of the firms involved. Therefore, working within a system that prioritised profit over health many chemical workers continued to be exposed to hazardous and lethal processes. The main response to this by both the employers and the state was to pay compensation. This was the cheaper alternative to prevention and also had the effect of hiding the destitution that arose when a chemical worker no longer had the ability to sell his labour power