Ninety-nine years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech in Norfolk, Va., decrying “the bitter injustice” that forced workers and their families to shoulder all the physical risks of work in the new industrial economy.
It was time, he said, for Americans to unite to meet a new challenge.
In the last decades of the 19th century, a new family form – the male breadwinner marriage – had emerged during the transition to industrialization, replacing the pre-industrial family in which wives and children had worked alongside fathers and husbands on farms and in small businesses. The most serious threat to this family was the danger that factory workers ran of being killed or maimed on the job.
Much has been done since Roosevelt’s speech to protect men who supported their wives and children in male breadwinner families. But over the past 50 years, a new family form has emerged: the dual-earner family. Today, most women, like most men, are employed for the majority of their lives, including the years when their children are young. The occupational health and safety issue for the 21st century is helping working parents find enough time for family needs and obligations.
Back in Roosevelt’s time, 25,000 industrial workers, mostly male, lost their lives at work every year, and 700,000 more were injured, leaving dependent wives and children with no support. At U.S. Steel in 1907, one- quarter of its employees were injured in the course of a year. Industrial accident rates in the United States were two to four times higher than in Britain, France, Belgium and Austria. Roosevelt proposed that employers be held responsible for the risks associated with the work they hired people to do and that workers should receive compensation for job injuries.
His speech was a daring departure from the prevailing principles of 19th century capitalism, which opposed any government regulation of health and safety as obstruction of free competition. Most politicians and judges agreed with the American Law Review, that making employers pay for employee deaths and injuries would “impose so great a restraint upon freedom of action as materially to check human enterprise.”
Careful observers noted that the high accident rates in American industry were largely due to American employers’ choice of unsafe equipment in the absence of government safety rules and regulatory oversight. But most businessmen blamed the workers themselves. Workers were uneducated or unable to read English instruction manuals, went the argument. They came to work drunk or hung over. And above all, they were free to leave, so if they chose to work in hazardous conditions, that was their problem. Neither government nor employers owed them a living – or, for that matter, a life.
During the first half of the 20th century, however, the labor movement and political reformers gradually rejected the idea that industrial accidents were a problem of personal carelessness and that workers should be forced to choose between earning a living and protecting their lives. Over time, society came to agree that the problems of job safety and workers’ compensation insurance had to be solved by society itself.Government and business implemented new health and safety regulations, adjusted hours and production schedules, invested in safer equipment and hired people to enforce safety laws.
But today, when the issue is helping working parents meet family needs, many business and political leaders recycle the same objections to innovation as they did 100 years ago. “It’s too expensive” to provide subsidized parental leaves, decent child care and time off to care for sick children, we are told, even though 18 of the 20 leading countries of the industrial world manage that. Women are told that if they take a job, they are giving implied consent to the risk of their children not being adequately cared for. They should quit work if it interferes with their parenting responsibilities, and they should let their husbands take care of them. If their husbands lack health insurance or if women happen to be single mothers, that’s their own problem.
But workers should not have to choose between doing their jobs and taking care of their families. The time has come for Americans to set aside their current political rivalries to do for dual-earner families and working single mothers what was done for male workers’ safety needs in the first half of the last century. We need to make the workplace safe for family life. Where are the politicians with the courage to recognize the “bitter injustice” of forcing workers to shoulder all the risks of today’s speeded-up global economy?
Stephanie Coontz is director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families.
