Workplace safety problems have played a significant role in US history since the onset of industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century. Workplace accidents and their prevention are crucial factors in the evolution of, among other things, technological development, labor organization and tort law. This project focusses particularly on changing scientific, legal and popular explanations for why industrial accidents occur: how different groups at different times have understood the causes of accidents in different ways and how they have translated that changing knowledge into demands for legal reform has been a significant catalyst for the growth of American liability law in general since the 1850's. Existing scholarship in labor history, however, has all but ignored the role of accidents and of accident liability law in determining the nature of factory production, while the legal and scientific literature on industrial health and safety has paid little attention to the role of culture and politics in determining what factors the law has been able to recognize as significant threats to industrial health and safety. This study aims to synthesize those two bodies of knowledge so as to answer that question, and to analyze the critical role that industrial accidents and disease have played in American economic development. The study will rely on extensive research into workers' compensation decisions and the case law on industrial accidents in several states from the late nineteenth century to the present. Primary sources in labor history such as the labor press, union archives, and the personal records of individual workers will show how accidents and disease figured in the lives of industrial workers and how they attributed responsibility for them. To explain changes in common sense notions of causality and their application to workplace safety problems, the study will rely on contemporary works in physics, economics, psychology, anthropology, law, and industrial hygiene. The study will show how the law both reflects and contributes to accepted notions about causality in the natural and social sciences. It will clarify the theoretical and practical problems that underlie ongoing crises in tort and administrative law where the control of hazardous technology is at issue.
