INTRODUCTIONSomebody Had to Fight

I felt somebody had to fight for some of these conditions because I despise working in the area I am working. I felt somebody has got to fight. It is a hurting feeling just seeing what is going on. It is a hurting feeling seeing my older men dying.

—Eugene Pughsley, 1975

Eugene Pughsley's determination to fight over hazardous conditions came from his long experience working around the coke ovens at the Inland Steel Company plant in East Chicago, Indiana. He had spent many years enveloped in clouds of the toxic chemicals emitted from the ovens. He had seen his coworkers, the vast majority African Americans like himself, dying of cancer with alarming frequency. By 1975, when he testified in Washington, DC, in support of a strong US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standard on exposure to coke oven emissions, in all probability he was aware of the epidemiological discovery that those who spent five years or more laboring atop the ovens were ten times more likely to die from lung cancer than other steelworkers. But besides his primary interest in eradicating this lethal threat, Pughsley, along with other coking worker witnesses at the regulatory hearings, was fighting for access to crucial information. Pughsley told OSHA officials about his employer's refusal to reveal the results of periodic employee medical examinations. He pointed out that plant management gave no warnings about the respiratory hazards present in the coking department. Like countless other workers before and after him, Pughsley was struggling to eradicate dangerous ignorance.¹

There was much at stake in the fight over the right to know about workplace hazards. As a rank-and-file activist who watched his comrades sicken and die, Pughsley had one compelling vantage point on the meaning of denial of lifesaving facts. By the 1970s, other vantages provided compelling evidence of a critical situation. In 1972, the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare estimated that occupational disease killed up to 100,000 Americans a year. A few years later, that agency announced that it had already identified 19,000 commercial substances with known toxic effects, including more than four hundred carcinogens. Because the vast majority of these substances entered the nation's workplaces under one of almost 100,000 opaque trade names, federal authorities concluded that about 90 percent of the tens of millions of the nation's workers exposed to toxic chemicals had no meaningful information about the risks they were facing. Long before these revelations, close observers of working conditions understood that ignorance of hazards exacted a heavy human toll.²

Asymmetric access to information exacerbated the jeopardy of frontline workers throughout the recent COVID-19 pandemic. The fast-food industry, employer of more than four million Americans, where workers function in close proximity to one another and to customers, has been one especially risk-filled environment. A University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) study conducted in 2021 in Los Angeles County, where nine in ten fast-food employees are people of color, found that most employers failed to comply with a state requirement to notify potentially exposed workers within one business day of learning of a confirmed case of COVID-19 at the worksite. According to the UCLA investigators, “Workers described deliberate obfuscation of potential exposure, which they experienced as a frightening ignorance of a health threat.” In some instances, food-service staff learned of their risk only when sick coworkers returned to the job and revealed the cause of their absence. One of the issues that led workers at the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York, to organize a union in early 2022 was the refusal of management to acknowledge the occurrence of COVID-19 cases at their facility. The failure of managers to alert employees that a colleague had either tested positive or fallen ill with the virus has represented a dangerous denial of vital information.³

As the historian Robert Proctor has observed, “Ignorance has many friends and enemies.” This has certainly been the case with respect to unawareness of occupational disease. The existing historical literature has delivered several accounts of the behavior of the friends of ignorance, mainly in and around the business community. As analyses of asbestos, beryllium, vinyl chloride, and other workplace health hazards have shown, the creators and perpetuators of ignorance as a strategic ploy have engaged in a variety of machinations, often with success. To a great extent, as David Michaels, who directed OSHA during President Barack Obama's administration, put it, “Doubt is their product.” Michaels and other scholars have emphasized that manipulation of science is central to the manufacture of doubt. By obstructing and distorting research and by influencing the distribution and interpretation of scientific findings, powerful friends of ignorance have, in a sense, endeavored to dam up the headwaters of the flow of information regarding toxins encountered at the worksite. Historians, journalists, and social scientists have helpfully illuminated the conspiratorial and other efforts of these forces and their blighting effects.⁴

In contrast, this book focuses on the enemies of ignorance. Since the turn of the twentieth century, a diverse aggregation of individuals and organizations has sought to expand the knowledge of at-risk workers. Working-class advocates of democratic transparency were driven by fears of disability or death. Sympathetic outside supporters were animated by humanitarian concern for the well-being of vulnerable workers, particularly the workers of color and immigrants who have disproportionately endured the worst working conditions. For both those activists directly at risk and their sympathetic allies, toxic ignorance had become something that they could not ignore. Previous historical works have appropriately emphasized the widespread victimization resulting from ignorance; however, the central thesis here is that there has also been a long history of resistance to victimization.

It would be a mistake to examine the partisans of transparency in isolation from their opponents. Unsurprisingly, the relations between labor and capital were highly conflictual on this fraught issue. Although many disputes played out within the confines of the employment relationship itself, the main battlefield was that of public policy and administration. This is not the first work to consider the battles waged in the public arena between the friends and enemies of ignorance of toxic hazards, but it is the first to examine those contests across a wide range of occupational health hazards, at national and subnational levels, and over the span of several decades. One striking pattern that emerges from this overview is the support that secretive corporate interests found from public health authorities. With notable exceptions, guardians of the public health guarded the proprietary interests of employers on critical aspects of the dissemination of facts about hazards and their ill effects. Against this tendency, there stood opposition and at times fierce antagonism from governmental officials in labor agencies. The state thus served not so much to mediate class conflict as to provide a setting in which to conduct it. (Alas, this book will not settle the larger question of the role of the state in advanced capitalist society. The presence of a substantial contingent of proworker governmental actors does, however, lend support to that school of thought stressing the relative autonomy of the state from absolute control by the dominant class.)⁵

Complementing the historical work emphasizing the damming up of scientific headwaters, this project explores the downstream situation in order to determine how much information flowed so far as to reach workers at risk. To that end, it investigates the availability of messages found on warning labels and placards; the provision of oral precautionary alerts and instructions; and the distribution of flyers, pamphlets, and other educational materials.

This study covers roughly the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, up through the moment when a full-blown national movement arose to establish a strong legal right to know about occupational hazards. Although there is no straight line of continuous incremental development that culminated in this movement, there were unmistakable continuities in activists’ concerns and in their reform agenda. In seeking at least to identify all the significant contributors and contributions to this quest for greater transparency, this book uncovers a number of previously unrecognized participants in this marathon struggle. Many of these individuals resided within the lower and middle levels of state and federal bureaucracies. Others inhabited relatively obscure corners of the labor movement or of academia. All possessed a willingness to confront powerful forces that had an interest in workers’ ignorance.

Chapter 1 deals with the first systematic attempts to assess and redress the problem of workers’ and employers’ nonrecognition of hazardous toxic chemicals, especially lead and arsenic, during the Progressive Era. Three leading industrial states mounted deep investigations into the extent and causes of occupational disease. These investigations revealed a large and growing array of poorly understood threats, particularly to the sizable non-English-speaking segment of the workforce. This interval witnessed the conscientious interventions of Alice Hamilton, whose actions demonstrated that she was not only the founding mother of American occupational medicine but also the grandmother of the right-to-know movement.

Chapter 2 analyzes the bureaucratic infighting over control of the dissemination of information that raged from the 1910s through the 1940s. At both the state and national levels, labor and health agencies competed fiercely, especially in the pivotal 1930s. Led by the US Public Health Service, the health institutions made it a cardinal principle to preserve opacity, which was part of a strategy of accommodating employers in order to maintain access to research sites. Governmental labor officials saw their mission as democratizing access to lifesaving information for workers in jeopardy. Although labor agencies, especially in the state of New York, did manage to dispense a good deal of warning material to the endangered, their adversaries won a clear-cut victory in this turf fight.

Chapter 3 takes up the private regime constructed in the post–World War II years by the Manufacturing Chemists’ Association. As its main informational activity, this trade association sought to protect its member firms from legal liabilities by devising and promoting a set of warning labels for containers of toxic chemicals. On the political front, the association aggressively strove to forestall government regulation at either the state or federal level. Where the industry could not prevent public intervention, it pressed, with much success, to encode its minimal labeling scheme into law.

Chapter 4 discusses the labor movement's growing resistance to the not-quite-hegemonic privatized system of the chemical manufacturers and their allies. Protests by the United Steelworkers of the refusal of state health officials to turn over reports of hazard surveillance activities led to corrective legislation in Pennsylvania that carved out an unprecedented right to hazard knowledge. Although thwarted in their demands for similar state-held information about poisonous pesticides, the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee made effective use of the issue of withheld facts in building support for its organizing drives. At the insistence of organized labor and its progressive allies, the landmark Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 incorporated a number of breakthrough provisions extending workers’ epistemic rights.

Chapter 5 assesses the problematic implementation of the 1970 legislation. The tortuous, protracted process of promulgating OSHA regulations often frustrated champions of transparency. Setting standards for carcinogens like asbestos and coke oven emissions, as well as for other severe hazards, forced advocates of employee enlightenment into a series of confrontations with intractable opposition from formidable employer interests. Despite their frustrations, these encounters in the bureaucratic arena did yield some significant gains, including requirements that the methods of delivering warnings extend beyond the placement of labels and placards to encompass training and instruction of employees.

Chapter 6 is devoted to the emergence of the national right-to-know movement. OSHA had only a brief honeymoon with progressives. The limitations of reliance on federal administrative capacity reinforced a predisposition for collective self-help among activists. The critical development in bringing a new movement to life was the founding of a network of local and state coalitions that united union leaders, rank-and-file activists, and health and legal professionals. The product of delicate class-bridging negotiations, these organizations effectively harnessed and created militant energy.

The epilogue to this book briefly sketches the advances made in the 1980s by the right-to-know movement. It delineates the main components in initiatives at the local, state, and federal levels and their positive results. Reforms included the issuance of the long-delayed federal Hazard Communication Standard in 1983, which mandated dissemination of basic warning information. The epilogue also suggests the need for further study of the challenges of assuring that workers are aware of on-the-job risks that might kill them.

Beyond whatever it may add to our understanding of the history of occupational health, this study seeks to help illuminate the larger question of rights to knowledge of hidden dangers. Philosopher Lani Watson recently observed that epistemic rights “play an increasingly important role in our lives and communities and yet they often go unnoticed, disregarded and unprotected.” The struggles over the right to know about workplace hazards suggest that establishing and protecting such entitlements require sustained collective action and that they may come only after a very long gestation period.⁶