Tag - occupational health

It’s the Real Thing: Coke Oven Cancer

For nearly a decade a major battle has been waged over conditions in coke plants. While the steel industry has resisted clean-up efforts tooth and nail, the United Steel Workers of America (USWA), prodded by rank-and-file coke oven workers, has won definite improvements in conditions in coke plants. Still, most plants...

Dying for a Job

Until chemical manufacturers are taken to task for supplying unsuspecting workers and other purchasers with chemical time bombs, we will all be relying, to our peril, on a philosophy roughly the equivalent of “Better Profits, But Often Worse Living, Through Chemistry.” Even before the question arises of how to control...

Danger: Women’s Work

...it is time that women stop being viewed primarily in terms of their childbearing capabilities. It is time that women's occupational health, not simply pregnant women's health, be studied and dealt with.

A Ton of Cure: Why There Is No Cancer Prevention

There is much more profit in finding a cure for cancer than in preventing the disease. Industry tries to manipulate cancer prevention into a case of the environmentalists against the workers; just as nuclear power, uranium mining, automobile emissions standards, and too many others have been previously manipulated...

Nonionizing Radiation: Unsung Villain?

Nonionizing radiation is an example of a presumed benevolent technology which, because found useful for military and corporate purposes and for social benefit, has become intertwined in our lives to a potentially dangerous level. When it first gained widespread use some 30 to 50 years ago, little work was done to...

Fight for Safe Workplace: Epoxy Boycott in Denmark

In recent years labor unions have become more and more interested in problems in the work environment. In Denmark unions have initiated research into social and medical problems related to work. Their goal has been to make the workplace safe for their members and  to track down work-related health hazards and illness...

Molly Coye, Health Activist for the OCAW

I had been to China in February '72, and I spent two years giving lectures on China. When I talked to people about worker control of the factory, their eyes glazed over. But when I talked about a health care system which was run by the community and in which many of the people doing health care work identified...

Science for Sale: The Pesticide Connection

Farmers like George Neary feel that the objectivity of these scientists is being compromised by the close financial ties to chemical manufacturers. The allegation is backed by some scientists within the land-grant establishment. “Chemical companies are brazenly buying University goodwill,” said the late Robert van den...

Sexual Harassment: Your Body or Your Job

The scope of sexual harassment is staggering. It ranges from propositions and sexual innuendo to rape. It is just as pervasive in universities as in blue collar jobs, in police forces as in acting schools, in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as in unions The Women’s Legal Defense Fund estimates that “more...