Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

The miner, it was said, “went down to work as to an open grave, not knowing when it might close on him.” . . . Unprotected powershafts maimed and killed hoopskirted workers. . . . The circus stuntman and test pilot today enjoy greater life assurance than did the [railroad] brakeman of yesterday, whose work called for precarious leaps between bucking freight cars at the command of the locomotive’s whistle. . . . Also subject to sudden death . . . were the train couplers, whose omnipresent hazard was loss of hands and fingers in the primitive link-and-pin devices. . . . Whether a worker was mutilated by a buzz saw, crushed by a beam, interred in a mine, or fell down a shaft, it was always “his own bad luck.”⁵⁹

“Bad luck” was a convenient explanation for employers, and until recently it was a part of a widespread fatalism about lethal accidents, which were commonly attributed to destiny or acts of God. (Today, safety engineers and public health researchers don’t even use the word accident, since it implies a fickle finger of fate; the term of art is unintentional injury.) The first safety measures and insurance policies in the 18th and 19th centuries protected property, not people. As injuries and deaths started to increase unignorably during the Industrial Revolution, they were written off as “the price of progress,” according to a nonhumanistic definition of “progress” that was not reckoned in human welfare. A railroad superintendent, justifying his refusal to put a roof over a loading platform, explained that “men are cheaper than shingles. . . . There’s a dozen waiting when one drops out.”⁶⁰ The inhuman pace of industrial production has been immortalized in cultural icons such as Charlie Chaplin on the assembly line in Modern Times and Lucille Ball in the chocolate factory in I Love Lucy.

Workplaces began to change in the late 19th century as the first labor unions organized, journalists took up the cause, and government agencies started to collect data quantifying the human toll.⁶¹ Bettmann’s comment on the lethality of work on trains was based on more than just pictures: in the 1890s, the annual death rate for trainmen was an astonishing 852 per 100,000, almost one percent a year. The carnage was reduced when an 1893 law mandated the use of air brakes and automatic couplers in all freight trains, the first federal law intended to improve workplace safety.

The safeguards spread to other occupations in the early decades of the 20th century, the Progressive Era. They were the result of agitation by reformers, labor unions, and muckraking journalists and novelists like Upton Sinclair.⁶² The most effective reform was a simple change in the law brought over from Europe: employers’ liability and workmen’s compensation. Previously, injured workers or their survivors had to sue for compensation, usually unsuccessfully. Now, employers were required to compensate them at a fixed rate. The change appealed to management as much as to workers, since it made their costs more predictable and the workers more cooperative. Most important, it yoked the interests of management and labor: both had a stake in making workplaces safer, as did the insurers and government agencies that underwrote the compensation. Companies set up safety committees and safety departments, hired safety engineers, and implemented many protections, sometimes out of economic or humanitarian motives, sometimes as a response to public shaming after a well-publicized disaster, often under the duress of lawsuits and government regulations. The results are plain to see in figure 12-7.⁶³

At almost 5,000 deaths in 2015, the number of workers killed on the job is still too high, but it’s much better than the 20,000 deaths in 1929, when the population was less than two-fifths the size. Much of the savings is the result of the movement of the labor force from farms and factories to stores and offices. But much of it is a gift of the discovery that saving lives while producing the same number of widgets is a solvable engineering problem.

Figure 12-7: Occupational accident deaths, US, 1913–2015