The Need for Safety from the Worker's Point of View

Journal article

By: William Green

Date: January 1926

Source: Green, William. "The Need for Safety from the Worker's Point of View."Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 123 (1926): 4–5

About the Author: William Green, an influential labor leader and reformer, was President of the American Federation of Labor from 1924 to 1952. He was instrumental in bringing about legal protections for workers.

INTRODUCTION

William Green was born in Ohio in 1870. Following in his father's footsteps, he left school at age sixteen to become a coal miner, where he experienced the daily hazards inherent in sub-surface mining. In 1891, he was elected Secretary of the local mining union. After the local union merged with the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), Green was elected to several offices, including President of the Ohio District.

Green also used political channels to advance the cause of labor. In 1910, after he was elected to the Ohio State Senate, Green sponsored and passed legislation to provide compensation to injured workers. Building on his success in politics, Green held increasingly powerful positions in the UMWA, and in 1916 became the Secretary-Treasurer of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the nation's largest multi-union umbrella organization.

The AFL was instrumental in improving working conditions and guaranteeing worker rights. Among the union's accomplishments were laws against child labor, shorter hours, higher wages, and workman's compensation protection. Union progress was often accompanied by violence, as union president Samuel Gompers took an openly confrontational approach to securing worker rights. Following his death in 1924, William Green was named the union's new president.

Green's twenty-eight years as AFL president were marked with turbulence. However, his approach was far less confrontational than that of Gompers, and Green's numerous speeches frequently focused on the mutual benefits of employer-employee cooperation. Green's perspective on worker rights was clearly shaped by his years in the coal mines, and he frequently referred to the hazards of that profession in his speeches and writing.

PRIMARY SOURCE

THE NEED FOR SAFETY FROM THE WORKER'S POINT OF VIEW

Progress seldom comes with the simultaneous forward movement of a whole group or an undertaking. Usually some part is in advance of the others, and there is maladjustment until all can move forward in equitable co-operation. So in industry the material side of technical progress has been speeded up without adequate consideration of the human instrumentalities necessary to direct high technical organization. The machines of industry were first built and installed without a thought of hazards to those in charge of them.

Men, women and even children spent their working hours around unguarded machinery and when rush periods came or the day's work had passed the peak of high production and fatigue made the workers less wary, many an unnecessary accident brought individual suffering and loss as well as loss to the industry.

Control over machine guarding, work processes and other working conditions rests primarily with management. While the worker may express his views he does not have power of decision. The responsibility for compensating industrial accidents rests, therefore, upon the industry. This has become an accepted social policy expressed in our compensation legislation. The enactment of this legislation brought industrial accidents forcefully to management's attention through expense items in accounts. When accidents became expensive, industry began to consider accident prevention devices and methods.

The technical side of accident prevention is primarily a field for experts and technicians, but the problem of carrying any plan into effect makes necessary the co-operation of wage earners. This co-operation can come only through an organized group. Here the union is the logical agency, for it only can offer the worker unwavering support. Putting a safety program into effect is not so simple as it sounds.

Often the rules prescribed for safety first mean doing things other than the speediest way. When management makes high quantity production paramount, the worker who follows safe practices finds himself penalized if not dismissed. Obviously then, co-operation must rest upon confidence and equality.

Human Waste in Industry

An illustration of effective safety work organized on a democratic basis with the co-operation of trade unions, is the safety work of the safety committees of the United Mine Workers. These committees serve as an educational agency as well as an administrative agency for mine safety.

The miner's work is ultra-hazardous. In 1923 there were 28,172 men injured in the anthracite mines. In 1924 there were 30,241 injured, nearly one-fifth of the total number employed in the anthracite industry in one year victims of accident and death. The loss of four million labor days a year by one hundred and fifty-eight thousand men in the anthracite industry through injuries and deaths alone is the loss to the industry. In the whole mining industry there were two thousand four hundred and fifty-two fatal accidents in the year 1923 and two thousand three hundred and eighty-one in 1925.

For the year 1921 in all industries the fatal accidents reported were eight thousand seven hundred and sixty-four and the non-fatal one million, two hundred nine thousand, one hundred fifty-one. This, of course, does not include many unreported accidents, non-fatal accidents or data on those suffering from industrial diseases.

The picture of what industrial hazards mean in the terms of industrial waste is given in the following estimates from theWaste in Industry Reportof the American Engineering Council:

In 1919 there occurred in all the industries of the United States about 23,000 fatal accidents; about 575,000 non-fatal accidents causing four weeks or more disability; about 3,000,000 accidents in all causing at least one day's disability.

The same report estimates the net waste due to negligence of health supervision in industry at one billion dollars. In addition, preventive measures bring social dividends of high value to the nation.

These figures of course do not disclose the full extent of industrial hazards for miners, for an industrial hazard comprehends disability by disease as well as by sudden injury. We cannot consistently urge one policy for accidents and another for industrial disease. Both are due to work environment. Both result in disability, differing only in rapidity of development.

Preventive measures and programs as well as compensation should therefore apply to both occupational disease and accidents.

To management the problem of industrial safety and hygiene is a problem of efficiency. Whatever interferes with stability of working force is industrial waste—an expense that adds to production costs.

The wage earner has more at stake in the industrial safety movement than any other group. His own physical and mental well-being is involved. The consequences to him are personal or irreparable. Naturally, therefore, the first protest against conspicuous industrial hazards came from wage earners and our protests found effect in compensation legislation and constructive efforts to reduce preventable injuries.

Preventive Measures

The principal methods through which safety work is carried on are safety codes, safe practices and technical advice on desirable working condition standards. For the fully rounded development of these methods, wage earners can make the invaluable contribution of the experience of the workman on the job. This contribution is necessary to assure practicability of recommendations. In serving in this capacity, wage earners should be representatives of the unions, which are the repositories of the work experiences of the craft for many years.

On the health side, the same inadequate consideration of the health of the workers in connection with changes in production processes exists. Chemical research has been making radical and comprehensive changes in manufacturing methods. Some of these changes have been put into effect without thought of the exposure of workers to industrial poisons. The new industrial hazards were discovered only through increasing sickness, and even in some cases through an undermining of the nervous system. Such carelessness on the part of management is bad industrial economy and constitutes a revolting social waste. Labor is seeking better and more accessible sources of information on industrial hygiene, as present agencies are inadequate.

In the fields of industrial accident and disease prevention, wage earners through their only representative agency, the trade union movement, have an immediate and vital interest and stand ready to help in every possible capacity.

SIGNIFICANCE

William Green's tenure as head of the AFL saw division within the group's ranks. The AFL had historically organized workers on the basis of craft or skill, meaning that large industries included multiple unions organized by the type of work involved. But by the mid 1930s, a growing faction within the AFL was advocating a new approach to organizing, in which all workers within an industry would form a single union. In 1935, John Lewis of the UMWA led the formation of the Committee of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, which quickly gained ground in the auto and steel industries and challenged the AFL's national leadership. Renamed the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1938, the CIO broke away from the AFL and vigorously competed with it before the two eventually remerged in 1955.

William Green's efforts produced significant improvements in the lives of U.S. workers, who formerly enjoyed few legal protections and were frequently abused by employers. Green's support helped pass the Norris-La Guardia Act, which prohibited "yellow dog contracts" forbidding new employees from joining labor unions. Green was also instrumental in passing the National Labor Relations Act, which protected workers' rights to form unions and collectively bargain with management. In 1938, he helped pass legislation creating a minimum wage and the forty-hour work week for all employees.

Because of Green's extensive experience in both labor relations and government, both Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman appointed him to advisory positions on federal boards. His political efforts within his own union, however, were less successful. During his tenure as AFL President, Green worked tirelessly to reunite the craft unionists and the industrial unionists, arguing that the two groups wielded greater power as a single organization. When several unions ultimately left the AFL to form the CIO, Green openly criticized their choice, claiming that their actions violated the fundamental principle of union solidarity.

William Green led the AFL during what is now viewed as the golden age of labor. In 1945, more than thirty percent of U.S. workers were represented by labor unions, giving them tremendous clout. In the years that followed, unions achieved sweeping improvements in working conditions and compensation. Organized labor also became a powerful political force, able to marshal enormous manpower and channel millions of dollars to favored candidates.

Changes in the makeup of the U.S. economy, combined with abuses by union officials and unrealistic demands by union members soon began to stifle union growth. Ironically, previous union successes, by improving the working conditions of most Americans, actually made new union recruiting more difficult, and by 2005 only 12.5 percent of the U.S. workforce was unionized. Among non-government employees, the rate is even lower, at 7.8 percent.

While the American workplace is demonstrably safer in the twenty-first century than it was in William Green's day, mining remains a hazardous occupation. In May 2006, industry regulators began investigating a rash of fatal mining accidents in which thirty-three miners died in the first five months of the year. Union officials blamed longer work weeks and fatigue due to a rapid increase in demand for coal.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Baldwin, Robert E.The Decline of U.S. Labor Unions and the Role of Trade. Washington, D.C.: The Institute for International Economics, 2003.

Jacobs, James B.Mobsters, Unions, and the Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement. Albany, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2006.

Zieger, Robert H. and Gilbert J. Gall.American Workers, American Unions: The Twentieth Century. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Periodicals

Abramsky, Sasha. "Reversing 'Right to Work.'"Nation. 282 (2006): 16–21.

Baldwin, William. "Bigness and Badness."Forbes. 177 (2006): 16.

Miller, Matt. "Blowing up the Union to Save the Union."Wall Street Journal—Eastern Edition. 152 (2005): 36.