Since the early 1970s, some groups of organized labor in the United States have been deeply involved in issues of occupational health and safety. There is some evidence, however, that these programs have not functioned as smoothly as anticipated. This Minority Research Initiation Planning Grant conducts the preliminaries for developing a project to study the conditions that promote the development and maintenance of sound and effective health and safety programs. Interviews and data from newspapers, congressional documents and union archives will provide data on textile union shops in North Carolina and Tennessee to assess program maintenance costs, to determine whether labor had to make concessions in order to insure the continuation of the programs, to evaluate the degree of satisfaction of labor with the operation of the programs, and to measure how successful the programs have been in decreasing the number of accidents, injuries, illnesses and deaths on the shop floors. This project will enhance our understanding of the importance of health and safety issues under conditions of growing international competition, the weakening of the trade union movement, and the faltering of the economy. This project also provides an excellent opportunity for a promising young scholar to lay the foundation for conducting further research on the dynamics of the protection of the health and safety of American workers.
