When the Air Became Important

A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries

Janet Greenlees

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780813587967
• eBook ISBN: 9780813587974
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire moderne de la Grande-Bretagne

In When the Air Became Important, medical historian Janet Greenlees examines the working environments of the heartlands of the British and American cotton textile industries from the nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Greenlees contends that the air quality within these pioneering workplaces was a key contributor to the health of the wider communities of which they were a part. Such enclosed environments, where large numbers of people labored in close quarters, were ideal settings for the rapid spread of diseases including tuberculosis, bronchitis and pneumonia. When workers left the factories for home, these diseases were transmitted throughout the local population, yet operatives also brought diseases into the factory. Other aerial hazards common to both the community and workplace included poor ventilation and noise. Emphasizing the importance of the peculiarities of place as well as employers' balance of workers' health against manufacturing needs, Greenlees's pioneering book sheds light on the roots of contemporary environmentalism and occupational health reform. Her work highlights the complicated relationships among local business, local and national politics of health, and community priorities.

Chapter 1

Introduction

When Does the Air in the Workplace Become Important?

This book is about the air many people breathe daily but rarely think about—the air in the workplace. Today, people entering buildings rarely consider the air inside, noticing only if it is too warm or too cold. In extreme climates, both hot and cold, people go into buildings to enjoy the comfortable, manufactured weather. Machines have the capability to precisely engineer the internal micro-climate to ensure human comfort, preserve objects, and create a perceived “ideal” work climate, while the science behind this capability remains hidden from public view. Technical innovations prevent or reduce dust or other foreign particles from polluting the atmosphere, while modern medicine minimizes the potential impact of diseases. Yet this ability to manage both the quality of the air in internal environments and the effects of that air on human health is a recent phenomenon.

It was not until the latter half of the nineteenth century when workers and doctors began raising concerns about the air quality in workplaces, particularly in factories where large numbers of people worked long hours in enclosed spaces and were exposed to contagious diseases. By 1900 science and public-health reformers were raising questions about if and how contagious diseases spread within the workplace. These were followed with questions about the bodily impact of working long hours in either a hot and humid room or in a cold room and questions about the importance of ventilation to both general air quality and worker fatigue. As the twentieth century progressed, the focus shifted to the effects that working long hours in a dust-laden atmosphere had on the body. After that, and because the many new technologies introduced during the first half of the twentieth century made cities increasingly noisy places in which to live and work, some social reformers and doctors raised questions about the impact of regular exposure to loud noise on human health. Yet only certain anxieties about the air quality in factories gained political, social, and economic interest. There was no consensus between science, politics, industry, and labor about the cause, nature, and extent of the health hazards attributable to poor aerial quality or about the role of occupation in disease causation and etiology.

This book engages with these issues as they played out in the cotton factories of the United States and Great Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These were the first factory environments where questions about health at work and the forces that determined them came to the fore. When the Air Became Important provides a critical comparison of the historical contexts in which air quality in the workplace became an important enough health concern that it prompted political and medical investigation as well as monitoring or reform in the cotton-manufacturing regions of New England and Lancashire, England, during the years of the industry’s unprecedented growth and subsequent decline. Focusing on aerial health hazards in the factory setting, such as tuberculosis; temperature, humidity, and ventilation; dust; and noise, this book relates how different groups, including local doctors, public health officials, local and state politicians, social reformers, and employers and workers, understood diseases caused by aerial hazards and their etiology in relation to the working environment. Drawing on Michelle Murphy’s term “regimes of perceptibility,” When the Air Became Important engages with the perceptions and misperceptions of doctors, politicians, employers, and workers about the contours of different aerial health hazards and their solutions.1 It analyzes the perceived health risks within the contexts of the local and national political landscape, the textile communities, and the nature of the workforce to suggest a place-based ecosystem, highlighting the interactions between technological processes, workers’ bodies, and communities.2

Improving poor air quality in factories required negotiation and consensus about what constituted a health risk, including when the workplace was a disease site and when it was not. While industrial regulation forms part of the story, operatives still had to live with the ill-health caused by the short- and long-term effects of exposure to poor air quality at work, with some suffering the consequences the rest of their lives. Therefore, despite the importance of legislation, employers’ reform of workplace practices or their refusal of the same can only be understood by appreciating the broader social, economic, and medical context. Comparing the same industry in two countries with diverse traditions and political systems reveals the varied and multiple methods used by employers, workers, physicians, and politicians in raising awareness of the factory environment as both a site and a cause of ill-health. When the Air Became Important moves away from a focus on state efforts toward factory reform and away from the role and impact of legislation to integrate community and workplace health agendas; it argues for the benefits of a place-based ecosystem rather than a separate health and safety agenda.

Ideas and understandings about aerial hazards and working environments are the complex product of the political, economic, social, and cultural contexts in which we live. Consequently, the dominant driver behind such ideas is variable. For example, the centrality of cotton manufacturing to many New England and Lancashire community economies meant that, during periods of economic decline, jobs might be prioritized before occupational hazards, while during more prosperous years, industrial health reform might become integrated into the public health reform agenda. Or, when an individual believed an illness was caused by occupation, the social context surrounding employment may cause the sick worker to either seek or avoid health advice. Therefore, if we are to improve health care and effectively address health inequalities in Western countries, we need to address the full spectrum of health. Until President Obama introduced the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010, the United States did not have federally directed health insurance. Even then, the Affordable Care Act was not designed to provide comprehensive national insurance. It operates at the state, rather than the national, level. Nevertheless, Obama earned greater praise for addressing health and safety concerns related to occupation than did former Prime Minister David Cameron of Great Britain, which has had a National Health Service (NHS) since 1948, but where occupational health was noticeably absent in the original plans.3 In fact, in 2012, Cameron announced his plans to end occupational health and safety legislation, considering it an “albatross around the neck of British businesses.”4 Cameron’s approach suggests little change from Arthur McIvor and Ronnie Johnston’s argument that the early NHS prioritized curative or palliative treatment over a preventive healthcare agenda that incorporated occupational medicine.5 The long-term implications of the Obama and Cameron policies on conditions on the shop floor remains to be seen, particularly when the Trump administration is trying to repeal Obamacare and the British government is preoccupied with Brexit. Instead, recent political rhetoric surrounding healthcare suggests a different question: how do the various forces that determine, define, and manage the risks to worker health and welfare interact? When the Air Became Important tackles this question with relation to aerial hazards.

To answer this question, we must understand the symbiotic relationship between the working environment and local circumstance and the many forces involved in creating healthy living and working environments. For example, urban communities developed at different rates, with different social and political priorities. In the United States, immigration and migration also helped shape local priorities. In both countries, while the gender balance at work was partially dependent on the local economy, workers’ social identities were also shaped by gender and, in the U.S., by ethnicity. Workers’ identities were further complicated by the community in which they lived, with individual towns developing their own identities. Town identities, in turn, were partially shaped by local industry. Despite these many complexities, most occupational diseases and industrial hazards were gender-neutral, including the impact of climate, contagious diseases, fatigue, dust, and noise. Hence, disease experiences were more dependent on the mill department and room in which someone worked than on gender, although some firms did practice occupational segregation. In addition, the perceived extent of workplace aerial hazard depended on each mill community’s interpretation of its government public health agenda. Some local physicians and civic leaders actively promoted public health reform and included the workplace in their community’s public health agenda. Others did not; their opinions were shaped by their local scientific knowledge base. Some social reformers sought evidence and examples of the health impact of technological investment, legislation, and broader public health improvements from towns with a similar economic base, both at home and abroad. Other community reformers sought exemplars from regional or national health initiatives. These interactions between public health officials, politicians, employers, workers, and social reformers in different communities only serve to reinforce McEvoy’s point about needing to understand the reciprocal interaction between technological processes, the worker’s body, and the individual’s role within society,6 but through the broader lens of health as well as safety.

Community understandings of the disease environment need to be understood within the broader regional context to appreciate the strength of local forces compared with those of industry and the state. From the mid-nineteenth century, the cotton-manufacturing industry dominated the economies of many towns in Northwest England, primarily Lancashire, and the Northeast United States—principally New England.7 These regions and their rapidly growing textile towns were some of the earliest industrialized communities to employ women outside the home on a regular basis. While the aerial hazards of the mill environment gained public interest at similar times in the two regions, factory reform differed. There was no one route to addressing aerial hazards in the workplace; neither was there a common understanding of what comprised a healthy working environment. Industrial working environments formed only part of a complex ecosystem.

American and British industrial similarities meant that by the mid-nineteenth century, observers were comparing their cotton-manufacturing techniques and industrial strategies.8 They noted the British preference for spinning mules and Lancashire looms, while many American firms preferred ring-spinning and automatic looms. American firms chose vertical integration while most Lancashire firms specialized in either spinning or weaving. Industrial strategy, labor, and productivity were also compared, alongside the concomitant urban development, continued through the economic boom during the decades surrounding 1900 and the subsequent industrial decline. These themes are reflected in the vast historiography of the two industries. Diverging economic experiences have been explained in terms of entrepreneurial agendas, resource allocation, product and market conditions, and institutional development.9 Moreover, the social impact of such choices has been found to be more intraregional than cross-national, because cotton towns developed individual identities.10 Regional identities corresponded not only with the manufacturers’ industrial choices but also with the choices of local town councils and the towns’ inhabitants, creating both similarities and divergences in the social consequences of industry.11 Both town and regional identities helped shape, and were shaped by, urban public health priorities. Local health priorities, in turn, helped determine whether the working environment became a public health concern. Geoffrey Tweedale found that many of Lancashire’s diseases were regional diseases, including high levels of respiratory diseases and byssinosis.12 These diseases were also common to other cotton regions, suggesting that industrial diseases need to be qualified within the different local, regional, and national contexts because the consequences of community decisions surrounding public and workplace health have a lasting impact on the town and its residents.

Regardless of historical interpretation, there has been a tendency to view the Lancashire industry through the lens of its American counterpart because of the labor-productivity gap between the regions.13 New England’s manufacturing output quickly surpassed that of Lancashire because of technological investment and innovation. Such a viewpoint implies the superiority of the American model of vertical integration, technological choice, and investment. Yet because both industries and regions experienced a dramatic decline during the twentieth century, the supremacy of the American model of cotton manufacturing has been rightly questioned, as has the validity of viewing one region through the lens of another.14 Industrial decisions and industrial decline—and the local, regional, and national responses to both—had health consequences for local residents. However, in communities or regions that were dominated by one industry, the working environment becomes central to understanding how communities prioritized health and defined the parameters of individual and collective responsibility for health.

While nineteenth-century observers believed the early American factories and towns were “healthier” places in which to live and work than those in Britain,15 by the end of the century the rapid industrial growth of textile towns in both New England and Lancashire revealed increasingly similar public health concerns relating to overcrowding, poor housing, poor sanitation, and a deteriorating working environment.16 Mill workers’ relative poverty...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1. Introduction: When Does the Air in the Workplace Become Important?
• Chapter 2. Textile Towns and Mill Environments
• Chapter 3. Tuberculosis in the Factory
• Chapter 4. “I Used to Feel Ill with It”: Heat, Humidity, and Fatigue
• Chapter 5. Dust: A New Socio-Environmental Relationship
• Chapter 6. “The Noise Were Horrendous”: The Ignored Industrial Hazard
• Chapter 7. Conclusion: When Does the Air Become Important?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Series List