Making Capitalism Safe: Work Safety and Health Regulation in America, 1880-1940

Published by EH.NET (May 2010)

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Donald W. Rogers, Making Capitalism Safe: Work Safety and Health Regulation in America, 1880-1940. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009. viii + 275 pp. $55 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-252-03482-4.

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Reviewed for EH.NET by Mark Aldrich, Department of Economics, Smith College.

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Donald Rogers has written an institutional and political history of state efforts to regulate workplace safety from the Progressive era down to about World War II.? It is, therefore, somewhat less ambitions than the title ?making capitalism safe? might suggest. The book represents an extension of his Ph.D. thesis, which focused on Wisconsin, to include material on Alabama, California, Illinois, New York and Ohio as well. The author?s central concern is to rebut historians? claims that these state regulator approaches were ?invariably ?weak,?? (p. 7) even during the 1920s.? While the book contains no sustained economic or statistical analysis, economists interested in work safety and government regulation will find it informative.?

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The book includes an introduction, nine chapters that chronicle the evolution of state safety institutions, an epilogue that sketches developments from World War II to OSHA, an appendix, bibliography and index. Although the author occasionally discusses mining, the emphasis is on manufacturing and construction.? The work is based on a wide reading of the secondary literature and makes extensive use of primary sources including archival work relating to Wisconsin. Other states? archives were not consulted.

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In an initial chapter Rogers sketches the necessary background. The common law approach to work safety required only that employers exercise ?ordinary care.? He also depicts the early factory acts as usually under funded, often partisan, technically imprecise, inconsistent across states, and sometimes hamstrung by judicial interpretation.

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The author next describes an ?administrative transformation? (p. 31) that began in 1911 when Wisconsin repealed its factory laws and replaced them with an Industrial Commission Act.? The act not only set up a commission, it included a safe place statute to raise employers? standards of care and it inaugurated workers? compensation as well.? Rogers emphasizes John R. Commons? role in these developments and he nicely details both the ideas and the complex political maneuvering that led to this transformation.? He then briefly notes the range of responses in other states. California and Ohio largely duplicated Wisconsin?s approach; Illinois never created an organization with code making authority, while New York established separate bureaucracies for compensation, safety codes and inspection.? Here and in subsequent chapters the strength of the book is in the discussion of Wisconsin?s experience while other states are treated in a more abbreviated manner.

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The next six chapters detail these various regulatory approaches in action.? Three chapters discuss safety campaigns, code development, and enforcement in the 1910s; these are followed by similar discussions during the 1920s and 1930s.? The final chapter discusses states? efforts to grapple with occupational disease. While the author occasionally sprinkles these materials with numbers on inspections, violations and funding, the text contains no charts or tables. The appendix contains five tables, all devoted to Wisconsin.? Text tables that depict comparative funding and enforcement activities would have sharpened the discussion.

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Rogers is at his best in narrating these alternative regulatory approaches; he is less successful in explaining why states took different paths and in evaluating the consequences of these differences.? The author often appeals to differences in states? industrial structures to explain alternative regulatory paths. ?Thus Ohio?s tepid approach to code making ?reflected big industry?s dominance? whereas ?California?s decentralized manufacturing sector … encouraged extensive administrative actions.?? And ?New York?s codes … reflected the state?s diverse economy and local interest groups.? (All quotations are on p. 83.)? Such claims seem ad hoc and the author fails to provide them with adequate support.? The author stresses that Wisconsin penalized safety code violations by increasing employers? compensation costs.? But the increase was trivial, affecting fewer than three percent of compensation cases in the 1920s and amounting to less than one percent of compensation costs.? During the same period, the author claims that ?productivity gains allowed manufacturers to tolerate higher accident levels? (p. 150).? Yet lost productivity was a major cost of accidents. He also claims that experience rating ?relaxed compensation?s financial inducements? (p. 148). ?In general, the discussion of workers? compensation would also have been improved had the author more fully engaged the work of Fishback and Kantor (2000).

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More persuasive is Rogers? discussion of the shift in regulatory focus that came with the 1920s.? He explains that early state safety work emphasized machine guarding but by the 1920s most large businesses had protected their equipment and were focusing safety emphasis on management and worker behavior.? Regulators, accordingly, shifted their concerns to smaller workshops with less well guarded equipment.? This emphasis continues to the present; when I worked for OSHA we were less interested in improving safety at large companies such as DuPont than in trying to bring smaller firms up to their level.?

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The penultimate chapter, on occupational disease, provides a useful if limited offset to historians? usually gloomy assessment of state and federal industrial hygiene efforts in the 1920s and 1930s.? By 1920 California and Wisconsin had begun to compensate workers for occupational diseases while Illinois, Ohio and New York followed with more narrowly defined legislation.? Codes and inspections began to focus on hazards such as spray painting and the need for ventilation.? Still, Rogers admits that regulators were slow to recognize silicosis problems, and by the late 1930s only half the states provided any form of compensation for occupational diseases.

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Did any of this matter very much for workers? safety? Was the commission approach of Wisconsin and California more effective than the ?old fashioned? (p. 7) approach of Illinois, the ?fragmented? (p. 7) system of New York, or the near absence of safety codes and compensation in Alabama?? While the author seems to think the commission approach was superior, there is little evidence on this issue here or elsewhere.? Except for mining, no state collected adequate accident statistics before the advent of compensation legislation and even in the 1920s the data are inconsistent and inadequate.? Economic historians, although they will find some of Rogers? judgments and interpretations problematic, will find this book to be a valuable narrative treatment of state safety regulation, but perhaps inevitably, they will learn little of its effectiveness.

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Reference:

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Price Fishback and Shawn Kantor (2000), _A Prelude to the Welfare State: The Origins of Workers? Compensation_, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Mark Aldrich is Marilyn Carlson Nelson Professor of Economic Emeritus at Smith College.? He is the author of _Safety First_ (Johns Hopkins, 1997) and _Death Rode the Rails_ (Johns Hopkins, 2006) and maintains a web site devoted to old railroad political cartoons: http://sophia.smith.edu/~maldrich.?

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