Fighting Toxic Ignorance

Origins of the Right to Know about Workplace Health Hazards

Alan Derickson

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781501780196
• eBook ISBN: 9781501780202
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Fighting Toxic Ignorance explores conflict over access to information regarding health hazards encountered in the US workplace during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. Alan Derickson considers risks posed by toxic chemicals and physical and biological agents of disease. By the 1970s, occupational disease was estimated to kill up to 100,000 Americans a year. Derickson unravels the social and political forces and the conflictual process that gave rise to a sustained social movement for a workers' right to know about often-insidious threats. He argues that the decades prior to the emergence of this movement were not a dark age of victimization brought about by enforced ignorance but a time of recurrent battles over the disclosure of needed facts. Workplace warnings—informative signs, labels, and instructions—often saved lives. Fighting Toxic Ignorance covers a broad range of dangerous substances, deals with a large share of the national workforce, and illuminates the many ways that activists endeavored to see that warnings reached workers, especially immigrants and workers of color.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Somebody Had to Fight
• 1. A Very General Ignorance
• 2. Wider Use of Existing Knowledge
• 3. The Path of Self-Correction
• 4. A Matter of Increasingly Public Record
• 5. No Need to Alarm Employees
• 6. New Worker-Oriented Counter-Institutions
• Epilogue: Turning the Tide on Toxic Chemical Ignorance
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright Page