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Safety First: Industrial Safety in 1632, Part One, Legal and Social Aspects

Written by Iver P. Cooper

In Virginia DeMarce's "Murphy's Law" (Grantville Gazette, Volume 5), Tony Adducci tells Count August about the real-life "Mannington Mine Disaster": "It was at Farmington, right beyond the border of the Ring of Fire, heading east past the high school. There was a big explosion in Consolidation Coal Company's number-nine mine. Ninety-nine miners were inside; only thirteen managed to escape right away. They got eight more out later. That left the rest of them to die underground. Seventy-eight men."

This article will look at three major topics: the hazards to which workers are exposed, the legal and social framework by which the cost of accidents can be re-allocated, and the safety technology with which the risk of accidents can be reduced.

Hazards

Industrial accidents can result in damage or destruction of property (both of the factory owner, and of neighbors), and loss of life or limb (by workers, customers, and passersby). In this article, I am mostly concerned with the risks to workers. However, I will consider the safety of passengers in the case of the transport industry.

The most obvious hazards are the physical ones, of the Road Runner-Wile E. Coyote variety: being crushed, slashed, impaled, or blown to pieces. In Virginia DeMarce's " 'Til We Meet Again," set in 1634, a flying saw blade cut Billy Nelson in half at the hip, and turned Thomas Merton Smith into a double amputee and Foster Caldwell into an incomplete quadriplegic.

Heat and cold can cause direct damage, in the form of burns and frostbite, or merely result in fatigue or weakness (which in itself can make the worker more accident-prone). High humidity exacerbates the effects of high temperature, and low humidity can cause respiratory problems.

Carrying a load, or performing the same movement over and over again, can harm you. If you move around, you can slip, fall into a pit, or get run over. Our bodies don't like chronic exposure to vibrations, either.

The adoption of up-time innovations will expose many down-timers to a new hazard: electrical shock. Previously, only those working outdoors, and thus vulnerable to lightning, would have been at significant risk. And electrical accidents are often (perhaps 40%) fatal.

Our senses can also be assaulted: we can be blinded by the high-intensity light of a welding torch, or deafened by the incessant clank of machinery. Nor is it good to be literally "in the dark"; inadequate illumination results in accidents.

In some industries, workers will be exposed to dangerous chemicals, by skin contact, or, more insidiously, inhalation. These exposures are not limited to those who make chemicals. The mineworker can breathe in coal dust; the painter can have a reaction to his paints and solvents. Machinery uses lubricants and coolants which can aerosolize, or merely evaporate.

Gases under pressure present additional hazards, as they can be released explosively.

Fires require heat, a combustible substance, and an oxidant (usually oxygen). They can be caused by open flames, electricity (including lightning), and spontaneous combustion of certain gases and dusts. Wood construction is common in seventeenth century Europe and wood is flammable. The up-time industries will involve manufacture and use of a variety of flammable liquids, and they will also generate dusts.

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Some of the hazards mentioned above are those in which the exposure result in an obvious effect (loss of limb, welder's eye, etc.) in seconds, minutes or hours. However, there are also occupational diseases, which can take months or years to cause serious damage. For example, lead poisoning was mentioned by Hippocrates, and Agricola's De re Metallica (1556) says that miners were plagued by corrosive dusts.

The occupational diseases which have been observed in times past included scrivener's palsy, caissons disease, black lung disease, mad hatters' disease, painters' colic, woolsorters' disease, and phossy jaw. While modern safety measures have reduced the incidence of occupational disease, they have not abolished it. Even in 1996, there were 439,000 new cases of occupational disease (e.g., carpal tunnel syndrome) in the United States.

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Historically, the demand for protecting workers from industrial hazards, or compensating them for occupational injuries and diseases, did not become substantial until the nineteenth century.

This reflected both an increase in the number of industrial workers, and a change in the nature of the manufacturing processes. More machinery meant more risk of getting caught in it. New chemical production meant more exposure to chemicals. And "nowhere was the new work associated with the industrial revolution more dangerous than in America."

As the USE "gears-up" to nineteenth century manufacturing technology, if it does not also give consideration to safety it is likely to experience industrial fatality rates which equal or exceed those of late-nineteenth-century America (about three per thousand workers per year in mines, about 8.5 for trainmen). In the early twentieth century, the injury rate was 44 per million manhours in the steel industry (1910-13), 24 in manufacturing (1926), and 90 in coal mining (1931). (Aldrich).

Rick Boatright's article on Iron (Grantville Gazette, Volume 3) forecast an increase in USE iron production from 15,000 tons to 150,000 tons in the five years following the Ring of Fire.

The United States produced 69,000 tons of steel in 1870; 1,247,000 in 1880, 4,217,000 in 1890, and 10,188,000 in 1900. It therefore would not surprise if USE iron production were above 1,000,000 tons in RoF+10, and 10,000,000 in RoF+20.

To achieve these levels is going to require a lot of steelworkers. Even in 1975, productivity was roughly 200 tons per worker. If the productivity were 500 tons per worker in RoF+10, that would imply use of 2,000 workers. With a sixty hour work week (that isn't unusual for the late nineteenth century), that translates to about 40,000,000 manhours and over 1,600 injured workers.

Similar calculations can be made for every industry which the USE would like to foster. Workplace safety isn't an immediate problem, but it clearly will become increasingly worrisome.

In 1634: The Baltic War, Mike Stearns, standing outside the Magdeburg coal gas plant as the fire brigade tries to cope with a coke furnace fire, muses about the rapid industrial development of Madgeburg: "But nothing came free, and the price they paid for that explosive growth was inevitable. Everything and everybody was stretched very thin, and they weren't so much cutting corners as lopping them off with an ax. With his own extensive experience in coal mining and stevedoring, Mike knew full well just how dangerous that could be."

The issue also arose in 1634: The Bavarian Crisis. Keith Pilcher is stationed in the Upper Palatinate, charged to get the iron mines and smelters of the region back into operation. He is worried that none of the local laws "contained any provisions that protected the workers," and, even if they did, there could be a "considerable difference" between what safety rules said and the way they got implemented (Chap. 22).

Legal and Social Framework

Working exposes the worker to a variety of hazards, some occupations being riskier than others. Societies have evolved a variety of social and legal mechanisms for dealing with these occupational risks.

The simplest approach, of course, is to place the burden directly on the worker. If injured on the job, the worker must be cared for by his or her family, if any, and they suffer from the loss of earning power of both the worker and the caregiver. This might or might not be alleviated somewhat by the charitable deeds of those more fortunate.

In theory, wages should be adequate to compensate workers for the risks of their jobs. In practice, even in the early twentieth century, wages weren't appreciably higher in dangerous employments. At least, they weren't proportionate to the accident rate. Nor did the more highly compensated workers show much tendency to lay in a reserve to tide them over in case of a disabling accident. Rather, higher wages meant that they enjoyed a higher standard of living.

The problem with economic theory is that it makes simplifying assumptions. It assumes that the workers have perfect knowledge of the accident rates. It assumes that they will weigh the risks the same way that an economist would. And it assumes that they are free to move into other occupations if the one of interest provides compensation which isn't commensurate with its risks.

As occupational hazards increased, society found alternative methods of dealing with them. The economic cost of the occupational risk may be borne, not just by the afflicted worker and his or her family, but rather by a group of workers in the same industry, by a larger association of workers, or by the employer. The employer's liability may be conditioned, as in the case of tort law of negligence, or absolute, as with a workmen's compensation law. The employer may attempt to pass on some of the cost to customers, and may also attempt to make costs more predictable by obtaining insurance. We will briefly explore these alternatives.

Mutual Aid Groups

Workers could band together to form protective groups. The workers might pay dues which would go into a fund to care for injured members, or to provide support to the family of a deceased compatriot.

This practice is of very longstanding. A Roman society of legionary officers in the garrison town of Lambaesis (Algeria) collected monthly dues and paid 500 denarii to the family of a deceased member. (Gray) The medieval guilds, or associated brotherhoods, would "help ill and destitute members" and "pay something toward hospital and funeral expenses." (Gies, 91) The rules of St. Catharine's guild provided that

—"If a member suffer from fire, water, robbery, or other calamity, the guild is to lend him a sum of money without interest"

—"If sick, or infirm through old age, he is to be supported by his guild according to his condition."

—"Those who die poor, and cannot afford themselves burial, are to be buried at the charge of the guild." (Gray)

In Germany, the Knappschaft—an association of mine workers -- "provided a communal safety net whereby some support could be offered to the widows of men killed underground." (Lynch, 34)

Of course, the guild is not, strictly speaking, an association of employees. The masters are employers of journeymen and apprentices. However, workers did receive some protection against the hazards of their occupation as a result of guild membership.

I think the most interesting example of a mutual aid society is found among pirates. The articles of Bartholomew Roberts' band stated "every man who shall become a cripple or lose a limb in the service shall have eight hundred pieces of eight from the common stock and for lesser hurts proportionately." (But there were no death benefits for next-of-kin.)

The guilds were ultimately replaced by "friendly societies." Unlike the guilds, there was no division into ranks, the members having equal votes, regardless of the member's investment. Also unlike the guilds, these societies didn't regulate work practices or prices. Formation of "friendly societies" was encouraged by statute, e.g., the Friendly Societies Act of 1793. The Clerk's Society (1807) provided a "sickness benefit of one guinea per week for the first 52 weeks of incapacity, reducing by a half for the next 26 weeks and, thereafter, to seven shillings for so long as the incapacity continues." In the event of total disablement, they paid 30 pounds a year. On death of a member, the widow was paid 100 pounds, or a pension of 15 pounds a year. (Gray)

The United States didn't have guilds, but in the nineteenth century, there were benefit societies and fraternal orders (essentially, homegrown friendly societies) to which members paid an assessment, or a periodic premium, and from which they received disability or death benefits. In essence, these preserved the mutual-aid aspects of the old guilds by creating a form of insurance. However, the ties weren't necessarily those of profession; they could be religious, ethnic, or geographic.

Those which operated on an assessment basis charged the remaining members whenever one died. Others operated on a mutual basis, collecting and investing premiums, and distributing the excess of premium income over death benefits to the policy holders. In 1900, there were about 600 fraternal societies in the U.S., and they provided over five billion dollars in life insurance. (Murphy)

The mutual insurance companies likewise collected premiums and paid benefits. They initially provided life insurance, much of which was certainly purchased by employed workers. The first mutual casualty insurance company was the Mutual Boiler Insurance Company of Boston (1877). They covered both injuries to the policyholder, and injuries for which the policyholder was liable. Casualty insurance could be bought by employers or (in theory) by employees.

Employer Liability for Negligence

In the approaches discussed above, the cost of accidents has been borne by workers, either the injured parties alone, or by workers as a group.

But workers could be given the right to sue their employer. The theory was that the employer had a duty to provide a reasonably safe work environment, and that, if this duty were breached, the employer was actionably negligent. It was already well established that certain professions owed a duty of care to their customers. So it wasn't a huge leap to say that a duty of care might be owed to others, too.

So far as I know, the first recorded Anglo-American legal decision in which a servant sued a master was Priestley v. Fowler (1837). It was a noble failure.

Unfortunately, the courts developed three significant limitations on employer negligence. First was "contributory negligence." If the employee had been at all negligent, the employer's negligence was excused. (In modern "comparative negligence," the relative negligence of the parties is considered, and the negligence of the plaintiff results in reduced damages.)

Secondly, there was the "fellow servant" doctrine. If the accident were the result of a ...