Tag - labor

Jobs and the Environment: A National Conference

This essay is reproduced here as it appeared in the print edition of the original Science for the People magazine. These web-formatted archives are preserved complete with typographical errors and available for reference and educational and activist use. Scanned PDFs of the back issues can be browsed by headline at...

Women’s Work in Vietnam

Women's participation has been essential to reconstruction efforts after the Viet Nam War, during which they have made enormous strides towards their own liberation.

MassCOSH: Organizing for Occupational Health

A collective bargaining agreement which recognizes the right of the union to represent and protect its members is of paramount importance. It gives the union the right to demand that management provide complete information concerning the materials to which workers are exposed and all other hazards of the workplace. It...

Accelerating the Struggle: Discontent Stalks the National Labs

The National Laboratories are a post-World War II development that evolved from the wartime mobilization of scientists. Partly devoted to basic research and partly to continued atomic-weapons development, the Labs offer employment to research scientists under favorable conditions, but with somewhat less prestige than...

The New Robots

A new wave of technological change is gathering. Only this time it threatens to be more than a new arrangement of control systems and conveyors. The “robot” is finally upon us and may condemn to the scrap heap people who are working not only in factories but in offices and in various service industries formerly...

Report from Worker-Oriented Health & Safety Projects

The New Haven Occupational Health and Safety Project is a collective of professionals and students who have been working around issues of workers’ health in southern Connecticut since 1972. In this article we have discussed our approach, stressing one role highly skilled people can play in the fight for worker control...

Diagnosis: Work-Related Disease

This is an adaptation of an article which originally appeared in Mountain Life and Work—a publication of the Council of the Southern Mountains. It was expanded and modified for use here by a member of our editorial collective with the permission and cooperation of the authors.

Asbestos: $cience for $ale

For almost a decade exposes of worker deaths due to asbestos have commanded newspaper headlines. In 1972 the U.S. government held hearings on a new asbestos standard for the workplace. Yet today the human cost of asbestos exposure remains a public scandal. 

An Introduction to OSHA

The Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), passed by Congress in 1970, establishes the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the Department of Labor. The Act sets minimum standards for working conditions, which are enforced by the inspection of workplaces and the levying of fines of up to $1000 for each...

Engineers and Unions

Unionization of engineers received its greatest impetus not during the Depression years but during the war years (1943-45). That is to say, it was not so much economic deprivation which led to large-scale unionization, but rather the monumental change brought about by their employment on a mass basis in large war...