The Social Construction of Occupational Health and Safety: Barriers to Environmental-Labor Health Coalitions

Abstract

Occupational and environmental health advocates promote the potential of alliances between workers and community members to address shared health problems resulting from industrial processes. Advocates recognize the need to overcome job blackmail, which has successfully pitted these groups against one another by threatening job loss in the face of calls for improved standards. This strategic form of issue management represents a dualism between good health and clean environments on one hand and jobs and tax bases on the other. The author argues that overcoming job blackmail requires attention not only to this dualism, but to the broader social construction of occupational and environmental health. The article describes a series of oppositional constructions, in both strategic organizational rhetoric and everyday cultural discourse, which reinforces job blackmail and impedes the development of solidarity among workers, neighbors, and environmental advocates. These dualisms polarize our views of work and environment, science, and social identity, thereby producing barriers to coalition formation. Understanding these reifications helps to build an activist agenda and identify potential resources for organizing to overcome these barriers.

Effects of social, economic, and labor policies on occupational health disparities

“…By the end of the 1990s, many COSH groups started to focus on the needs of low-wage and immigrant workers who were less likely to be union members, yet more likely to be employed in dangerous work settings. COSH groups have worked to link labor unions and environmental organizations by focusing on the workplace as a source of health hazards for workers and the community, helping environmental groups understand workplace justice, and moving environmental groups to concentrate on environmental justice issues within industrial sectors, such as racial disparities in Superfund cleanup efforts [Zoller, 2009]. COSH groups have long championed the effort for workers and communities to have the Right to Know about toxic and hazardous chemicals in their environment [Mayer, 2009].…”

Communicating Risks after Exposure Has Ended: Former Workers' Perspectives on PCBs

“…Zoller's discourse analysis [20] on the workplace as a private sphere suggests that our focus group participants were caught in a contradictory position as former workers and as longterm residents of the contaminated community. As citizens, they condemned the company for environmental contamination and the serious health problems resulting from it.…”

“…For example, the hazardous material studied in the occupational cohort may have been also recognized as an environmental hazard. Because risk communication in community settings is typically more active and organized than in occupational settings [20], workers may have substantial knowledge of the hazard from various sources such as mass media, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and community activism even before worker notification. In such situations, worker notification will be received with heightened awareness and preconceptions of the hazard.…”

“…In addition to using these psychological mechanisms, we can apply a broader perspective to the focus group participants to help us further understand the contradictory beliefs about environmental and occupational exposure. Zoller [20] spells out how workers and area residents have been alienated from each other in discussing the impact of industry on health: the workplace is considered a private, self-contained entity in which workers trade their health for pay. This view removes workers from environmental health advocacy even though they may be exposed to the same hazard more severely on the job than are area residents.…”

Participation in a US community-based cardiovascular health study: investigating nonrandom selection effects related to employment, perceived stress, work-related stress, and family caregiving

“…Given the important role occupation plays in community health, it is important for community-based epidemiologic studies to collect data on employment status and job characteristics [6]. However, few studies have examined empirically the challenges in recruiting employed individuals and collecting high-quality occupational data in a community-setting, an increasingly important issue since response rates appear to be declining [7,8].…”