History of the Workplace

Environment and Health at Stake

Lars Bluma, Judith Rainhorn, Lars Bluma, Judith Rainhorn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317626107
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Interest in the history of the workplace is on the rise. Recent work in this area has combined traditional methods and theories of social history with new approaches and new questions. It constitutes a 'topical contact zone', a particularly dynamic field of research at the junction of social history, history of occupational health and safety, history of technology and the industrial environment. This book focuses on the new approaches in this important and growing area and their possible range of influence. These new attempts to rewrite a history of the workplace are multiple - and in some cases disparate - but share many key characteristics. They are turning away from the assumption that class and class conflict is the prime mover in social history, abandoning the traditional binomial workers vs. entrepreneurs perspective which had long sustained the historical perspective on labour. Moreover, as this collections outlines, these new attempts concentrate on the analysis of complex social networks of actors that defined and configured industrial workplaces, suggesting a broadening of possible social actors.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Review of History.

History of the workplace: Environment and health at stake – An introduction

Judith Rainhorn^a and Lars Bluma^b

^aUniversité Lille Nord de France (Valenciennes), Institut Universitaire de France, Esopp-EHESS, France; ^bGerman Mining Museum, Bochum, Germany

The history of workplaces and especially industrial workplaces is a well-established field within the social history of labour, labour movement and industrialisation. In some ways, it is a classical field of historical investigation; founded in the social turn of historical science in the 1960s and 1970s, it lost its momentum in the 1980s. Coming along with the concurrent debate about the death of labour history, research on the history of workplaces was then widely neglected.¹ Since the establishment of social history as the dominant concept in historiography, the discussion on industrial workplaces took place within this methodological framework for the next two or three decades. A special challenge for the history of workplaces arose with the establishment of ‘everyday history’ in the 1980s and 1990s. Nevertheless, industrial-workplace conditions were still not considered as structural elements as important as wages, working hours or the rate of labour unionisation. It remained a place where class struggle became visible but was not a locomotive force of modernisation nor a specific focus for historians.

However, for a decade or two, there appears to be a new interest in historical workplace studies, which in part proceeds with traditional methods and theories of social history mostly applying new approaches and asking new questions. It constitutes a ‘topical contact zone’², a particularly dynamic field of research at the junction of social history, history of occupational health and safety, history of technology and the industrial environment. The main target of this introduction to this growing field is neither to give a detailed overview about the social history of work in the last six decades nor to formulate a definite theory. We want to focus here on some new approaches and their possible range of influence. After this we will briefly introduce the articles of this special issue of European Review of History dealing with environment and health issues in the history of the industrial workplace in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe.

These new attempts to rewrite a history of the workplace are multiple – and in some cases disparate – but share many key characteristics. First, all of them are turning away from an approach consisting of assumptions that class and class conflicts are the prime movers in social history, abandoning the traditional binomial ‘workers versus entrepreneurs’ perspective, which had long sustained the historical perspective on labour. Moreover, these new attempts concentrate on the analysis of complex social networks of actors that defined and configured industrial workplaces, suggesting a broadening of possible social actors, which cannot be reduced to a simple dualistic class conflict between labour and enterprise. Overlapping interests and day-to-day conflicts beyond class affiliation seem to be the common case and also apply to social history in general. In particular, the traditional focus on institutional histories of organised labour was vanishing, making it necessary to reassess the ambiguous role of labour unions and associations in the workplace and in the main social issues of industrial work.³ In this broad perspective, comparison between national cases definitely has a heuristic role to play, following Sellers’ recent invitation to write a ‘cross-nationalising history’⁴ of workplace health and safety.

The national framework of labour history as a history of organised interest groups was called into question, and international organisations, networks and associations and their influence on national regimes of work and labour were now more and more often the focus of historians.⁵ Beyond a comparative approach between national experiences, the recently theorised ‘transnational turn’ allows one to reassess the role of international movements and associations, as well as the circulation of ideas and concepts among industrial societies, institutions and states within the industrial world since the nineteenth century. As recent scholars have emphasised, we definitely think that the issues of the industrial workplace and of social policy gain from being assessed both in a comparative and transnational perspective.⁶

Secondly, at a lower scale, works which deal with the workplace in a historical perspective focus more and more on the mutual interaction of the workers’ body and its workplace environment. As a consequence of this, these often deal with the problem of work-related diseases caused by this industrial environment. This renaissance of occupational health and safety as an important subject of history (and not only of the sub-discipline – history of medicine – where this topic was usually positioned) deals especially with the hazards of work processes. These include: the culture of work and risk; the influence of gender on occupational health; and the role of complex networks, including a wide range of players such as workers, medical experts, scientists, insurance entities, the government, managers and entrepreneurs. It also deals with the regulation of the work environment through a variety of techniques as well as with the interaction between the workplace and the workers’ body.⁷ In this context the regulation of industrial workplaces is seen as a way to achieve social control of workers and their bodies. This means that – for example – the spatial order of a factory or the health and safety instructions in mining around 1900 are manifestations of a specific social order or, in other words, are a significant part of the Western project of modernity. Consequently this approach overcomes a perspective which concentrates only on discipline and punishment in favour of a sophisticated view of multiple power relations manifested at the workplace. Therefore Karsten Uhl and Lars Bluma have recently advocated for a historical analysis of industrial workplaces on the basis of Foucault’s concept of ‘gouvernementalité’, which includes problems of human resource management in general.⁸ Techniques of control using constraint and rigid regulations as well as managerial strategies of independent and autonomous work are in this perspective two sides of the same coin. Furthermore, using Foucault’s concept of ‘gouvernementalité’ makes it possible to connect the real actions taken in the workplace with the discourse and entanglements associated with power and knowledge. With this methodical concept, a historical reconstruction of industrial work is possible: one which describes labour as a form of political technology in which economic programmes and practices, discourses on rationalisation and modernity, as well as moral norms and discipline of the individuals were developed and linked with scientific knowledge – one produced by psychology, medicine, hygiene and physiology – all taken to define the worker’s body in view of his productivity and vulnerability.

Finally, it seems that the European political framework plays a role in the emergence of these new perspectives, particularly in the growing sensibility of populations at risk, in whatever form (social, environmental, health or otherwise). Thus, this shift in labour history towards postmodern theories, post- and anti-Marxist thinking and the inclusion of gender concepts is best expressed by the conceptual reassessment of the Society for the Study of Labour History and its series of books (titled ‘Studies in Labour History’ published beginning in 1998.⁹ As shown in recent research, the recently updated French historiography¹⁰ has made the workplace one of the cores of the historical perspective on social movements, social policies and public health. The German debate on this new perspective in labour history is presented in a volume edited by Jürgen Kocka bringing together articles on the visions and discourse on work, on global dimensions of labour, on gender in work in a comparative perspective, and so on.¹¹ Kocka’s statement that ‘it is not yet clear what the leading questions and viewpoints structuring the history of work as a general field of research might be’¹² shows a great change for a well-established field of research to renew its perspectives, methods and theoretical framework to establish more connectivity to the leading debates in historiography in general.

The articles in this special volume of the European Review of History present different aspects of the industrial workplace in a historical perspective. They mainly focus on Germany and France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a look at Soviet-ruled Estonia and a comparative perspective with the United States. Beyond these historical experiences, this special issue intends to enlighten processes, stakeholders and specific timeframes which help us understand how working conditions – and especially the human body in the workplace – became an important subject of interest during the industrial era.

The articles presented here address three main historical themes. First, the vision of the workplace as a social environment subject to theoretical debates and practical implementations: Karsten Uhl and Timo Luks illuminate this. Karsten Uhl shows the linkage between the spatial order of fabrics and ways of exercising power at the workplace. His thesis is that at the beginning of the twentieth century, a debate about the so-called ‘factory problem’ was started that led to new governmental power over workers. Using Foucault’s concept of ‘gouvernementalité’ he reconstructs the debate of different actors such as architects, sociologists and engineers in the first half of the twentieth century dealing with the humanisation of work. This included concepts of workplaces in factories as a human habitat (Lebensraum) and as an environment which promotes the efficiency of workers not by external discipline, surveillance and punishment, but by self-discipline and by utilising the individuality of workers. Producing a humanised, beautiful and also efficient workplace was seen as a technique to increase the potential of the human factor in factory work.

That the spatial order of factories was at the centre of discussions about modernity in Germany shows in Timo Luks’ article. Between 1920 and 1960, the fabric was addressed by sociologists, welfare workers and engineers as a spatial and social environment based on an all-embracing order of modernity. The rise of social engineering as a mode of rethinking modern societies to overcome social disintegration and fragmentation caused by industrialisation was a reaction of this discursive linkage of industrial work, environmental concepts of the factory and modernity. Luks’ approach uses Foucault’s idea of ‘problematisation’ as a totality of discursive and non-discursive practices that produces a particular problem as an object of mind, and the factory was such a ‘problematisation’. Just as Karsten Uhl did, Luks emphasises the importance of the idea that the factory is a social environment.

The control and regulation of workers’ behaviour in the workplac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. History of the workplace: Environment and health at stake – An introduction
• 2. The hygienic movement and German mining 1890–1914
• 3. The banning of white lead: French and American experiences in a comparative perspective (early twentieth century)
• 4. Aluminium in health and food: a gradual global approach
• 5. Fiddling, drinking and stealing: moral code in the Soviet Estonian mining industry
• 6. Hygienists, workers’ bodies and machines in nineteenth-century France
• 7. The factory as environment: social engineering and the ecology of industrial workplaces in inter-war Germany
• 8. The ideal of Lebensraum and the spatial order of power at German factories, 1900–45
• Index