Dying to Work: Death and Injury in the American Workplace, by Jonathan D. Karmel. ILR Press, Ithaca, NY, 2017, 264 pp., ISBN: 978‐1501709982, Price £34.00, hardback.
| Author | Andrew Watterson |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12432 |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12432
56:4 December 2018 0007–1080 pp. 882–887
BOOK REVIEWS
Dying to Work: Death and Injuryin the American Workplace, by Jonathan D.Karmel.
ILR Press, Ithaca, NY, 2017, 264 pp., ISBN: 978-1501709982, Price £34.00,
hardback.
The book, by a lawyer who deals with industrial injuries, was written after the
Trumpelection. The graphic descriptions of hazardous working conditions in America
that so damage workers are set in historical, legal and political context for the
reader and discussed carefully. It is a coherent, well-presented, readable and generally
appropriately evidenced publication, mixing statistics, narrative, commentary and
analysis very eectively.
A series of interviews or ‘stories’ are at the centre of the book documenting the
experiences of those harmed at work and their families. These range from employees
in the service sectors, sometimes on the periphery of occupational health and safety
studies, to traditional industrial workers. A substantial analysis of the issues and
possible policy solutions to the problems is then provided: the very big chapter
dealing with this could perhaps have been broken up into more digestible and smaller
chapters for the reader. The book examines the spurious attacks on the putative
‘red tape’ of health and safety regulation now gaining momentum under Trump’s
administration, which ignore both the human costs of injury and death and the
capacity of governmentsand some employers to externalize the economic costs of these
harms.
The book in parts melds together the approaches of the likes of Studs Terkel,
Dorothy Nelkin and Theo Nichols in terms of describing hazardous work in the
United States, understanding the causes of injury and illness and letting workers and
their families speak for themselves.The tone is set with an opening quote from Upton
Sinclair’s 1906 novel,The Jungle, on the brutal management of migrant meat packers
and the advances made in worker health and safety and regulation since. Sinclair’s
description resonates in some respects with the plight of manymigrant and precarious
workers todayin car washes, warehouses, call centres, factories and farms.
Karmel recognizes significant progress has been made since the 1900s on hazard
identification and risk reduction, if not hazard removal,in many workplaces. He oers
a helpful commentary on the series of US safety and occupational disease disasters
throughout the twentieth century and the struggles to introduce and enforce health
and safety lawsin the Progressive era and into the 1960s and 1970s. The roleof workers
and the opposition of industry is made explicit. Now the limited progress is not just
stalling but reversing in North America and Europe.
The stories fromwomen and men, young and old, migrant workers,include a grocery
clerk, hotel housekeeper, warehouse workerand nurse as well as a miner,packing house
C
2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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