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H-NET BOOK REVIEW 
Published by [log in to unmask]  (March, 1998) 
 
Christopher Sellers.  _Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease 
to Environmental Health Science_.  Chapel Hill: University of North 
Carolina Press, 1997.  xv + 331 pp.  Bibliographical references and 
index.  $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2314-7. 
 
Reviewed for EH.Net by Mark Aldrich <[log in to unmask]>, 
Department of Economics, Smith College 
 
This is a complex, thoughtful, and meticulously researched history of 
thought about occupational disease in the first half of this century that 
is based upon a wide reading of the archival, primary printed, and 
secondary literature. Although not an economic history, the work will 
interest economists and anyone else anyone concerned with the evolution of 
the American workplace during these years. 
 
Sellers begins with a prologue informing us that he intends to recover 
"this biological dimension to the workplace's past" (p. 4), and then goes 
on to ground postwar environmentalism in the earlier industrial hygiene 
movement.  There follows a chapter on the discovery of lead and other 
industrial poisoning in Europe and its comparative neglect in the United 
States until the early years of this century.  Sellers occasionally 
provides glimpses of how nineteenth century labor markets dealt with 
well-known toxins--fewer than fifteen percent of workers at one lead-using 
firm stayed more than forty-eight weeks, and the foreman would encourage 
those showing poisoning symptoms to leave.  Managers, he argues, were 
largely unaware of the extent of such disease--a rational result, perhaps, 
of the low payoff to such information.  Two chapters then trace the rising 
concern with occupational health to the rise of militant labor and to 
legal changes such as Holden vs Hardy- which seems implausible as states 
had been regulating health and safety for decades. The industrial hygiene 
movement begins with the revelations of phosphorus and lead poisoning by 
the American Association for Labor Legislation and Alice Hamilton, and the 
more formal investigations by the Public Health Service (PHS).  Themes 
include the development and meaning of expertise and the ability of 
researchers such as Hamilton to wield "disciplinary power" to encourage 
business compliance with researchers' prescriptions. 
 
Chapters Four and Five continue these themes, tracing the complex 
relations between scientists and the business community, the problems with 
identifying occupational diseases, and the origins of a laboratory-based 
study of occupational disease at such institutions as Harvard's School of 
Public Health.  Here again, Sellers argues that while company concerns 
often shaped research agendas and publications, researchers were still 
able to exploit the need of corporations for disinterested expertise to 
carve out both independence and disciplinary power.  Chapter Six briefly 
discusses some of the occupational health studies of the 1930s and notes 
the increasing interest in toxicology of large companies such as DuPont 
and GM but says little on what stimulated this interest or what results it 
had.  In the remainder of that chapter, the focus turns to the non-work 
environment.  Sellers recounts a PHS study of environmental lead exposures 
to apple workers and consumers that revealed the difficulties of applying 
outside the workplace those techniques that relied on clinical findings of 
disease.  The conclusion links modern environmentalism to the earlier 
hygiene studies.  The author claims that the modern overemphasis on 
synthetic industrial chemicals is a legacy of the industrial hygiene 
movement, and he unfavorably contrasts EPA-OSHA regulation with the 
earlier, more flexible approach, which he compares to right-to-know laws. 
 
I want to raise two issues that relate to coverage and evidence.  This is 
a history of the development of scientific thought about occupational 
disease.  It is not, as the title suggests, a history of hazards of the 
job if by that is meant a reasonably comprehensive assessment of the 
extent of industrial disease, nor, as the author makes clear in the 
preface, is it a comprehensive history of industrial hygiene. This 
emphasis on scientific thought means we learn much less about business and 
labor leaders' motives than about those of scientists.  Similarly, the 
coverage of hazards and regulatory efforts is spotty--there is little on 
silicosis, byssinosis, black lung, and asbestos-related disease, perhaps 
because their study did little to advance the science of occupational 
medicine.  The increasing coverage of occupational disease by workers' 
compensation laws is noted but not discussed in any depth.  Nor do we come 
away with any sense of what worked:  Sellers informs us that in 1910-1911 
Illinois tightened regulations on lead, arsenic, and brass industries, but 
the book does not discuss whether or not the new rules had any effect. 
 
No one should be criticized for failing to write a different book, and the 
above is not intended as criticism, but merely to clarify the book's 
scope.  But one aspect of coverage does affect the author's argument.  Of 
the broad themes Sellers advances, perhaps the most interesting to 
economists is the power he ascribes to informal, expert-based authority in 
shaping employer behavior.  Early company efforts to reduce lead exposures 
were probably not cost-effective, Sellers argues, but were done for moral 
reasons or public relations, and he claims that "for [Alice] Hamilton, the 
investigative enterprise became a regulatory act" (p. 73).  Later he 
asserts the "surprising effectiveness of this new professional form of 
authority,"  and claims that it "exerted a new discipline over a growing 
number of employers" (p. 180).  Yet three pages later we are told 
"preventive measures [urged by Harvard's School of Public Health] had 
little impact on industrial processes" (p. 183).  In fact the evidence on 
these issues is exceedingly weak. Thus, there is little about the 
prevalence of even such a well-studied disease as lead poisoning, or about 
whether occupational diseases were reduced by the industrial hygienists' 
efforts.  Occasionally there are generalizations about the extent of 
occupational disease such as "Barnes shared this kind of dilemma [the need 
to accept an unhealthy job during the Depression] with tens if not 
hundreds of thousands of others"  (p. 189).  But the source for this claim 
turns out to be four letters written by workers, two of which date from 
the 1940s. 
 
While it is easy to nit-pick any book, there are number of places in 
addition to the above where the author's interpretation outruns his 
evidence.  Occasionally causation is either obliquely asserted or 
presented without much evidence.  For example, Sellers asserts (p.  133) 
that "By raising his wariness of patient testimony to such an extreme, 
Schereschewsky forestalled the employer and professional criticisms 
endured by Hamilton: no one could accuse him of falling prey to garment 
workers' exaggeration of their ills."  It is not clear whether this is 
simply a statement of behavior or an attempt to imply motive as well.  Or 
consider the following problematic attempt to infer motive.  Apparently 
the author found few photographs of physicians with workers and so a 
picture of a doctor reading physical examinations is captioned "Hardly 
ever did industrial hygiene researchers _allow themselves_ [my emphasis] 
to be photographed with worker subjects; they preferred to be seen at 
their desks, with emblems of their science ..."  Of course the absence of 
photographs reveals nothing about the cause of that absence. 
 
Finally, although it may seem inappropriate for an economist to comment on 
anyone else's prose, Sellers' book is not an easy read.  There are too 
many sentences such as: "To tell this tale is thus to foreground the 
centrality and importance to twentieth-century workplace history of 
knowledge claims themselves--in this case, the conflicting representations 
of environmental biology" (p. 8).  Or consider this assessment of 
middle-class reformers: "We may understand their discipline as a major 
symbolic achievement:  like the Protestant ethic whose Weberian reading 
Jean-Christophe Agnew has lately recast, 'not simply an economic strategy' 
for controlling both workers and employers, but a 'cultural strategy for 
ordering a mass of meanings' incited by market-driven workplace change" 
(p.  230). 
 
Despite such difficulties this remains a valuable book.  It reveals a role 
for science in shaping production technologies that economists have 
largely overlooked and a linkage between industrial hygiene and 
environmentalism that has gone largely unnoticed.  It will be the 
definitive treatment of the early evolution of industrial medicine and an 
invaluable source on the origins of health and safety regulation. 
 
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