About this item
Highlights
- Fighting Toxic Ignorance explores conflict over access to information regarding health hazards encountered in the US workplace during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century.
- About the Author: Alan Derickson is Professor Emeritus of Labor Studies and History, Pennsylvania State University.
- 222 Pages
- History, Social History
Description
About the Book
This book analyzes advocacy by public and private agents for fuller disclosure to endangered workers of the nature of toxic chemicals and other occupational health hazards in the United States during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century-- Provided by publisher.Book Synopsis
Fighting Toxic Ignorance explores conflict over access to information regarding health hazards encountered in the US workplace during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. Alan Derickson considers risks posed by toxic chemicals and physical and biological agents of disease. By the 1970s, occupational disease was estimated to kill up to 100,000 Americans a year. Derickson unravels the social and political forces and the conflictual process that gave rise to a sustained social movement for a workers' right to know about often-insidious threats. He argues that the decades prior to the emergence of this movement were not a dark age of victimization brought about by enforced ignorance but a time of recurrent battles over the disclosure of needed facts. Workplace warnings--informative signs, labels, and instructions--often saved lives. Fighting Toxic Ignorance covers a broad range of dangerous substances, deals with a large share of the national workforce, and illuminates the many ways that activists endeavored to see that warnings reached workers, especially immigrants and workers of color.
About the Author
Alan Derickson is Professor Emeritus of Labor Studies and History, Pennsylvania State University. He specializes in problems of public health and labor in the United States.