[See also the review by Bill Luckin]
Bronstein, Jamie: Caught in the Machinery. Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2007. ISBN 978-0-8047-0008-5; 240 S.; £ 44,53.
Rezensiert für H-Soz-u-Kult von:
Joseph Melling, The Centre for Medical History, University of Exeter
E-Mail: [mailto]J.L.Melling@exeter.ac.uk[/mailto]
The subjects of workplace accident and the risk of injury remain as important to the employed population today as they were to the first generations of industrial workers who staffed the mines, workshops and factories of Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century. As Jamie Bronstein shows in this fluently-written and accessible text, legal responsibilities and compensation rights were vital elements in the story of prevention as well as restitution throughout the 1800s. The central argument of this book is that we need to understand not only the institutional framework in which accidents are identified and contractual liabilities are determined, but also the various cultural meanings of risk and injury to which workers' families and communities contributed as they dealt with the hazards of working life and the consequences of disaster. The author draws on various contemporary texts from the United States as well as Britain to elucidate the individual careers of employees who suffered damage and even destruction as a result of their employment. In discussing the complexities and limitations of common law and the eventual arrival of employers' liability and workmen's compensation legislation in the United Kingdom (and significantly later in most American states), Bronstein shows that voluntary paternalism as well as social philanthropy failed to meet the expectations of workers and was steadily replaced by the attribution of responsibility under statutory obligations.
To illuminate the terrible costs that workers and their families often suffered at the hands of industry, Caught in the Machinery traverses the familiar ground of railway casualties, mining fatalities and the crushing and tearing of bodies in the textiles and other factories of industrialising Britain. The story of reform is enlivened by the introduction of active personalities such as the trade unionist Alexander MacDonald and the legislator Sir Edward Watkin. In a concluding 'epilogue' the author considers the slower pace of progress in the United States and muses on the remarkable celebration of technological achievement in American popular culture, resisting the necessary recognition that such innovations often brought new hazards and unknown risks. The reasons for legislative change in both countries are explained as the outcome of a multitude of factors including the political drive of the Progressives in the United States and the growing recognition that the dense undergrowth of case law and common law did not deliver justice to the working population. Bronstein concludes that the introduction of compensation systems has also had adverse consequences in reducing the scope for communal concern with the families of accident victims and even an obscuring of the blame or fault for injuries when they occur by chloroforming the public with the certainty that financial awards will be made.
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