Review of Nate Holdren, Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era (original) (raw)
Related papers
Work That Causes Harm: Violent Labour and the Ecology of Suffering
Canadian Review of American Studies, 2019
In this article, "violent labour" is framed as work that causes harm: work that is necessarily situated in overlapping global contexts of contemporary technological capitalism, and harm that is always itself ecological, in the senses of distributed, relational, and complex. To explicate these senses, I sketch a political ecological case study of the harmful effects of global high-technology industries through the entirety of a causal spectrum that has mineral extraction in central Africa on one end, office jobs in California in the middle, and globally distributed e-waste processing on the other end. Conventional philosophical, legal, and common-sense perspectives that feature intention as the central salient component of violence are critiqued. A consequentialist and phenomenological alternative is proposed wherein the suffering of sentient beings within broadly conceived relational ecologies replaces the violent intent of discrete actors as the key metric for understanding the impacts of work that causes harm, or violent labour. Résumé : Dans cet article, le « travail violent » est défini comme travail qui cause du tort : du travail qui est nécessairement situé dans des contextes mondiaux communs de capitalisme technologique contemporain, et le tort qui est toujours écologique, dans le sens de distribué, relationnel et complexe. Pour expliquer ces sens, je dessine une étude de cas politico-écologique des effets dommageables des industries mondiales de la haute technologie à travers un spectre causal entier avec l'extraction de minerais en Afrique Central d'un côté, le travail de bureau en Californie au milieu et le traitement des e-déchets distribués partout dans le monde de l'autre côté. Des perspectives conventionnelles philosophiques, légales et sensées qui placent l'intention en tant que composante centrale importante sont critiquées. Une autre option conséquentialiste phénoménologique est proposée dans laquelle la souffrance d'être sentients au sein d'écologies © Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d'études américaines advance online article relationnelles conçues de façon générale remplace l'intention violente d'acteurs distincts en tant qu'indicateur clé pour comprendre les impacts du travail qui cause du tort, or du travail voilent.
The British Journal of Sociology, 2011
For two hundred briskly written pages, Jamie Bronstein sets out example after example of Victorian-era newspaper stories from Britain and the USA telling in gothic detail the horrific stories of industrial accidents. But Bronstein ends her book with an engaging idea. Newspapers today, she writes, rarely give the kind of coverage to industrial accidents that once was commonplace. Our compensation systems are far more generous. But our moral shock has shrunk. Industrial hazards have become routine. Bronstein's book is a comparative study of the routinization of the industrial accident in Great Britain and the USA from the 1810s and 1820s up to the enactment in 1880 of the British Employers' Liability Act. Bronstein covers familiar ground here. Recent work by P. W. J. Bartrip and S. B. Burman (The Wounded Soldiers of Industry) and R. W. Kostal (Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825-1875), among others, has already updated the English story. Work by myself (The Accidental Republic), Christopher Tomlins (Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic), and others on the American story has added to the already extensive literature on the subject. That said, some chapters in Bronstein's book struggle to identify either new historical evidence or new arguments to make about the existing evidence. This is especially true of the chapters dealing with the common law of employers' liability and the financial options for injured workers. But elsewhere Bronstein manages with considerable (if sometimes uneven) success to say something new in an already crowded field. For her book focuses not merely on the bureaucratization of industrial accidents, but on a particular form of routinizationthat of the agency of the workingman in a hazardous trade. A core theme of the book is the idea that the creation of new remedies for industrial accidents helped drain some of what little individual autonomy remained for workingmen in the hazardous industries of England and the USA. The idea that workers were agents of their own injuries has a checkered history, of course. All too often, as Bronstein reminds us, employers deflected responsibility for injuries by citing their employees' alleged negligence. None the less, a number of recent studies have given renewed attention to the role of employee autonomy in exacerbating the hazards of work accidents. In the USA, the control that many workingmen sought to retain over the conditions of their work often functioned collectively to aggravate the dangers of the workplace. Such attitudes suppressed worker activism for safer working conditions and employers' liability law reform. In Great Britain, workers deferred aggressive advocacy for employers' liability law
Trans-Humanties, Vol 1. , 2009
In order to understand the driving forces behind current developments of globalization and the obviously extreme difficulties of alternative action, I begin by putting the topic into an historical perspective and casting a look particularly at the violent, ongoing, history of modernity as a work society. The perspective will effectively be widened as it is viewed beyond the boundaries of the classical disciplines of historical science, sociology, political economy, etc., even making room for the inclusion of the results of psycho-analytical research. In this way, I attempt to transfer the perspective from a systemic one into an action perspective and to take up the angle of the original victims of the violent historical process. A short explication is given of the relevant aspects of trauma theory. Through this it should become evident that the deep collective traumas resulting from historical violence must have a lasting effect on modern societies, so that modernity can be interpreted as a posttraumatic society. Given this diagnosis, a discussion of the contents and forms of people's struggles against their valorization in this pathological system, of which they are at the same time an integral part are presented.
This book addresses some of the most difficult and important debates over injury and law now taking place in societies around the world. The essays tackle the inescapable experience of injury and its implications for social inequality in different cultural settings. Topics include the tension between physical and reputational injuries, the construction of human injuries versus injuries to non-human life, virtual injuries, the normalization and infliction of injuries on vulnerable victims, the question of reparations for slavery, and the paradoxical degradation of victims through legal actions meant to compensate them for their disabilities. Authors include social theorists, social scientists and legal scholars, and the subject matter extends to the Middle East and Asia, as well as North America. Overview Product Details About the Author Table of Contents Table of Contents Part I. Injury and the Construction of Legal Subjects: 1. The meaning of injury: a disability perspective Sagit Mor; 2. Injury in the unresponsive state: writing the vulnerable subject into neo-liberal legal culture Martha Fineman; 3. One small characteristic: conceptualizing harm to animals and legal personhood Claire Rasmussen; 4. Righteous injuries: victim's rights, discretion, and forbearance in Iranian criminal sanctioning Arzoo Osanloo; Part II. Constructing Injury, Imagining Remedies: 5. Chairs, stairs, and automobiles: the cultural construction of injuries and the failed promise of law David Engel; 6. Incommensurability and power in constructing the meaning of injury at the medical malpractice disputes Yoshitaka Wada; 7. Injury fields Løchlann Jain; 8. Good injuries Anne Bloom and Marc Galanter; 9. Privacy and the right to one's image: a cultural and legal history Samantha Barbas; Part III. Inequality and/as Injury: 10. Injury inequality Mary Anne Franks; 11. The unconscionable impossibility of reparations for slavery; or, why the master's mules will never dismantle the master's house Kimipono David Wenger; 12. Inflicting legal injuries: the place of the 'two-finger test' in Indian rape law Pratiksha Baxi; 13. The state as victim: ethical politics of injury claims and revenge in international relations Li Chen; 14. Law's imperial amnesia: transnational legal redress in East Asia Yukiko Koga; Conclusion Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller.
When “workplace violence” was identified as a pressing social problem in the 1980s and 1990s, experts and policymakers focused on the violence of individuals and the psychological causes of that violence, instead of considering the structural factors associated with the dynamics of class relations and the workplace that produced violence. Yet, workplace violence existed long before the 1980s. This paper investigates three high-profile incidents of workplace violence in the automotive industry of Detroit and Windsor in the 1970s. It explores how these incidents were understood and how such understandings were created and contested, highlighting the pivotal role played by radical legal practice in these contests. It demonstrates that workplace violence often stemmed from factors such as the labour process, racism, and union conflict, and that the success of radical legal practice in raising these issues depended on both the specifics of the crime itself and the political and historical context in which it took place. Lorsqu’ils ont reconnu « la violence au travail » comme un problème social pressant dans les années 1980 et 1990, les experts et les décideurs se sont concentrés sur la violence des individus et les causes psychologiques de cette violence au lieu d’envisager les facteurs structuraux associés à la dynamique des rapports de classe et du lieu de travail à l’origine de la violence. Pourtant, la violence au travail existait bien avant les années 1980. Cet article examine trois incidents très médiatisés de violence au travail dans l’industrie de l’automobile à Detroit et Windsor dans les années 1970. On perçoit ces incidents et de quelle façon on crée et conteste ces perceptions, en soulignant le rôle clé joué par la pratique juridique radicale dans ces contestations. Il démontre que la violence en milieu de travail découlait souvent de facteurs tels que le processus de travail, le racisme et les conflits syndicaux, et que le succès de la pratique juridique radicale à soulever ces questions dépendait à la fois des particularités du crime lui-même et du contexte politique et historique dans lequel il était survenu.
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2003
The lives of workers in this country are suffused with insecurity and anger, exacerbated by abuse and institutionalized powerlessness. On-the-job injuries, both physical and psychological, are thus inevitable. Using her experience over several years treating nine such injured workers, mostly blue-collar and all minority women, in psychotherapy, the author examines the damage inflicted on her patients as they struggle to cope with their work-related losses. The history, structure, and destructive impact on claimants of workers' compensation programs are described, and psychoanalytic understanding of trauma provides insight into the painful inner and outer worlds of these women.
Folklore. Electronic Journal of Folklore, 2021
The history of the twentieth century is filled with examples of mass murder and destruction of entire nations. Survivors of those traumatic events have horrific memories, which cannot be compared to anything that may happen in the course of an ordinary quiet life. However, coping strategies for overcoming the consequences of such traumatic experience were also developed in the twentieth century. It was made possible by conceptualisation of trauma as a cultural and psychological phenomenon at the level of theory and practice in various sciences. Introduction of this concept into the flesh and blood of modern (popular) culture, or rather its inclusion in the fabric of everyday cultural practices, transformed the concept of trauma into a mechanism of culture. Trauma developed into a concept, as we know it, because it functioned as one of the cultural clichés of the era, according to which economics, politics, science, literature, etc., are built. Of course, mass exterminations of people took place even before the twentieth century; however, they were not interpreted as historical traumas as we interpret them now because, firstly, a sense of distance from the event was not developed, which is characteristic of traumatic interpretation, and, secondly, the narratives corresponded to other cultural clichés (typical of those epochs), which served as the basis for political mechanics, economic processes, etc. This article identifies the main features characterising the functioning of trauma as a cultural mechanism. This objective is achieved by appealing to political economy and Baudrillard's and Derrida's critique of the victim order. In this study the term "loss" is used as an umbrella term for various traumatic constructs, such as the victim and the trauma itself. They are characterised as objects of a credit relationship between subjects (both individual and collective), according to which the victim (trauma) construct could be described as a debt obligation that must be fulfilled by paying off a symbolic debt. The study identifies all the acting forces (parties) in the trauma construct, which give form to this construct. The author draws attention to the spatial (topographical) accent of the traumatic narrative, as well as to the necessity of toponymic localisation of the active forces in space.