OCCUPATION DISEASES DUE TO EXCESSIVELY REPEATED MUSCULAR
ACTIONS. By THOMAS OLIVER, M.D., F.R.C.P., 815
Fatigue Neuroses: Scriveners’ Spasm, or Writers’ Palsy;
Telegraphists’ Spasm, or Cramp; Pianoforte Players’ Cramp, etc.;
Shoemakers’ Spasm--Boot and Shoe Making.
APPENDIX: SPECIAL RULES. By HAMILTON P. SMITH, _Retired
Commander R.N., and one of H.M. Inspectors of Factories_, 827
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FIGS. PAGE
1. Strong’s “Standard Guard” for Engine Fly-wheels, 207
2. Safety Starting-gear for Gas and Oil Engines, 208
3. Coupling with Dangerous Projecting Bolt-heads, 209
4. Safety Coupling with Countersunk Bolt-heads, 209
5. Collar with Dangerous Projecting Set-screw, 209
6. Collar with Countersunk Set-screw, 209
7. A Safe Form of Set-screw, 215
8. For Use with Screwdriver, 215
9. Halstead’s Patent Unbreakable Square-hole Solid-ended
Grub Screw, 215
10. Incomplete Guards for Spur Wheels, 216
11. Spur Wheels with Suitable Guards, 216
12. A Good Form of Guard to Cover Bevel Wheels 217
13. A Method of Covering Shaft Ends with a Sheet-metal Cap, 217
14. Knowles’ Improved Safety Hoist, 219
15. Morgan’s Patent Safety Catch, 221
16. Wadsworth’s Self-landing and Delivering Hoist, 222
17. Self-acting Mules. Shows Unsatisfactory Guard, 223
18. Shows a Guard which Completely Covers the Band round
Pulley, 223
19. Self-acting Mules, 224
20. Hargreave’s Mule Carriage Wheel Guard, 225
21. Hargreave’s Mule Carriage Wheel Guard, 225
22. Safe-guards for Ends of Looms, 226
23. Shuttle Guard, 227
24. Elvatka Guard, 227
25. Longmore’s Guard, 228
26. Victor Guard, 228
27. Woodhouse and Mitchell’s Guard, 229
28. Campbell and Greenwood’s Guard, 229
29. Power Presses, 230
30. Treatment of Persons apparently Killed by Electricity, 264
31. Treatment of Persons apparently Killed by Electricity, 265
32. Mild Form of Dermatitis in Flax-spinner, 268
33. Medium Degree of Dermatitis in Flax-spinner, 268
34. Severe Form of Dermatitis in Flax-spinner, 268
35. Severe Form of Dermatitis in Flax-spinner, 268
36. Disease of Finger Nails in Hide-dressers, 270
37. Severe Type of Disease of Finger Nails in a Hide-dresser, 270
38. Human Lung in Health, 272
39. Lead Miner’s Lung, 272
40. Steel Grinder’s Lung, 272
41. Coal Miner’s Lung, 272
42. Cement, 274
43. Sandstone, 274
44. Granite, 274
45. Lead Dust from Printing Shop, and Type-casting, 274
46. Gilchrist-Thomas’ Slag, 276
47. Needle Grinding, 276
48. Mother-of-Pearl, 276
49. Sawdust, 276
50. Flax, 276
51. Hemp, 276
52. Jute, 276
53. Cotton, 276
54. Silk, 276
55. Horn, 276
56. Ivory, 276
57. Felt Manufacture, 276
58. Dust from Fur Brushing Machine, 276
59. Dust from Rag Cleaning, 276
60. Bone Meal, 276
61. Dust from Wheat Cleaning, 276
62. Ordinary Slag, 276
63. Basic Slag, 276
64. Ganister, 276
65. Dust from Fork Grinding on Dry Stone, 276
66. Powdered Flint, 276
67. Glaze Cleaned off Ware, 276
68. Lead Mine, 284
69. Other View of Lead Mine, 286
70. A “Blue” Bed in a White Lead Factory, 288
71. Female Carrying Basins Filled with Washed White Lead from
Vat to Stoves, 288
72. Interior of Stove for Drying White Lead, 290
73. Section of Caisson Used in Rebuilding Redheugh Bridge, 729
74. The Simplon Tunnel Operations at Iselle, 738
75. Section of Simplon Tunnel, showing Difference in Levels
between North and South Ends 739
76. Section of Simplon Tunnel, showing Cross Gallery by Means of
which Air is Transmitted from Ventilating Passage to Head of
Tunnel where the Men are Working, 739
77. Interior of Bath-house and Vestiary for the Miners at the
Simplon Tunnel, Iselle, 740
78. Bottom Holing, 762
79. Bottom Holing. (To show Position of Head and Eyes), 762
80. Deputy Examining Roof, 764
81. Grinders. Edge-tool Grinding, 778
82. Men Engaged in Chipping, 780
83. Chipping against a Screen. Men Wearing Protectors, 780
84. Protectors, 782
85. Glass-blower when in Normal Condition, 806
86. A later Photograph of Glass-blower in Fig. 85, showing
RelaxedCondition of Cheeks, 806
87. German Sweep’s Costume, 810
88. Belgian Sweep’s Costume, 810
89. Shoemakers’ Chest, 823
LIST OF AUTHORS
ANDERSON, ADELAIDE M.
BALLANTYNE, A.
BELL, JOHN HENRY, M.D.
BROWN, JOHN, M.D., D.P.H.
COLLINGRIDGE, WILLIAM, M.D., ETC.
CUNYNGHAME, HENRY H., C.B.
DEANE, LUCY A. E.
DODD, JOHN R., M.D., ETC.
HALDANE, JOHN, M.D., F.R.S.
HAMER, W. H., M.D., F.R.C.P.
HEDLEY, JOHN, M.D.
JONES, H. LEWIS, M.D.
KELYNACK, T. N., M.D., M.R.C.P.
KEY, A. COOPER, _Major, late R.A._
KNYVETT, SEYMOUR H., M.A. (Oxon.)
LAURIE, A. P., M.A.
LEGGE, T. MORISON, M.D.
LOUIS, HENRY, M.A., A.R.S.M., F.I.C., F.G.S.
M’MILLAN, MARGARET.
MORRIS, MALCOLM, F.R.C.S.
OLIVER, THOMAS, M.D., F.R.C.P.
PATERSON, MARY M.
POWER, D’ARCY, F.R.C.S.
PURDON, HENRY S., M.D.
REID, GEORGE, M.D., D.P.H.
RICHMOND, H. S., B.A.
SIMON, ROBERT M., B.A., M.D. (Cantab.), F.R.C.P.
SMITH, HAMILTON, P., _Retired Commander R.N._
SNELL, SIMEON, F.R.C.S. (Edin.).
SQUIRE, ROSE E.
STUART, JOHN A. E., L.R.C.S. (Edin.)
TATHAM, JOHN, M.A., M.D., F.R.C.P.
TENNANT, H. J., M.P.
TENNANT, Mrs H. J.
WHEATLEY, JAMES, M.D., B.Sc.
WHITE, ROBERT PROSSER, M.D.
WHITE, SINCLAIR, F.R.C.S.
WILSON, HARRY J.
DANGEROUS TRADES
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The commencement of the Twentieth Century finds us discussing problems
and elaborating plans for the amelioration of the life of the people.
The last few years have witnessed an unexampled awakening of the public
to a sense of its responsibility in regard to conditions of labour and
unhealthy trades. The question is not should men and women work, but
how do particular trades affect individuals, physically and morally?
Like human life itself, industrial occupation has been a passage
from the simple to the complex, a process of evolution wherein each
succeeding stage of industrial development has been attended by labour
problems, social difficulties, and diseases particularly its own. An
attempt has been made to include within this book special knowledge,
and I have preferred that each contributor should express his or her
own opinions unfettered by editorial requirements, since the object
sought is not the promulgation of the views of a particular school,
but enlightenment, so that the lot of our working classes may be
improved, industrial hygiene promoted, and higher ideals if possible
attained. Living in a democratic age, we hear much of the claims of
the right to live, right to work, and the right of workers to a larger
share of the produce of their labour. These are not the subjects
dealt with in the following pages. There are certain side issues that
deserve consideration, but which can only be mentioned here. Social
advancement and commercial prosperity, while creating fresh desires,
often increase the difficulty of satisfying natural wants. The growth
of large towns and the concentration of people in the crowded homes
of our great cities are limiting the amount of pure air necessary to
the life of those collected there. Drinking water has to be brought
from distant sources and at great expense. The removal of the waste
or refuse of human activity is often as difficult a problem as the
conveyance of the necessaries of life. It is not, however, with such
problems as these we are concerned, but rather with the conditions
under which labour is carried on and its effect upon the people.
Manual labour and handicrafts exercised for the purpose of gain were
in a measure formerly controlled by family interests, subsequently by
guilds, and to-day they are largely regulated by trade unions. By trade
unions an attempt has been made, not only to sell labour in the highest
market, but to artificially restrict output by objecting to the use
of machinery, by requiring that machines shall run at a speed lower
than their full capacity, by demanding one day’s holiday during the
working week, claiming in many instances a uniform wage alike for the
skilled and the less skilled workman, and a reduction of the working
hours without a corresponding reduction of wages. Such methods in the
long run cannot but be disadvantageous to the workers themselves, for
they discourage industrial energy and enterprise, without which the
wage-fund must inevitably fall. Instead of mutual co-operation there
is an unnecessary conflict between labour and capital. The demands of
organised labour already mentioned have called forth a marshalling
of the forces of capital. Industrial competition concerns the sale
of labour as well as that of products. Some persons maintain that in
the bargaining that goes on capital has the advantage over labour.
Without expressing an opinion upon this point, it is apparent that
only organised capital is capable of holding its own against organised
labour.
The change from the domestic system of industry to the modern methods
of production by machinery and steam power forms what is known as the
Industrial Revolution, and marks an important epoch in the history of
the world. Within the last one hundred and thirty years the changes
produced in the social and intellectual condition of the people have
been enormous. Ever since the Industrial Revolution in our own country
there has been gradually coming a greater demand for knowledge on the
part of those workpeople who may subsequently acquire the control of
industries and direct the manufacture of machinery. There has been
created, if not immediately, certainly by degrees, a need both for
general education throughout the country and a special education for
those who wish to become leaders. On the one hand it has been felt
desirable to counteract the cramping effects of machinery and to
diminish the dwarfing influences of the division of labour upon the
intellect of the workpeople by giving them the benefits of a wider
education. As knowledge has been gained by the artisan classes,
their aspirations have naturally risen. With improved constitutional
means for the redress of grievances there has been in many instances
a gradual supplanting of methods that involve acts of violence and
intimidation, which years ago disgraced our large industrial centres.
Thus is it that while in the early decades of last century, shortly
after the Industrial Revolution and before labour had become organised,
factory legislation was promoted by the wealthier classes for the
benefit of the workers, the latter at the present time, with their
improved education and personal knowledge, can themselves bring to bear
upon the legislature demands for reform that are deserving of careful
consideration, especially when these are not extravagant and do not far
exceed the limit of experience. Factory legislation, while it embodies
the opinions of Members of Parliament who have studied labour problems
theoretically, and of a few who have practical knowledge, is a State
direction of our industries so far as relates to the safety, health,
and moral condition of the people, and which embraces to-day, more
than in any other epoch, the opinions of the workers themselves. The
story of factory life in Britain, of the long hours of toil spent by
children in the mills, and the physical suffering they endured, remains
a blot upon the pages of British history. Britain was the pioneer
of factory legislation--does she still lead the way? Her commercial
supremacy, we are told, is questioned, and the position she has long
held is being threatened by increasing competition. Despite this fact
there is a disinclination on the part of British manufacturers to admit
the necessity of learning anything from their Continental or American
friends. Is our country, both as regards methods of production and
factory legislation, abreast of the times and of other nations? Instead
of manufacturers hugging themselves into a state of industrial lethargy
which our insular position and national prejudices encourage, it would
be well if they sent their sons and heads of departments abroad to see
what other nations are doing.
Several things have prevented factory legislation being as far forward
as it ought to be. In our country no Government, however strong, can
hope to successfully introduce social legislation largely affecting
personal interests until public opinion has been educated to the belief
that the remedies proposed are really necessary. The facts likely to
carry conviction can only be produced after years of careful study and
investigation, consequently factory legislation has to some extent
progressed slowly. It is, however, fair to say that when certain
trades’ organisations or representative bodies combine to secure
amendments to Bills which, in their opinion, appear necessary, there
is a tendency on both sides of the Houses of Parliament to drop party
considerations, and to give facilities for well-considered legislation
likely to benefit the community. At this stage of our inquiry it may
therefore be not inopportune to refer to the Factory Act recently
passed (August 1901), the framing of Special Rules, and the means of
securing their observance.
In matters industrial the Home Secretary is not endowed with authority
equal to that enjoyed by similar officials on the Continent. The
arbitrary powers granted by foreign Governments for the regulation of
factories do not commend themselves to English politicians, and this
was borne in mind by the framers of the clauses in the Factory Act of
1891 relating to Special Rules and requirements, when each and every
occupier could demand that a matter of difference between himself and
the Secretary of State should be referred to arbitration. This system
may be said to have answered fairly well when dealing with small
trades, but certainly not in regard to extensive industries, such,
for instance, as the manufacture of pottery. In this particular trade
litigation has gone on for many years, and the questions at issue, at
the time of writing, are not yet settled. The methods now proposed
should not only secure fair-play to the manufacturer and the worker,
but should obviate loss of time and unnecessary labour. Under the Act
of 1891 the Secretary of State could not be held responsible to the
House of Commons, or to the country, for the final word rested with an
irresponsible arbitrator. Under the more recent provisions the ultimate
decision will rest, as it undoubtedly should, with Parliament. Having
certified that in his opinion any manufacture, machinery, process,
or description of manual labour used in factories or workshops is
dangerous, the Secretary of State may (subject to the provisions of the
Act) make such regulations as appear to him reasonable and practicable.
He must publish the proposals, with information as to where copies of
the suggested regulations can be obtained, and the time within which
objections may be made by, or on behalf of, the persons affected. He
is bound to consider their objections, and may, if he thinks fit,
amend the draft regulations, but where he does not amend or withdraw
these draft regulations, he is required to direct an inquiry by a
competent person, to be held in public, and the chief inspector, any
objector, or any other person affected, may appear either in person, by
counsel, or solicitor or agent. The witnesses may be examined on oath.
The proposed regulations may apply to all factories and workshops in
which the manufacture, machinery, process, or description of labour
certified to be dangerous is used, or to any specified class of
factories or workshops. The regulations may provide for the exemption
of any specified class of factories or workshops, either absolutely or
subject to conditions. They may prohibit the employment, and modify or
limit the period of employment, of all persons or any class of persons
in any process certified to be dangerous. They may prohibit the use of
any material or process, and modify or extend any special regulations
for any class of factories and workshops contained in the Factory Acts.
The regulations made under the new provisions shall not come into force
until they have been laid for a period of six weeks before both Houses
of Parliament. In the _London Gazette_ must be published notice of
the regulations made, and an announcement of the place where copies of
these can be procured.
The right of arbitration conceded to manufacturers has been sometimes
regarded as one of the means whereby the benefits of factory
legislation have been diminished. No person considers it desirable for
industrial liberty to be crippled by Acts of Parliament, or industrial
progress checked by Home Office interference, and yet the dictates of
humanity demand that no labour shall exceed the limits of endurance
of the workers, and that all occupations shall be made as healthy as
possible. The history of factory legislation is a record of attempts
made to better the conditions of labour, improve the health of workers,
and control the disposing power of employers over their workpeople.
Those who blame State interference as the cause of the doubtful decline
of our industrial supremacy, and who believe that it is checking
enterprise, are not making a sufficiently serious attempt to grapple
with the question by sifting all the facts carefully. It can be
demonstrated that legislation has not paralysed but has improved trade
as well as the conditions of labour.
At a meeting of the chemical industry in Glasgow, on 24th July 1901,
Mr Joseph Wilson Swan remarked that “two causes are contributing to
our loss as a nation in the chemical and metallurgical industries.
One is the supplanting of old methods of manufacture by newer,
_e.g._, the application of electricity. The electro-chemical and
electro-metallurgical industries of the future are grouping themselves
around large water-power stations,--90 per cent. of the power thus
used being obtained on the Continent from waterfalls. We have no such
available water-power in Britain, but we possess instead an abundance
of cheap coal. The other cause is the lack of scientific training,
and the indifference of our leaders of industry to the results of
scientific research. They are contented with the methods of production
of a bygone age. Their plant is old.” It is circumstances such as
these that explain, for example, the decay of the chemical industry
on Tyneside, and its transference to other localities at home and
abroad. As regards the causes that are threatening our industrial
supremacy, apart from the serious attempts made by countries possessing
the raw materials to complete the finished products on the spot, thus
hitting hard our textile and iron industries, I would emphasise the
higher technical education of the men who are heads of departments in
factories abroad compared with those in similar positions at home.
They are on the Continent a superior class of men. I am not for a
moment contending that the German or French workman is, as a workman,
superior to the average British artisan similarly employed. In many
respects I think our own is the more capable man; but the foreigner
is better directed, owing to the fact that the managers’ assistants
and principal foremen have been highly instructed; several of them
have had a University training, and they thus possess a theoretical as
well as a practical knowledge of the particular industry. Besides, it
is well known that in Germany at least, large firms employ men well
trained in chemistry and physics to do nothing but research work, with
the view of not only finding out new products, but of improving them
and cheapening their manufacture. Industrial methods, in a word, are
more scientifically studied on the Continent than at home, so that
while such labour troubles as strikes, and the higher wages paid to
English workmen, are to some extent responsible for the loss of some
of our manufactures and their transference to the Continent, the
cheapening of methods of production has not been without its influence.
As international competition becomes keener, and our manufacturers
endeavour to produce more cheaply by increasing the speed of their
machinery, there will be imposed upon the workpeople greater tension
during the hours of labour. Will this circumstance, also the rising
rents of houses and the consequent overcrowding in our large towns,
improve the physique of future workers? A study of the prospects of
the artisan classes is of necessity many-sided, since it must deal
not only with the effect of work upon their health, but take into
consideration the influence of their home life and surroundings. Our
large industries, excluding mining, have scarcely existed long enough
for us to realise to the full the physical changes they are inducing
in the workpeople. Hitherto there has been no great difficulty in
obtaining strongly-built men of good muscular development for hard
manual labour. Many of these have been taken from rural districts. As
these districts are becoming depopulated, they will cease to be the
source of supply they have been in the past. It is not altogether idle
to ask how far the second and third generations of the town-bred poorer
working classes will possess the necessary physical powers for hard
toil. Overcrowding and poverty are exercising a degenerating influence
upon the rising generation; besides, industrial occupation as carried
on in several of our large textile districts is preventing rather than
encouraging development, especially when children are employed at too
early an age. There is something in the air of such factories, it may
be the excessive heat and moisture, or the animal products given off
during perspiration and breathing, that interferes with the nutrition
of the body and checks its growth.
Half-timers, fortunately, are becoming fewer and fewer. Experience has
shown that they are not equal in physique to their classmates who are
allowed to remain all day at school. When healthy country children
have been taken into the factories of large towns, it has been found
that their normal rate of growth has been checked, so that after two
or three years’ work in the mills, they are observed to be of shorter
stature than their former playmates left at home and allowed to
rusticate. There is a limit to each person’s capability of doing work,
and when this is passed, the results are harmful. We should not ask
from any person more than his powers will enable him to accomplish.
For mechanical as well as manual labour there is a determined number
of hours beyond which the worker cannot proceed without physical
suffering on his part, while industrially with each succeeding hour
occupied there is a diminishing production. It is knowledge of this
fact, apart from economic considerations, that is used as a lever by
the working classes to obtain parliamentary sanction to limit still
further the hours of labour. Our attention, for example, is directed to
Australia, where, since 1856, the hours of toil have been reduced to
eight per day with a satisfactory result. In the coal mines, as well
as in the factories of Sydney, the week’s work is forty-four hours.
The eight-hours’ day has also been instituted in Tasmania, Victoria,
and New South Wales. A few years ago an eight-hours’ day was conceded
to the men employed in Woolwich Arsenal, and as this turned out to be
satisfactory, the Admiralty, in July 1894, took a similar step. There
are many writers who maintain that to a reasonable diminution in the
number of hours devoted to work there corresponds a qualitative and
quantitative increased production. There is a maximum beyond which
production is not profitable. The produce of one particular period
of the day cannot always be compared with that of another. While the
reduction from twelve to ten hours’ labour may have been beneficial,
and may even have improved production, it does not necessarily
follow that a reduction from nine to eight would be followed by a
corresponding result, and a reduction from eight to seven hours by
one still better. On this and other points the facts detailed further
on in this book by Mr A. P. Laurie, in his paper on Chemical Trades
under the heading “Health of Chemical Workers, etc.,” will be found
interesting. Too long hours are certainly a cause of accidents in
factories. Experience alone can settle the question of the number of
hours to be worked, and that number must clearly be not the same for
every occupation. Common sense, too, must dictate the minimum limit
of working hours. Men and women are conscious when their occupation
exceeds their strength; but the demands of the machinery they tend are
exacting, and so no difference is made between the strong and feeble
workmen. A few years ago, Messrs Mather & Platt, iron manufacturers,
Salford, reduced the number of hours worked in their factory from
fifty-three to forty-eight per week without reducing the wages of the
men, and this regulation is still, I believe, in force. Employers have
frequently questioned the value of the work done by the men between 6
A.M. and 8 A.M. Mr Mather holds the opinion that the first two hours
before breakfast are hardly worth the trouble and disarrangement which
they cause alike to the employers and the workers. Not only are these
two hours ineffective from a productive point of view, but their effect
upon the physical and mental condition of the men is to diminish their
vigour and spirits and their interest in what they are doing.
Coal mining is one of those industries from which an answer to this
question of the effectiveness of work in the early morning hours might
be expected, for the men work in two relays, a “fore” and “aft” shift,
and they change every fortnight. When working in the fore shift the
miners enter the pit about 3 A.M., and when in the aft at 10 A.M.,
each working in the North of England about six and a half hours. Mr
Ralph Young, Secretary to the Northumberland Miners’ Mutual Confident
Association, informs me, in answer to questions addressed to him on
this point, that the present method of working coal mines scarcely
allows of a satisfactory reply being given as to whether more work is
done during the fore or aft shift. There is a feeling among some of the
miners themselves that they can do more work in the fore shift, _i.e._,
between 3 A.M. and 10 A.M., but they attribute this circumstance not
to the particular hour of the day in which work is carried on, but to
the fact that the air in the coal mine is fresher and purer then than
later on in the day. In other occupations it is equally difficult to
get at the real facts of the case. To questions of a similar character
addressed to twenty foremen and men working in a large iron and steel
factory on Tyneside, I received the following answer--that more work is
done in the hours 9 to 11 A.M. than 6 to 8 A.M., and that a man does
more work after than before his breakfast. As regards the influence of
day and night shift, they all agreed that less work was done on the
night shift compared with the same number of hours of the day, but it
is difficult to express this in terms of percentages. Some of the men
stated that the amounts varied from 10 to 20 per cent. Against this, it
is only right to mention that some of my Infirmary patients working in
the same factory have told me that they believed after a time they did
as much work on the night as on the day shift. It was entirely a matter
of habit.
The Workmen’s Compensation Act, which was so strongly opposed by many
employers on the supposed ground that it would ruin the industries of
this country, has had apparently no effect in that direction. Although
it has theoretically increased their financial liability, as a matter
of fact many employers have been less out of pocket than formerly. The
Act has cleared the industrial atmosphere, made employers more careful
in their selection of workmen, more willing to safeguard machinery, and
do all they reasonably can to prevent accidents. It pays them to do so.
Until July 1898, when the Workmen’s Compensation Act of the previous
year came into force, in the case of all accidents coming under either
the common law or the Employers’ Liability Act 1880, the basis of the
action was negligence or wrongful act on the part of the defendant, or
of some person for whom the defendant was responsible. Since 1898 it
matters little how the accident was caused, the employer is held liable
by the Act of 1897. Certain trades only are included under the Act,
_e.g._, railways, factories, docks, laundries, mines, buildings 30
feet high, and any building in which machinery is driven by mechanical
power. So far as compensation for injury is concerned, the workman must
be incapacitated for more than two weeks as the result of the injury
before he can receive any benefit under the Act. After a fortnight a
weekly payment is secured to him of one half of his weekly wages during
his period of incapacity, or for six months, after which the employer
can claim to have his liability redeemed by paying a lump sum fixed by
agreement or arbitration. In the case of death the employer is liable
to the extent of three years’ wages, or 156 times the average weekly
earnings of the deceased workman during his period of employment, the
amount to be not less than £150 and not more than £300.
When the Workmen’s Compensation Bill was introduced it was strongly
opposed, as already stated, on the grounds that it would injure
trade and ruin many employers. So far, events have not justified
this suspicion, but have shown that these fears were more or less
groundless. In providing compensation for injured workmen, Britain was
only doing what other nations on the Continent, especially Germany, had
already accomplished. It was thought at the time that the operation
of the Workmen’s Compensation Act would very materially affect the
output and price of coal as well as the wages of the miners. There is
no clear evidence that it has increased the price of coal. The cost
of compensation paid in Northumberland and Durham does not exceed
one halfpenny per ton, while the cost under the Act for the United
Kingdom is under three farthings per ton. This is a small sum compared
with the threepence we were informed would be added to the price of
each ton of coal. One way in which the Act might indirectly increase
the price of coal would be by restraining timid capitalists from
investing money in coal mining through fear of being ruined by some
great accident or explosion; but this is a remote probability, and a
contingency that could be met by insurance. Nor can it be shown that
the Workmen’s Compensation Act has had any effect upon the miner’s
wages. Theoretically the wages of miners should fall _pro rata_
with the benefits received under the Act, but as the benefits will
not be more than 1½ per cent. of the wages, any readjustment would
be small. It cannot be said that in coal mining the Act has had any
noticeable effect one way or the other, so far as the number of
accidents is concerned. For several years prior to 1898, owing to newer
and more scientific methods, the number of accidents in coal mines had
been diminishing. It would appear from the reports of Mr Hedley, H.M.
Inspector of Mines for Northumberland, Cumberland, and North Durham,
that during 1899 there were 84 lives lost, and in 1900 the number was
105, or a ratio of 1 death for every 784 persons employed, against 1
for every 924 in 1899; in 1898 the ratio was 1 in 1053, and for the
five years 1893|97 the ratio was 1 in 895.[1]
Mr Ralph Young has abstracted from the annual reports of the
Northumberland and Durham Miners’ Permanent Relief Fund the following
facts, showing the number of fatal and non|fatal accidents, with the
percentages of non|fatal accidents, spread over ten years in the North
of England.
MINERS’ PERMANENT RELIEF FUND.
+------+-------------+------------------+--------------+--------------+
| | | | | Percentage of|
| Year.| Membership. | Fatal Accidents. | Non-Fatal | Non-Fatal |
| | | | Accidents. | Accidents. |
+------+-------------+------------------+--------------+--------------+
| 1890 | 107,997 | 158 | 16,000 | 14.9 |
| 1891 | 113,126 | 167 | 16,500 | |
| 1892 | 114,326 | 149 | 13,000(_a_)| 12.24 |
| 1893 | 115,361 | 177 | 16,400 | 14.21 |
| 1894 | 121,133 | 166 | 17,000 | |
| 1895 | 121,944 | 168 | 17,450 | 14.42 |
| 1896 | 122,257 | 163 | 19,200 | 15.7 |
| 1897 | 124,920 | 204 | 20,000 | 16.01 |
| 1898 | 127,564 | 159 | 19,511 | 15.28 |
| 1899 | 130,552 | 197 | 19,484 | 14.8 |
| 1900 | 137,073 | 198 | 18,470 | 13.4 |
+------+-------------+------------------+--------------+--------------+
(_a_) Durham Strike, 90,000 members idle for 13 weeks.
The Workmen’s Compensation Act came into force in 1898, but it cannot
be said, looking at the foregoing figures, that it has had any
material influence upon the number of accidents in coal mines, nor,
as was anticipated, has it so far displaced many of the older miners
by younger men. There is a remarkable constancy in the number of pit
accidents. I have tried to ascertain whether there is any decade in a
miner’s life during which accidents are more numerous than another,
but statistics do not support the supposition. There is a personal and
age element that must not be lost sight of, also one of fatigue. The
older miners have experience and caution; the younger, if rash and less
experienced, are more alert and can get out of danger quicker.
As bearing upon this part of our inquiry, the annual reports of the
Chief Inspector of Factories give the following information:--
+-------------------+---------------------------------------------------+
| |ACCIDENTS REPORTED TO CERTIFYING SURGEONS, AND ALSO|
| | TO INSPECTORS. |
+-------------------+-----------------------+---------------------------+
| INDUSTRY. | Fatal. | Non-Fatal. |
| +-----+-----+-----+-----+------+------+------+------+
| |1900.|1899.|1898.|1897.|1900. |1899. |1898. |1897. |
+-------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+------+------+------+------+
| Textile Total, | 70 | 52 | 59 | 43 | 4,647| 4,332| 3,786| 3,565|
| Non-Textile Total,| 975 | 819 | 668 | 615 |22,012|17,568|14,714|11,762|
+-------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+------+------+------+------+
| Grand Total, |1045 | 871 | 727 | 658 |26,659|21,900|18,500|15,327|
+-------------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+------+------+------+------+
In reference to these figures Dr Whitelegge states that there has been
an increase in the numbers of _reported_ accidents since 1897, the
year previous to the coming into effect of the Workmen’s Compensation
Act. Many considerations other than the Workmen’s Compensation Act
have to be taken into account, _e.g._, the better reporting
of accidents, activity of trade, and classification of industries.
From these figures of the Chief Inspector of Factories no definite
conclusion can be drawn as to the influence of the Act in preventing
accidents. As a contrast it should be mentioned that in some large
factories where an “Accident Compensation Fund” previously existed
under the Employer’s Liability Act, to which employers and employed
contributed in the ratio of 2 to 1, and out of which all accidents
were compensated, statistics show a remarkable falling off in the
number of reported accidents under the Workmen’s Compensation Act.
In some works these are now only one-third of what they were. This
reduction is probably explained not by any change in the methods of
production, nor by better safe-guarding of machinery, but by the fact
that while previously all accidents, however trivial, were reported and
compensated, accidents under the Act of 1897 must be of such severity
as to prevent the individual following his employment for two weeks
before he is entitled to compensation.
Although difficult to prove by actual statistics, there is a feeling
that the Act has on the whole been beneficial alike to employer and
workmen. It is this circumstance that has induced some Members of
Parliament to press for an extension of the Act so as to include
a larger number of industries, and particularly those regarded as
Dangerous Trades. One of the principal features of the Workmen’s
Compensation Act is that it fixes the liability upon the employer,
so that where an accident causes injury to health or the death
of a working man the individual himself or his relatives receive
compensation. If the circumstance solely of ill-health or of death
caused through work, and not violence or the manner in which either of
these has been induced, were made the principle that ought to underlie
the operations of the Act of 1897, there would be found many persons
who, taking effects alone into consideration, would recognise no
difference between ill health the result of an accident in a factory,
and ill health brought about by working at a particular trade known
to be dangerous. Ought dangerous trades, therefore, to be brought
within the scope of the Workmen’s Compensation Act? Many advocate their
inclusion. The law recognises that trade shall be made as healthy
as possible, and it takes steps to secure this, both by providing
regulations and penalising those who transgress these regulations.
Will it go further, and impose a burden upon the employer by making
him compensate a workman injured in health when it can be shown that,
even where all precautions have been taken, ill health has followed?
Occupation ought to be the opportunity whereby an individual, in return
for work done, should receive sufficient wages to enable him to live,
and not, as it occasionally is when he is employed in a dangerous
trade, the means whereby he becomes the subject of ill health at an
early age, and is thrown as a burden upon the ratepayers for the
remainder of his life. No high wages paid to men to undertake work in a
dangerous trade, even if it were always the case that such were paid,
can adequately compensate the affected workman for the loss of health
caused by following a dangerous occupation. Many dangerous trades are
far from being highly paid. The class of workpeople who are affected
by these industries are usually very poor, their occupation is often
interrupted, and they are not organised into Unions, so that they
neither contribute to the funds of, nor do they receive benefits from,
a Friendly Society. The Workmen’s Compensation Act makes accident the
sole circumstance that enables an individual to receive compensation.
As the Act stands at present it is clearly meant to distinguish
between accident and disease. It is a disputable point, for example,
how far a fatal disease like anthrax caught in a wool-combing factor
is not as much an accident beyond the control and expectation of the
individual workman as the fatal burns caused by the sudden ignition of
some spirit paint in a shipyard. A similar line of argument might be
made to apply to other trades. The man who gets his arm broken by a
piece of machinery in motion or by a barrel falling off a trolley in
a colour factory receives a weekly allowance from his employers; but
another man who becomes paralysed in both hands as a consequence of
having filled the barrels with white lead in the same factory does not
receive any part of his wages at all when off ill. It is said that the
Act only recognises the fact of external injuries, but it goes beyond
this, for a workman may die as a consequence of shock without any sign
of external injury and yet his relatives receive compensation. It is
the fact of personal and not external injury that underlies the Act. Is
phosphorus necrosis, which is a purely personal malady, an accident?
The Act answers--No.
There is considerable difficulty in defining what is meant by
industrial disease. It would be well if we could have some clearer
conception of what is implied both by “industrial disease” and
“dangerous trades,” for there is scarcely any trade or occupation that
is not attended by some risk or another. It is admitted that certain
occupations involve exceptional risks. Theory cannot determine what
these trades are, but experience and inquiry can. As an illustration,
I might mention that of 22 trades suggested as dangerous, and given by
the Home Secretary to the Dangerous Trades Committee to investigate,
careful inquiry showed they could not all be included in this category.
In the case of an accident there is usually the history of a violent
cause in operation, and there is the fact of an injury received.
Yet even with accidents there are certain contributing factors,
_e.g._, the length of the working day, the previous ill health
of the workman, and his state of debility anterior to the accident.
Old age, too, aggravates the harmful effects of an accident. It is
accessories such as these that have made legislation difficult and
tied the hands of Governments. The subject is one to which at home Mr
H. J. Tennant, M.P., Sir Charles Dilke, Bart., M.P., Sir John Stirling
Maxwell, Bart., M.P., Mr John Burns, M.P., and other members of the
House of Commons have given considerable study, and to which among
others on the Continent, Mr Arthur Verhægen, member of the Belgian
Superior Council of Labour, drew the attention of members at the
Congrès International des Accidents du Travail in Brussels in 1897.
Several writers have defined industrial disease. Dr Van der Borght
says: “Industrial diseases are those maladies which arise as the result
of the prolonged action of harmful influences in certain occupations,
and which consequently and exclusively occur in persons working in
these trades, or at least more frequently than in other persons in
general.” Dr Glibert, Medical Inspector of Labour, Belgium, says:
“Every disease recognised as particularly frequent in a profession
ought to be considered as an industrial disease to the extent that it
is clearly due to the risks in the trade.” By the term occupation or
industrial disease we mean, briefly, disease the direct effects of
a particular trade in which a person is engaged. In many instances
there are also included maladies that are the result of pathological
alterations of structure, _indirectly_ induced by the occupation.
Colic, for example, might be regarded as a _direct_ effect of
working in lead, and yet this is unaccompanied by structural alteration
in the wall of the intestine; on the other hand, kidney disease in
the file-cutter is very slowly developed, and although, as regards
its production, there are other causes in operation than lead, still
the kidney lesion is believed to be a remote or _indirect_
consequence of plumbism. As artisans are liable to the ordinary
ailments of humanity, it is necessary to carefully sift statements so
as to eliminate all causes other than those related to the particular
industry in question. To the production of occupation disease, several
factors contribute. Even in the causation of such an indisputable
malady as industrial lead poisoning, it is well to remember how
important is the part played by individual idiosyncrasy, while in the
badly ventilated state of one factory compared with another, the home
life and surroundings of the workpeople, poverty, heredity, age, and
sex are to be found conditions that favour its production, and are
therefore not to be ignored. Usually it is a gradual deterioration of
health that is produced. There is nothing of the nature of an acute
illness in industrial disease comparable with an accident. The only
occupation disease that approaches accident in the suddenness of its
development is anthrax, and even here the prospects of recovery are
influenced by the channel of invasion, the severity of the attack, the
vital resistance and idiosyncrasy of the affected individual. Take
another example: it is not always easy to draw a distinction between
potters’ phthisis due to the inhalation of dust when at work, and
a broncho-pneumonia which has become tuberculous, and yet potters’
consumption in the early stages may be as much the result of the trade
at which the person has worked as is the paralysis of the file-cutter.
In order to make an employer liable for an occupation disease there
would have to be a stated limit as to the length of time an individual
had worked in a particular factory, and as in some of the dangerous
trades the workpeople change frequently from factory to factory,
it would be difficult to prove under which employer the malady was
caught. Carelessness on the part of the employed, through ignorance or
intention, would also have to be disproved. In the case of workpeople
who spend practically the whole of their life in one factory, say a
white lead works, and who at the end of twenty or thirty years’ service
find themselves the victims of an incurable form of plumbism, humanity
and good feeling alike should indicate to the employer his obligation
to the affected workmen. Yet even here the question might be raised,
did the workman fully attend to all the regulations when in the factory
as regards personal cleanliness, and were his habits, when not working,
those of a temperate man? Mr Verhægen gives illustrations of the
difficulty of exactly defining occupation disease. A workman becomes
the driver of a public vehicle, and in the course of time, having
developed rheumatism, he is obliged to give up work. To the individual
thus crippled by rheumatism, is the employer financially liable? One
can scarcely think so, for the simple reason that while exposure to
inclement weather may be a cause of rheumatism, certain persons are by
heredity predisposed to it, and would develop the malady irrespective
of what their calling in life might be. Besides, are delicate men
and imprudent drivers to be placed on the same footing as robust and
careful men? Verhægen recognises the inexactitude, and states that
if we would but limit the term occupation disease to conditions of
ill health due to _poisoning_ caused by coming into contact with
certain chemical and other agents used in such industries as lucifer
match making, colour grinding, etc., the difficulty would be materially
lessened. It would still not always be easy to assign to one particular
factory, especially when it was known that the workman had moved from
place to place, the blame for having caused ill health. Even in cases
of “phossy jaw,” in which it is generally admitted that exposure to the
fumes of yellow phosphorus is its cause, there is yet some doubt as
to whether the necrosis of bone is entirely due to this circumstance,
or partly to it and the operation of micro-organisms. Take, too, the
diseases of Italian miners and of the colliers of Belgium, particularly
ankylostomiasis. Dr Kuborn of Seraing, in discussing this question,
maintains that the maladies special to mining have their origin very
largely in the kind of life the men lead, their inattention to the
rules of ordinary hygiene both in their home and person, excesses
of various kinds, imperfect feeding and clothing, etc., causes to
the influence of which want of education greatly contributes. In
some industries there are inherent dangers, and yet with care these
can be diminished if not removed. Ventilation of British coal pits,
for example, has practically abolished pulmonary consumption in our
miners. Experience shows that there is scarcely a dangerous trade from
which, with extreme care and attention to regulations, the dangerous
influences cannot be largely removed. There is no occupation so risky
to life as the manufacture of the high explosives. I have had the
opportunity of visiting the largest explosives works in the kingdom,
and can bear testimony to the healthiness of the employment and its
comparative safety owing to the careful training and discipline of the
workers, scrupulous cleanliness and attention to the minutest details.
Occupation disease, it must be remembered, is not _always_
easy of recognition. There is no difficulty in diagnosing a malady
to be plumbism when there are double wrist drop and a history of
exposure to the metal when at work; but where there is only complaint
of abdominal pain and vomiting, the diagnosis cannot be always so
clearly established, even in the presence of a well-marked blue
line on the gums. Several cases have been recorded in the medical
journals of acute abdominal pain occurring in painters, which had been
regarded as lead colic; but when the patients died, the post-mortem
examination showed that death was due to a small ulcer of the bowel
or to inflammation limited to a particular portion of the intestine
known as the appendix, which a surgical operation might have cured;
while, on the other hand, workers exposed to lead and with similar
symptoms have been operated upon by careful surgeons for appendicitis
when the malady was lead colic. If this is the difficulty experienced
by competent surgeons and careful medical observers, it shows us some
of the pitfalls parliamentarians might easily drop into by including
industrial diseases under the Workmen’s Compensation Act. Verhægen is
of opinion that the matter would be more easily settled by accumulating
a larger number of statistics of disease occurring in occupations;
but this inquiry would have to be extended over a lengthened period,
there would have to be some degree of uniformity in the conditions
under which the people worked, there would also have to be taken
into consideration the hygienic conditions of the factories, the
situation of these buildings, the number of hours worked per day, and
the influences that would follow a prolonged strike of the workpeople,
such as poverty. To be exact, too, the workpeople would have to be
medically examined before entering upon the particular industry, and
re-examined months afterwards so as to ascertain what effects, if any,
the trade had produced. Some of the difficulty would be got over by
limiting the definition of industrial disease to maladies that are
the direct consequence of occupation, and in which as a result there
is a well-ascertained lesion of the organism. Verhægen, as already
mentioned, illustrated his argument by alluding to the driver of a
public vehicle who in good health to commence with, and notwithstanding
his obedience to the laws of prudence yet becomes rheumatic, and
to another man who, under similar conditions as regards health and
carefulness, undertakes work in either a lucifer match or a white lead
factory, and suffers from phossy jaw or wrist drop. The malady is in
either of the latter instances regarded as a disease of occupation,
in the former it is not, the explanation of the difference being
that as regards the first illustration rheumatism is not confined
to the occupation of coach driving; also while it is admitted that
out-of-door occupations expose the individual to all kinds of weather
and predispose to rheumatism, the same out-of-door life led by other
people is in them an explanation of the good health they enjoy. In the
case of the match and white lead maker, had it not been for exposure to
the fume of phosphorus or the inhalation of lead dust the workman would
not have become the victim of phossy jaw or of wrist drop.
Although many workpeople in the factory incur the same risk, yet all
do not equally suffer. Some men are more susceptible than others. It
would be regarded as an interference with the liberty of the subject
if an attempt were made to prevent people going to work in a factory.
It is known, for example, that engravers are more liable to lose their
eyesight at an earlier age than men engaged in outdoor occupations.
Should a man with feeble sight be allowed to undertake this kind of
work? On commencing his industrial career, unless he voluntarily seeks
the advice of an oculist, who is to say to him nay? There cannot be,
although it is accomplished in certain dangerous trades without much
opposition, a medical examination of all persons undertaking work. The
dangers of particular occupations ought, however, to be pointed out
to all applicants for work, after which these should state that they
are prepared to accept certain risks. At present many workpeople incur
risks without knowledge of the danger or of the means of preventing
it. There are occupations that are not of themselves unhealthy, and
yet owing to the strain which they impose upon the body, the weak
spot of the organism, so to speak, is found out, and for this the
occupation itself cannot altogether be held responsible. Take what
is known as rupture or hernia, which occurs with greater frequency
in persons whose work obliges them to be long upon their feet, and
who are exposed to sudden strain, the lifting of heavy weights, etc.
What is said of it applies equally to varicose veins in the legs.
Both of these may be partly the result of the position assumed by
the individual when at work or the strain he is exposed to, and yet
it would scarcely be right to make the occupation responsible for an
affection the result of an inherent weakness of the abdominal wall
which allowed a portion of intestine to protrude, giving rise to
rupture, or for an ill-nourished condition of the walls of the veins
in the legs whereby the blood-vessels became distended and deformed.
To secure compensation, the workman would have to establish that the
hernia was solely the result of his work. Life is for all of us very
much a game of chance, and we have to run ordinary risks. For a disease
to be regarded as industrial, and capable, therefore, of being brought
within the scope of the Workmen’s Compensation Act, it would have to be
placed upon the same narrow limit as an accident. It would require to
be shown that it was the sole result of the occupation, and that there
had been produced a definite pathological lesion of the body. Adopting
this view, the maladies that could be included in the category would
be, among others, anthrax, poisoning by lead, mercury, phosphorus,
and bisulphide of carbon; but with the exception of anthrax, in which
the disease is often suddenly induced, and as rapidly runs to a
fatal termination, there is not as a rule the same exactitude in the
incidence of disease as is the case in accident. There might be little
difficulty in including anthrax under the Act of 1897. The inclusion
of some of the other dangerous trades would give rise to frequent
litigation, but it would make employers more careful in the selection
of their workpeople, and in the means adopted to prevent industrial
poisoning. This latter fact is one of the objects aimed at by those
who are in favour of an extension of the Workmen’s Compensation Act,
not omitting, where it can be clearly proved, the financial liability
of the employer to compensate the affected workman. In the case of a
fatal accident occurring in a factory, a post-mortem examination shows
perhaps the body to be healthy, and therefore the accident to have
been the sole cause of death, or there are certain signs of disease
present which may have caused or hastened the fatal termination. In the
latter instance the law takes no cognisance of the previous disease.
It takes for granted that but for the accident the individual would
have gone on following his occupation. In industrial poisoning, would
a similar legal opinion be entertained? In acute lead poisoning, when
the post-mortem examination and chemical analysis of the internal
organs conclusively prove that death was due to lead, it might be a
comparatively easy thing to fix the liability upon an employer; but
the presence of signs of previous disease in the body, which probably
contributed to the fatal termination of the illness, would make it
extremely difficult to assign to each of the two circumstances its
proper share in causing death.
It is facts such as these that doubtless led to the rejection by
Parliament in 1897 of the proposal to extend the scope of the Workmen’s
Compensation Bill so as to include industrial diseases, and place them
on the same footing as accidents occurring at work. There is, however,
a common sense view of the matter which should not be overlooked, and
it is this. Where a person suffers in health, or loses his or her life
through neglect of the employers to comply with the legal requirements
of the Factory Acts, surely the employer under these circumstances
ought to pay full compensation. In the case of accidents the question
of neglect does not arise under the Act of 1897. The injured person
is compensated, and that is the difference between the Employers’
Liability and the Workmen’s Compensation Act. The question that calls
for an answer then is rather this: Where an employer has followed out
to the full all the regulations required by the Home Office, and it
is shown that he has done all that common sense and humanity dictate,
and yet industrial poisoning has occurred, is the employer under these
circumstances to be considered liable? In France, where the match
industry is a State monopoly, the Government admitted its liability
by paying to the workmen who suffered from the effects of phosphorus
a stated indemnity. Bryant & May’s firm has always recognised its
liability by paying a weekly allowance to the workpeople off ill
through phosphorus necrosis. Other firms in other trades probably do
the same. It is for the public, therefore, to say whether humane
deeds like these, which are purely voluntary in this country, should
be made compulsory by an extension of the Workmen’s Compensation Act,
or be simply dealt with through the medium of mutual trade insurance
societies.[2]
Collectively, occupations may be likened to a huge organism. Industries
are the functions that indicate the life and prosperity of a nation,
and like the higher forms of life they have grown in process of
time from simple beginnings to highly complicated combinations,
the controlling and to some extent directing agent of which is
parliamentary legislation, keeping pace with the inventiveness of man
and human requirements. In many ways is the resemblance between the
industrial and human organism demonstrated. No man can use unrestricted
freedom with his own body. There is a physiological limit to which
he must bow. An over-worked brain or group of muscles sooner or
later tells its own tale, unbridled licence causes degeneration of
the nervous system, and excess in wine or at table is checked by the
diseases it produces. Perfection is what we ought to strive for, and
this can only be obtained by submission to nature’s laws. So, too, in
the industrial organism it is recognised that production should be
kept within limits, reckless bargaining should be curtailed, that each
man should put his very best into the work he is doing, and that there
should be more sympathetic communication between employer and employed.
Trades, like human beings, are influenced by their surroundings. They
do not thrive well away from coal fields and centres of human activity.
Competition or the struggle for existence is as keen in the world of
industry as in that of biology, and there occurs the same weeding out
in both. Thwarted by local conditions and hampered by scarcity of
labour, overburdened by excessive taxation or ground rents, industries
will languish in one place, while with fewer restrictions they will
flourish in another. New trades are constantly developing, and new
methods of manufacture keep replacing those that are old. Everything is
tending towards improvement. Many circumstances are operating to direct
the industrial evolution of to-day. Human wants and man’s inventiveness
play their part so that those manufacturers alone of their commercial
confrères are successful who, recognising the spirit of the age, make
an attempt to meet its demands.
Admitting that factory legislation has for the last century been
gradually bringing into line industrial undertakings of all kinds,
and that the Government has by enforcing regulations exercised a
disciplining influence upon masters and men, it is only recently
that it has taken up a strong and decided attitude in regard to the
effects of particular trades upon health. Public health as a science
is still in its infancy; it owes its origin mainly to the rush of
people into the large towns. Its theories and facts have been brought
by municipalities to bear upon the conditions of life in our homes
and persons. Modern factory legislation, so far as industrial hygiene
is concerned, is an extension of the ordinary laws of health to those
workers who in many instances cannot frame rules of guidance for
themselves. Law restricts as well as regulates individual freedom. The
Public Health Acts have interfered with the liberty of the subject by
insisting upon closing unhealthy dwellings, the removal of refuse, the
notification of infectious diseases, and the compulsory removal from
the home of members of a family who are suffering from some infectious
malady, and by doing so have secured a larger measure of health for the
community. Factory legislation similarly aims at improving the health
of the workers.
Every man tries to get as much out of life as possible. Ideally he
ought to contribute his best to it. A workman, while obtaining for
his labour the largest wages possible, ought to put into his labour
the best of his thought and energy so as to improve the character of
the work he is engaged in. While the immediate object of labour is to
obtain the wherewithal to live, the character of the work performed is
unconsciously shaping the destiny of labour and building up through
individuals the national reputation. The end of work is progress, and
just as human life is perfected through suffering and experience, so is
the industrial.
There are many ways by which the hygiene of trades may be promoted.
The notification of industrial diseases to the Chief Inspector of
Factories has, although it has only been in existence a very few
years, already placed the Home Office in possession of facts and
statistics which enable the Factory Department at once to realise
when a particular industry is becoming prejudicial to the health of
workers, and how it may be met. The good effects of notification are
observed in the trades in which lead, mercury, and phosphorus are
used. The power granted to the Home Secretary, which enables him to
schedule a trade as dangerous on sufficient information being given
to him, is, so long as it is judiciously applied, a step in the
right direction. It is desirable that accurate information should be
obtained from all sources, from employers as well as employed, and from
experts, chemical and medical. The formation of a consultative body or
of an industrial council composed of the Home Secretary and members
of the factory staff, employers, a few educated workmen, chemists,
medical men, and electricians, for the purpose of discussing with the
Home Secretary terms of Special Rules and prospective legislation
has been recommended, and might be helpful. On the Continent such
industrial councils exist, a description of which will be found in
Miss Anderson’s paper on “Regulations of Injurious or Dangerous
Occupations in Factories and Workshops in some of the Chief European
Countries.” In Britain there might be some difficulty in including upon
a permanent consultative body gentlemen capable of dealing with the
numerous technical questions that constantly arise, but the difficulty
would be no greater there than in France. Within the last few years
the Home Secretary has, whether for direct advice or to serve upon
committee, occasionally called in the assistance of recognised experts
or authorities upon particular points under consideration. This system
has worked well, and might with advantage be extended. Industrial
hygiene, too, so far at any rate as dangerous trades are concerned,
could be promoted by small International Committees meeting to improve
the sanitation of labour rather than to discuss economic problems of
production. By many it is believed that the cause of industrial hygiene
would be furthered by the establishment of a Ministry of Labour.
It seems an anomalous circumstance that a country like ours, whose
reputation has been built upon commerce, should be without a department
specially devoted to labour and labour problems. The Home Office has
the necessary machinery and possesses all the information, but its
jurisdiction covers too extensive a field. The Factory Department
ought to form a separate and distinct branch of the Home Office to be
directed by a Secretary or Under-Secretary of State. Year by year the
work of the Department and its scope increase, and surely among the
many Departments of the State there can be none of greater importance
than that which watches over the millions of persons engaged in
factories and workshops in the United Kingdom.
THOMAS OLIVER.
CHAPTER II
HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEGISLATION
FOR INJURIOUS AND DANGEROUS INDUSTRIES IN ENGLAND
“Now, since both the Ages of Antiquity and that we now live in
shew Laws ... calculated for the good Order and Reputation of
Tradesmen, ’tis but reasonable that Physick should contribute
its quota for the Benefit and Comfort of those of whom the
Law has been so tenderly careful, and display itself in a
particular manner (that has been hitherto neglected) for the
safety of Tradesmen, that they may follow their Trades without
injuring their Health.”--RAMAZZINI: _Treatise of the Diseases of
Tradesmen_. English Edition, 1705. Italian Edition, Modena, 1670.
“Year after year, as far forward as any present judgment would
willingly speculate, the same terrible waste of adult life must,
with no great mitigation, continue, unless the Legislature
see fit to provide by special enactment for more wholesome
conditions of labour.... The canker of industrial diseases
gnaws at the very root of our national strength. The sufferers
are not few or insignificant. They are the bread-winners for
at least a third part of our population.... That they have
causes of disease indolently left to blight them amid their toil
... is surely an intolerable wrong. And to be able to redress
that wrong is perhaps among the greatest opportunities for
good which human institutions can afford.”--_Report of the
Medical Officer (Dr, afterwards Sir John Simon) to the Privy
Council_, 1861.
From the benevolent and learned Italian physician of the seventeenth
century, in touch with every available source of information of his own
and preceding ages, searching for mitigation of the diseases of workmen
which he believes to be “incurable,” to the English State physician
of the nineteenth century seeking to persuade men that the diseases
must not be allowed even to arise, is indeed a long way. The way is
long in all that concerns knowledge of the causes and treatment of
disease, no less than in circumstances and organisation of industry.
It is doubtful, however, whether the transformation of ideas in either
is so great as in the general attitude of civilised society towards
protection of labour and promotion of industrial health. The change
cannot be accounted for, completely, either by change in the methods
and organisation of industry, or by increased knowledge, medical,
economic, or social. Nor can the increased breadth of conception be
attributed solely to that increased intensity and quantity of human
suffering which inevitably accompanied concentration and growth of
industry. In all ages there have been physical, moral, and economic
evils which fell to the lot of the labourer, probably differing from
time to time on the whole more in degree than in kind, and doubtless
felt at each stage by the sufferers, and sometimes by onlookers, with
an intensity which relatively was great, and which with adequate
discernment of a remedy and the duty or expedience of applying it,
would have led to legislative action.
In the great civilisations of antiquity, whether in the East, West, or
in Europe generally, there was sufficient concentration of the forces
of labour to produce the intensest forms of the maladies classed by
Pliny as the “diseases of slaves.” Some of the most injurious processes
known to us now are extremely ancient. To mention but a few: lead and
quicksilver mining, the potters’ craft, and the textile processes of
preparing and weaving asbestos and flax.
The long history, in another department of social ills, of legislation
and organised guild efforts for protection of buyers from dishonest
manufacture and dishonest trading in adulterated products, or again,
of efforts to regulate supply of labour and to enforce honest service
from workers, affords many illustrations of the action that could be
taken in Middle Age and Renaissance Europe, where an evil was both
recognised and also believed to be remediable. It is to be noted how
few the indications are that the strivings after social improvement of
handicraftsmen and labourers were in those times inspired by any clear
vision of the physical safety and health of individuals as part of the
well-being to be sought. Illustrations might indeed be gathered from
records of craft guilds and municipal organisations, of provisions and
regulations that tended to results similar to those expressly aimed at
by modern sanitary regulations. This is especially true of England,
where the masses of manual workers came earlier than in other countries
of Modern Europe to comparative physical comfort. We must, however,
avoid the mistake of reading into past events, however interesting,
ideas that are consciously at work in practical affairs only in our own
times.
Of much later date are the first documents that I have been able to
trace expressly dealing with the nature and results of industrial
occupation in dangerous or injurious processes. These are in the
_Transactions of the Royal Society of England_, and are of the
theoretic and reflective character that is appropriate to their
setting. Belonging to the same century as Ramazzini’s most human
treatise (1670 and onwards), touching both manufacture and mining in
Europe (_e.g._, manufacture of white lead, silvering of mirrors by
mercury, lead mining, coal mining), they would take an important place
in a general history of European thought and action on this question.
The vivid descriptions by the Italian as well as by the English writers
of the effects on the worker of lead,[3] of mercury,[4] of silk
dust,[5] of explosions in mines,[6] give one a sense now of the kinship
of past labour with present, and a clearer perception of the magnitude
and the worth of the object that this generation has set itself--to
remove such causes of suffering from the path of the labourer.
In those papers, however, we are still far from any practical
preventive treatment of industrial diseases. My task in this paper is
to trace out in England, that is in the foremost industrial community
of recent times, the history of tentative, halting efforts, almost
wholly within living memory, to engraft on the earlier legislative
movements of the nineteenth century towards hygienic and moral reforms
in industry, that special, applied regulation of injurious manufactures
for which Sir Edwin Chadwick[7] and Sir John Simon were the earliest
and most distinguished advocates. In this history itself, I think, is
found the nearest attainable explanation of the wide difference between
the general attitude of our day towards care of the health of the adult
labourer at his trade, and that of any previous age, when the diseases
accompanying industry were the subject of scientific observation. In it
is to be seen the gathering momentum which could so completely sweep
away age-long modes of regarding the worker at his bench as merely
a means to the ends of others than himself and his family, that the
legislature and administration could at length treat the promotion
of the physical security of each individual labourer as a worthy end
for the State no less than the labourer. Lord Londonderry, when he
railed in Parliament in 1848 against the “hypocritical humanity” which
sought by protective legislation to save the lives and limbs of the
miners of Great Britain, represented but a singularly extreme though
not isolated survival of the older assumption of legislators that the
health of the masses of people, as of individual labourers, might be
left to take care of itself, if indeed it was worth thinking about
at all. Even the learned and humane contributors in the seventeenth
century to the _Transactions of the Royal Society_ on dangers of
mining and means of overcoming them, can tell without a thought of
irony how a ventilating tube was first placed in a dangerous mine after
an accident from fire-damp, resulting in the loss not only of men but
of a “gentleman of quality.” There is indeed a long series of laws,
extending back to before the time of Elizabeth, for the protection of
the poorer wage-earner in making his contract so that he should not be
cheated by extortionate charges or unfair payments in goods. The real
contrast in the normal attitude of the centuries before our own towards
the _persons_ of workers is nevertheless well seen in Macaulay’s
wondering notice of the fact that in the latter end of the seventeenth
century it was possible for an eminent philanthropist to exult in the
thought that in Norwich, the centre of the clothing trade, where “a
little creature of six years old was thought fit for labour,” boys and
girls of “very tender age created wealth exceeding what was necessary
for their own subsistence by £12,000 a year.” Greater degradation than
any shadowed there had to be achieved, in England at least, before
the first legislative foundations could be laid, on which afterwards
was to be engrafted the special trade legislation with which we are
here concerned. Out of the desecration of child*-life and womanhood,
underground and in factories and workshops, recorded in the Blue
Books of the earlier part of last century, came the needed force for
the beginnings of a State control in England of special conditions
of health and security, which in some other European countries had
been for long, at least in mines, partially maintained through the
operation of a more or less definite theory of State or Imperial
ownership.[8]
Although I refer necessarily to the general sanitary and social
protective measures, the development of which belongs to the great
humanitarian movements of the first half of the Victorian age, I must
at this point make it clear that I exclude here their history, so far
as concerns purely the control of economic and moral abuses, which were
not inherent in manufacturing and mining industry itself. We are not
directly concerned with physical sufferings which, owing to the apathy
of the community, in fact accompanied the earlier developments of the
factory system, nor with the barbarities which culpable ignorance too
long allowed to survive, from rougher and harder times, underground
in mines. Our concern is with those material risks in any industry
which, when reasonably good methods of working have been developed by
the necessary help of law, remain as ordinary accompaniments of the
occupation itself, either because of the nature of the substance used,
or because of the appliances necessary to the processes carried on.
Some special regard for classes of persons employed is also necessary
in so far as they are specially affected by risks on account of tender
years or physical constitution, but not because Parliament was first
and foremost compelled by unnatural conditions to safeguard young
workers and women, nor because the force of law remains, and, humanly
speaking, will continually remain necessary in competitive manufacture
to maintain for them good normal conditions.
We must remember that applied scientific protection of all workers
against industrial injury was from the outset introduced step by
step into two distinct sets of Acts of Parliament, the Mines Acts
and the Factory Acts, both with primarily social aims, each acting
and re-acting on the other throughout, both in Parliament and in
the Department administering them. This compels study of the stages
of development in those Acts, as distinct from the movements which
produced them, in order to arrive at any comprehension of the nature of
the now resulting form of control of injurious trades.
In a complete history of this subject a long section would be devoted
to the development of the later-initiated law relating to Public
Health, to the origins of the two great Sanitary Commissions of 1843–5
and 1869–71 and their reports, and adequate recognition would be
possible of one main cause of gradually quickened public and official
understanding of the need of special precautions for health in
injurious industries. This cause was the introduction into the service
of the State, first as special commissioners, later as permanent
officials, of scientific investigators and medical officers, whose work
brought to light not merely new facts bearing upon industrial disease,
but also new and broad ideas as to their origin and effects, and whose
reports secured in some instances attention far beyond the boundaries
of England. It is difficult for a modern Factory Inspector to realise
all that is implied in the brief allusions of a former Chief Inspector,
Mr Redgrave, in one of his annual reports, as late as 1868, to the fact
that cleanliness, ventilation, and prevention of disease generally, in
factories, were then regulated only so far as they were provided for at
all in the “Sanitary Act,” and applied by local medical officers--where
there were any--without effective central control or organisation.
What it meant in loss of life and injury to the bread-winners of the
masses of the nation was only too clearly set forth in the accumulated
evidence in Dr Simon’s and Dr Greenhow’s reports to the Board of Health
and to the Privy Council on the sanitary state of the people of England
from 1858 onwards. The words I quote at the head of my paper indicate
Sir John Simon’s idea of the magnitude of the evil at that time. In
many passages he showed his view of the worthlessness of such general
powers as then could be applied to the more general classes of evil.[9]
In prolonged special investigations, guided by the danger signals of
mortality statistics, he traced out the preventible injuries going
on steadily in half-regulated or wholly unregulated dangerous trades.
“Certain industrial establishments,” he said, writing in 1862, “are
subject to Government inspection, and some to a very limited extent
are regulated by Act of Parliament.... Is there any sufficient reason
why these precedents should not be followed in other industrial
establishments.... There is abundant causation of premature death
in mines which are neither coal mines nor ironstone mines,[10] and
potters, grinders, carders, hacklers, not to mention hosts of other
artisans, may, any of them, show the same claim as miners--the claim
of grievous physical suffering--to have the special circumstances
of their industry subjected to Government supervision.”[11] These
observations were not based on vague description or casual inquiry into
the circumstances of industry, but on systematic notes of conditions
of employment in selected localities where mortality due to given
diseases--for example, tubercular phthisis or irritative disease of
the lung--was three, four, or even six times as high as in other parts
of England. The evidence for this need of supervision by centrally
directed specialists, working under a specialised legislation, had
been already repeatedly touched on in Reports of Royal Commissioners
primarily appointed to inquire into employment of children and women.
Far more had to be later said and written before the first steps could
be taken in some of these manufactures to remove causes of injury
which, later, the Commissioners of 1878 referred to as a “public
scandal,” and for which no basis of control existed until 1891.
What, then, are the first beginnings of special legislation; and how
did the succeeding steps follow each other in the Factory and the
Mines Acts respectively? First, it must be pointed out that whereas
the particular kind of legislative weapon (the provision for “Special
Rules”), which was destined to be forged for use against dangerous
trades, was first planned in connection with regulation of mines,
it reached its most elaborate form in connection with regulation of
manufacturing industries, that is, in the earlier and more fully
regulated industries, under the Factory Acts.
It is now almost incredible that one of the most dangerous of all
groups of industry--mining--should have been free in England from any
form of protective legislation until 1842,[12] when women and girls
were excluded from underground working, and that it was not until 1855
that any comparatively useful safeguards of health, life, and limb were
prescribed by law. It is still more difficult to realise that before
1814 it was not customary to hold inquests on deaths of miners killed
by accidents in mines. With the exception of regulations against truck,
there was no provision except such as protected the colliery owner--and
of that kind there were many--against injury to his property by miners.
Meanwhile the landmarks from the present standpoint in factory
regulation had been the Acts of 1802 and 1833. The first, aiming
only at the preservation in cotton mills of the “health and morals”
of apprentices, further laid down that “visitors,” to be appointed
by justices in every county for repression of contraventions, were
empowered to “direct the adoption of such sanitary regulations as
they might on advice think proper.” The Act of 1833,[13] regulating
first the labour of children and young persons in textile factories
generally, replaced those “visitors” of the Act of 1802 (who had seldom
been appointed, and still more seldom had acted) by “inspectors” with
similar powers of entry, and of calling to their aid expert advisers,
but with additional powers: to administer oaths and to make such
“rules, regulations, and orders” as were necessary for the execution
of the Act, and to convict offenders and impose penalties under the
Act, as if they were Justices of the Peace. In 1844 an Act applying
similarly only to textile factories repealed these remarkable powers
of Factory Inspectors to make rules, orders, and regulations, and
to act as Justices of the Peace; at the same time it organised the
Inspectorate, with institution of an office in London, on lines
comparable to those of our own time. Certifying surgeons were then
first provided primarily for the purpose of examining young workers
under sixteen years of age as to their fitness for employment, and
granting certificates of age and ordinary strength; but further also,
for re-examination of such workers at the instance of an inspector
where there was reason to believe that injury would be caused by
continued employment. The Acts were now extended to women, and for
the first time special provisions for health and safety (as distinct
from general provisions for cleanliness of the factory) began to make
their appearance. Workers in wet spinning became entitled to sufficient
means against being wetted and against unnecessary escape of steam into
the room if young persons or children were employed there; but far
more important were the new attempts to reduce accidents by providing
for the safer use of machinery, inquiry into causes of accidents, and
penal compensation to workers for accidents due to machinery remaining
unfenced after notice from the inspector that it was “deemed to be
dangerous.” These provisions embodied a few of the recommendations
made in Special Reports of the Inspectors of Factories, presented to
Parliament in 1841, and the recommendations of the Select Committee of
the House of Commons presented in the same year; with them, however,
was also introduced the principle of Arbitration on the objections
raised by an occupier. The inspector might give notice of dangerous
machinery to be fenced, but for fourteen days the right remained with
the occupier to require the appointment of arbitrators “skilled in the
construction of the kind of machinery” to which the notice referred.
Each party, the occupier and the inspector, was then to nominate his
arbitrator, and the two arbitrators were to proceed to examine the
machinery “alleged to be dangerous” within fourteen days. If they could
not agree, they were together to appoint as umpire a third arbitrator
“possessing a similar knowledge of machinery.” When the ultimate
decision supported the occupier’s objection, the inspector’s notice as
to danger was annulled, and even if an accident thereafter occurred,
penal compensation could not be obtained for an injured worker. Not
until the Act of 1891 did this principle, later so greatly extended in
application to matters of health as well as safety, cease to control
the fencing of dangerous machinery (other than mill-gearing) in
factories, and it still remains for all dangers in mines not expressly
covered by any other provision. As regards this first introduction
into the Factory Acts of penal compensation for preventible injuries,
it appears to have been the outcome of a discussion by witnesses
before the Royal Commission on Labour of Young Persons in Mines and
Manufactures in 1841. This was the “trade charge or insurance payable
by the branch of industry liable to the accidents,” which has been at
length secured to the worker only at the end of the nineteenth century
by the Compensation Acts.
In the year in which these considerable steps had been taken in
factory legislation (1844), the Mines Inspector under Lord Ashley’s
Act published his first report. Even two years later women were still
to be found in considerable numbers underground. Progress nevertheless
was being yearly made--through the reports on safety and ventilation of
special scientific commissioners (including Lyell, Faraday, Playfair),
by the action of associations of miners, by spread of knowledge of
the dangers of mining, and not least, by the recurrence of appalling
accidents which ever increasingly shocked the public conscience--came
the first tentative measure for general safety in coal mines--the Act
of 1855[14] In 1854 the Select Committee on Accidents had reported,
adopting among other recommendations a suggestion of the Inspectors for
legislative extension of the practice of several colliery owners, of
framing special safety rules for working in mines. The Act, in addition
to specifying seven general rules binding on owners and agents of
collieries for safety, relating to: (1) adequate ventilation to dilute
and render harmless noxious gases; (2) fencing of disused shafts; (3)
fencing of pumping pits when not at work; (4) secure lining of shafts;
(5) proper means of signalling; (6) indicator and break for machine
raising or lowering persons; (7) proper gauges and valve for steam
boiler, provided for the framing and enforcement of special rules,
to be submitted by owners for approval of the Secretary of State, at
every colliery. These special rules, when established, were to have
the force of law both for owners and miners, but were enforceable only
by penalty in the case of owners, by penalty or imprisonment with or
without hard labour (maximum three months) in the case of miners. This
latter distinction occasioned considerable bitterness at the time, but
the provision which was most generally criticised was the elaborate one
for arbitration in case of objection on the part of the owner to any
alteration or addition to special rules made by the Secretary of State.
Within twenty-seven days the owner had power to nominate three or more
“practical mining engineers or other competent persons of experience
in the district,” not “interested in or employed in the management of
... the colliery,” and the Secretary of State might appoint “one or
more” such persons “to determine the matter in difference.” In case
of the owner not exercising this power within the time specified,
arbitration could be organised on lines very similar to those provided
by the Factory Act of 1844, with the difference that in the case of
special rules in mines one of the parties to the arbitration was the
Secretary of State instead of the inspector. In the framing of special
rules following on this Act, it was common for groups of collieries
working under similar conditions to adopt one set of special rules,
but sometimes individual owners drew up their own special rules, and
occasionally attempted to introduce remarkably irrelevant matter, such
as attendance at “Divine Service at least once on the Lord’s Day,” for
the regulation of the conduct of miners.
Five years later the law relating to mines was extended, and in some
ways strengthened, several disastrous accidents and explosions,
entailing loss in the aggregate of thousands of lives, having in the
meanwhile occurred. At several of the inquests strong evidence was
given of incompetent management and neglect of rules in addition to
disregard of inspectors’ suggestions for improvement of ventilation
in the interests of safety; in one case the coroner’s jury returned
a verdict of manslaughter against the manager, the overman, and the
fireman of the colliery, though this was subsequently followed by
acquittal at the assizes. The Act of 1860 touched on several new
points, besides extending the law to include ironstone mines; wages and
education sections were first introduced, but a demand for certificated
managers of coal mines was not met until 1872. The chief advances in
the direction of increased safety were, by extension of the general
rules to include provision for places of refuge on engine planes,
use of covers overhead in lowering or raising persons in every pit,
fencing of fly-wheels of every engine, maintenance of boreholes to
prevent inundations, by empowering an inspector to propose additional
safeguards for dangers not covered by any rules (but in case of
objection by the owner, the matter was to go to arbitration); by
raising the age of those entrusted with charge of steam engines to
eighteen years.
In the meantime the course of factory legislation continued to
illustrate the strength of the original motive--rescue of young
workers and women in textile factories from monstrously long hours
and overwork--rather than intelligent and steady assimilation by the
community of the evidence of need of special control of drainage,
ventilation, use of deleterious substances, and other matters affecting
health in a large number of non-textile industries. Such evidence was
first strikingly presented by the Report of the Commission on Mines
and Manufactures, published in 1843, but later in greater detail as
regards the injurious industries of lucifer match and pottery making in
the Report of the Children’s Employment Commission of 1862. A long and
fierce battle had to be waged over the form and degree of limitation of
hours in textile works before the gradual extension of the principle
of regulation could begin and proceed from trade to trade. It was in
the Act of 1864, which added the largest number of these, including
earthenware and lucifer match works, that the fruit of the labours of
expert commissioners began to appear in explicitly sanitary measures,
applicable to all classes of factories under the Acts.[15] In this
Act we first find the idea of ventilation applied in order to render
harmless “gases, dust, or other impurities generated in the course of
manufacture that may be injurious to health.” And here we find the
first fleeting attempt to introduce the “special rules” system from the
Mines Acts, on the employers’ initiative, but without the arbitration
clauses. Manufacturers were empowered to draw up special rules binding
on workers, after approval by the Secretary of State, “for compelling
the observance ... of the conditions necessary to ensure the required
degree of cleanliness and ventilation, and to annex to any breach
of such rules a penalty not exceeding one pound.” These powers were
extended to many other trades, including indiarubber works, letterpress
printing works, blast furnaces, and iron mills, by the Act of 1867,
and were soon unfavourably reported on by inspectors, as throwing too
heavy a burden on the workers, “the onus of being a principal under the
Act,” to use Mr Baker’s words. In 1868 he reported that special rules
were in force in most of the iron works in his district, which gave
the employer “power over his workpeople who sub-employ in his works,”
by holding them responsible for various sections of the Acts relating
to employment of young persons; a purpose which we can now readily see
to have been foreign to the general intention of such legislation.
By the Act of 1871 penalties for breach of these rules were made
recoverable by summary proceedings, but the provisions for framing such
rules disappeared when the law was consolidated by the Act of 1878.
The Workshop Regulation Act of 1867, amended in 1870, practically
completed the application of the general law to all workplaces in which
manual labour was exercised for gain, in the making or finishing of
articles or parts of articles for sale. The “Sanitary Act” of 1866
had provided for cleanliness, ventilation to remove injurious gases
and dust, and for freedom from overcrowding in any workplace not
under the operation of any of these Acts. The Factory Acts of 1864
and 1867 prohibited the taking of meals in certain workrooms where
dangerous processes are carried on, _e.g._, lucifer match making,
earthenware dipping, china scouring, glass-making (mixing, grinding,
cutting, polishing), and the application of power to the extraction of
injurious dusts was furthered by introduction of provision for a “fan
or other mechanical means,” approved from time to time by the Secretary
of State, in case of grinding, glazing, polishing on a wheel, or “any
other process in which dust is generated or inhaled by the workmen to
an injurious extent.” The Act of 1878, in consolidating all previous
Factory and Workshop Acts, re-cast some special safety provisions
(for example, those relating to prohibition of certain workrooms for
meals), in such a form as to empower the Secretary of State to extend
the prohibition to other industries, a power which was exercised in
a considerable number of industries. Employment of young workers was
also prohibited in certain dangerous processes, and power was taken
to extend such prohibition. Nothing was done, however, at the time of
this great measure--which was primarily for better administration of
existing provisions, and was accompanied, on the recommendation of
the Commissioners of 1875, by a thorough reorganisation and extension
of the inspectorate--towards securing more detailed regulation of
methods and conditions of working in dangerous trades, in spite of a
recommendation to that effect by Mr Redgrave. The first decisive step
in that direction was taken in 1883 in the case of one of the most
deadly of lead industries, the manufacture of white lead, whose effects
had been recorded for centuries, and in France had been the object of
special inquiry followed by regulation early in the century under the
direction of the _Conseil de Salubrité_. It is rather remarkable
to read in a report of the Chief Inspector, 1882, that although
“employment in dangerous occupations has on several occasions been
brought under the notice of the legislature, until recently special
attention has not been drawn to the manufacture of white lead.”[16]
Now, however, the evils pressed for remedy, and the “Mines Acts as to
general precautions and special rules” were adopted as a “precedent” to
be applied to white lead works.[17]
Before touching further on this new departure and tracing out its
sequel, a brief reference must be made to the course of Mines
legislation since 1860. While political conditions had been
unfavourable to additional legislation for some time after the Act of
that year, the conditions in the coal industry had been developing
steadily, both as regards extent and methods of getting mineral on
the one hand, and as regards association amongst miners on the other,
in such a way as to make a complete law possible when it inevitably
came. Scientific knowledge as to mechanical means of ventilation and
other provisions for safety became at the same time incomparably
wider spread. Greatly increased public discussion brought out far
more clearly the objects and desires both of masters and men, and
the determination of the latter to obtain certificated and competent
management, extension of the system of “general” safety rules,
improvement of the method of forming “special rules,” and increased
inspection, had its effect in the consolidating and amending Act of
1872. The number of general rules was more than doubled, matters
formerly left to the chances of special rules were permanently
transferred to the general law, which now included compulsory use of
safety lamps where needed, regulation of use of explosives in blasting,
securing of roofs and sides, daily examination of the state of the
mine, facilities for inspection by representatives of the miners.
Special rules became more clearly defined as intended for the guidance,
safety, and proper discipline of the miners at work, and they might
only be transmitted for the Secretary of State’s approval after they
had been posted in the mine for two weeks with a notice that objections
to them might be sent by any person employed to the inspector of the
district. Wilful neglect or contravention of any provision of a kind
likely to endanger safety became punishable, in the case of employers
as well as miners, by imprisonment with hard labour. The machinery
of arbitration on any questions of safety under the Acts was made
considerably clearer. In all these matters[18] the great advance was
by way of development of previous ideas. The entirely new departure
lay in the six sections relating to daily control, and supervision of
every mine by a manager holding a certificate of competency from the
Secretary of State, after examination by a board of examiners appointed
by the latter, power being retained to the Secretary of State to cause
inquiry, if necessary, later into the competency of the holder of
the certificate, cancellation or suspension of the certificate being
possible in case of proved unfitness. There is little room for surprise
that so great an advance in the law should have given widespread
satisfaction to the miners, and that for a considerable time efforts
of their associations were directed to securing vigorous enforcement
rather than extension of the law. In the same year the question of
health and safety in Metalliferous Mines[19] received its first
treatment in a separate code (which remains in force to the present
time), of similar scope to the Coal Mines Act. A Royal Commission had
been appointed in 1862, and had reported in 1864. The great excess of
mortality and sickness among metalliferous miners, “mainly attributable
to the imperfect ventilation of the mines” and inhalation of gritty
particles, to excessive physical exertion in climbing up and down
ladders of great length, to the great changes of temperature, and
exposure to wet, were brought out in the report and made the subject
of recommendations. It was also shown that accidents were of frequent
occurrence from falls from ladders, falls of the rock or stuff,
carelessness in blasting, defective gear, and sudden irruptions of
foul air and water. The method of regulation adopted for Metalliferous
Mines, by general rules for safety, special rules for conduct and
guidance of miners, and the requirements as to notice of accidents,
coroners’ inquiries, fencing of abandoned mines, being similar to those
for Coal Mines, details are unnecessary for the purpose of the present
essay. In 1881 the Coal Mines Acts were strengthened in regard to the
use of explosives underground, in 1886 the Secretary of State was
empowered to direct a formal investigation of any explosion or accident
and of its causes and circumstances to be held (a provision embodied by
reference in the Factory Acts in 1895). In 1887 the Coal and Ironstone
Mines Acts were again consolidated with amendments strengthening the
already existing provisions. By General Rule 4 more stringent provision
for inspection of working parts of mines before commencing and during
shifts, and the distinction between mines in which inflammable gas
had been found within the preceding twelve months and those in which
it had not, disappeared. By Rules 8, 9, 10, 11, construction and use
of safety lamps became much more detailed and stringent than in the
former Rule 7, which they replaced. By Rule 24 the age of competent
male persons in charge of machinery for raising and lowering persons at
the mine was raised to twenty-two. By Rule 34 provision of ambulances
or stretchers with splints and bandages ready for immediate use at the
mine became compulsory. Other main provisions of the Act strengthened
were those relating to distance and height of communications between
the two shafts required in mines; daily personal supervision of the
mine by the certificated manager; notice of opening or abandoning
seams. Arbitration on special rules and other matters was modified so
that while the qualification of being a practical mining engineer was
retained for the two representative arbitrators, the umpire, if any, is
bound to be a county court judge, a police or stipendiary magistrate, a
recorder of a borough, or a registrar of a county court.
Turning again to the Factory and Workshop Act of 1883, which forms
the first distinct attempt to regulate a dangerous manufacturing
industry, we find, in its unamended form, a remarkable parallel to
the method of mines regulation, not merely in the requirement that
every occupier of a white lead factory shall frame and submit for
approval to the Secretary of State special rules[20] which have been
affixed in the factory with a notice to the workers of their power to
send objections to the Chief Inspector; but also in the prescribing
of six general conditions for obtaining a certificate to carry on the
dangerous industry. These include provision for ventilation of stoves
and stacks, means of maintaining personal cleanliness, and proper room
for meals. The special rules, however, were not in the original statute
liable to any process of arbitration, merely to full consideration
by the Secretary of State, who had power to make modifications after
hearing the occupiers’ objections, if any, to his modifications.
This procedure was considerably modified when by the Act of 1891
provision was made for establishment of special rules in any industry
(not being a domestic industry) certified by the Secretary of State
to be dangerous or injurious to health, or dangerous to life or limb.
Then the initiative in drafting the “special rules or requiring the
adoption of such special measures as appear to the Chief Inspector to
be reasonably practicable, and to meet the necessities of the case”
was transferred from the occupier to the Factory Department, but a
counterbalancing force was provided by addition of the arbitration
clauses wherever the occupier persisted in objections to the proposed
special rules, and the Secretary of State could not see the way to
accepting modifications asked for by the occupier. At the same time the
share of the worker in framing the rules, by his legal right to make
objections before they were established, entirely disappeared. It was
not until the Act of 1895 that this loss was imperfectly compensated,
by a right to representation on the arbitration on conditions
prescribed by the arbitrators which was then secured to workmen
interested, or any class of them. In 1896, in the Mines Acts that
privilege was superadded to the other. The general tenor of the Factory
Act of 1891, following as it did on the important work of the House of
Lords’ Committee on the Sweating System, and the Berlin International
Conference, was one of development of sanitary organisation,
particularly with regard to workshops, and of closer regulation of
dangerous and injurious trades. It had been preceded in 1889 by an Act
with special reference (like the Act of 1883) to a single class of
factories, in this case the cotton cloth factories, in which excessive
heat and humidity produced by artificial means seriously affected
the health and comfort of operatives. The Act not only limited the
temperature of workrooms and amount of moisture in the atmosphere, but
also provided for tests and records of the same, and fixed a standard
minimum volume of fresh air, 600 cubic feet, to be admitted in every
hour for every person employed. Power was retained for the Secretary
of State to modify by order the maximum limit of humidity of the
atmosphere at any given temperature, and a short Act of two sections in
1897 extended this power to other measures for the protection of health
recommended by a Departmental Committee appointed to inquire into the
working of the Act of 1889. Without doubt, the most important measures
adopted under this Act in 1898 were those tending to purify the air of
workrooms by prescribing a CO standard of ventilation (“during working
hours in no part of the Cotton Cloth Factory shall the proportion of
carbonic acid in the air be greater than nine volumes of carbonic acid
to every ten thousand volumes of air”), and by prohibiting use of
impure water for production of artificial humidity. One other point of
historical interest in connection with the Act of 1889 must be touched
on. It contained a general provision enabling an inspector, where he
considered that dust was inhaled by the workers to an injurious extent,
to serve a notice on the occupier of the factory to adopt mechanical
or other means for its removal, but subjecting the notice in case
of objection by the occupier to the same process of arbitration as
the notice of fencing for dangerous machinery provided in the Act of
1844. In both cases the power of the employer to send the notice to
arbitration was repealed by the Act of 1891, and, consequently, the
ordinary procedure for the inspector to enforce such notices was by
establishment of the evidence in support of his requirement in the
ordinary courts. For the first time some provision was made in 1891 for
means of escape in case of fire in factories and workshops. Certifying
surgeons were now called upon to report annually as to the persons
inspected and the results of inspection.
On the Act of 1891 followed a period of greatly increased
administrative activity with the new powers to initiate detailed
regulation for promotion of special hygiene in factory and workshop
life. No fewer than sixteen trades, including the majority of those
referred to in the reports of Royal Commissioners and special medical
experts of the earlier and middle parts of the century, were certified,
under sections, by the Secretary of State, as dangerous or injurious
within four years of the passing of the Act.[21] The Act of 1895,
extending greatly in several directions the sanitary control of
industrial life, followed on this period of increased activity, after
the Royal Commission on Labour had reported on the results of its wide
survey of industrial conditions, after two important Departmental
Committees had reported on lead and phosphorus industries, and after
two successive annual reports had embodied reports and recommendations
from the women inspectors who in 1893 were first added by the Home
Office to the staff of factory inspectors. In the year in which this
Act came into force, medical knowledge was established as a guiding
factor in the permanent administration of the Department. Probably no
more important step towards control of use of poisonous substances
in manufacture has been taken than that contained in the provision
for reports to the Chief Inspector from every medical practitioner
attending in certain cases of poisoning contracted in any factory or
workshop. Complementary to this is an extension of the province of
certifying surgeons; it included now not only examination of workers
under sixteen, but also the duty of inquiry and report in certain
cases of industrial disease and accident, and, under special rules,
where required, periodical re-examination of workers. In the general
provisions of the Act appear for the first time the questions of
reasonable temperature, requirement of lavatories where poisonous
substances are used, formerly only touched by special rules; it
became possible by order of a court of summary jurisdiction to secure
prohibition of use of dangerous structures or a dangerous machine
until the necessary steps had been taken to remove the danger by the
occupier of the factory or workshop. The field of factory regulation
was extended by the inclusion of certain conditions of health and
safety in “laundries,” and of general and special conditions of safety
in every dock, wharf, quay, and warehouse. In the special rules it
became possible for the Secretary of State, subject to the award
of arbitrators if objection were raised, to introduce provisions
prohibiting or limiting employment of any classes of persons in the
industries scheduled as dangerous, a power which has been exercised in
the case of white lead works (prohibition of women’s employment in the
most dangerous processes), vulcanising of indiarubber by bisulphide of
carbon (limitation of hours of adults), and lead smelting works (limit
of spells in cleaning flues).
A few words must be said about the dangerous industry of quarrying
in open quarries (as distinct from underground quarries under the
Metalliferous Mines Act). These were nominally under the Factory Acts
by section 93 of 1878, but it was not until special rules could be
introduced under the Act of 1891 that any practical steps could be
taken at all to enforce the particular measures of safety applicable
to the conditions. These proved inadequate, and in 1894, on the
recommendations of a Special Committee appointed in 1893 to inquire
into the whole matter, a special Quarries Act was passed which, while
retaining those provisions of the Factory Acts that were suitable, such
as fencing and regulation of employment, applied also those provisions
of the Metalliferous Mines Acts which from the nature of the industry
rendered them better adapted for control of its peculiar dangers; at
the same time the administration passed to the Mines Department, and
in a few years it was reported that special rules for safety had been
established in over 2000 quarries with satisfactory results.
Much remains to be said of the methods of regulation of injurious and
dangerous industries since 1896;[22] of the steps taken by inquiries
and action of the permanent staff, with its increasingly expert
character; of inquiries by Departmental Committees and by specially
appointed advisers on scientific and technical aspects of processes;
of endeavours, successful and unsuccessful, to frame and carry through
special rules without resort to arbitration to meet the risks to
the life and health of whole classes of workers; of the results of
arbitration in two of the most injurious industries, manufacture of
earthenware and china, and of lucifer matches, where white or yellow
phosphorus is used. All this, however, belongs so much to current
history and controversy that its true meaning and tendency can best
be brought out later, and perhaps by a more detached observer. At
the very time when the proofs of this sketch leave my hands, an
important Bill is passing to report stage in the House of Commons
from the Grand Committee on Trade, where opinion has been shown to be
practically unanimous in regard to the substitution of a better method
of establishing special rules for the precarious and clumsy method of
arbitration; power has been taken to prohibit, limit, or control use
of any material or process in industry; and, where fruitful extension
has been made of the principle of legislating, for details in matters
of health by means of departmental orders. Enough has, I trust, been
said to illustrate the rise and growth in the last hundred years of the
still new ideas of the claim of the industrial worker in a civilised
country to reasonable, practical measures to secure his immunity from
needless suffering, of the claim of the community that the profits of
manufacture shall not be bought at the expense of the life and health
of citizens, in whose individual well-being the true wealth of the
community lies.
ADELAIDE M. ANDERSON.
CHAPTER III
REGULATION OF INJURIOUS OR DANGEROUS OCCUPATIONS IN FACTORIES
AND WORKSHOPS IN SOME OF THE CHIEF EUROPEAN COUNTRIES.
In the historical sketch of the development in England of factory and
workshop hygiene, I have endeavoured to indicate the groundwork on
which special regulations for dangers arising out of the nature or
the organisation of particular processes rest. Comprehension of the
meaning of regulations for industrial health in other countries would
be greatly increased for the student of this branch of comparative
legislation and administration, if there were knowledge of the
historical development of these institutions not only in one but in all
the countries touched on. But then, equally so would there be gain in
acquiring practical administrative experience in all those countries.
Although both kinds of knowledge are not equally impracticable of
attainment by one individual, the limits of space and time in such a
chapter as this prohibit any attempt to enter on either field so far as
details are concerned, and it is only possible to take the absolutely
necessary step of entering a warning against over-estimation of the
value of comparative surveys of systems of factory law and schemes of
administration which are not followed by further research. With a view
to such further research I trust that the slight survey attempted here
may be of value.
While fully appreciating the need of supplementing study of the law
relating to factory hygiene in any country by reference to the system
of local government and the law relating to public health, I am
compelled by the limits already touched on to concentrate attention on
the one branch of law--factory legislation proper.
England stands in a special position, with its own qualities and own
defects. Having entered long before most other European countries on
the path of control of employment in factories owing to the earlier
need of such regulation, and having admittedly also led the way in
the task of building up a complete and precise sanitary code for
regulation of public health, England has shown in the later stages
of the part of the work which touches industry too little interest
in the later efforts, on different lines of other countries. This
slowness is traceable in part to the same causes as those which have
retarded in England the general study of comparative legislation and
administration, of which foremost, no doubt, stands the necessity of
developing on national lines our own safeguards, yet it seems probable
that the country which in a singular degree stimulated European
progress in Public Health by the justly famous “Report on the Sanitary
Condition of the Labouring Population,” 1838, and its immediate
fruits, has latterly retarded its own progress in industrial hygiene
by too close an adherence to its own methods. However this may be,
it is clear that whereas Continental thinkers have already begun to
utter warnings as to the limits of the value of comparative study of
labour legislation, we in England are still waiting for sufficient
material and accurate information on which to base any comparisons at
all. Even for those who have time to do little more than mould their
opinions by reading the daily and weekly papers, still more for those
who desire to devote more time to these subjects, it would be well if
we had continually accessible, in convenient form, current documents
which would enable us to estimate more exactly what we have to learn
from other countries, and what are the ideas applied there which are
capable of application here under different circumstances of social
and administrative tradition and legislative groundwork.[23] And to
understand any one branch of factory legislation, even the sanitary,
engineering, and medical side of prevention of industrial diseases and
accidents, knowledge must be acquired of other sides, the economic one
of limitation of hours and times of work, and protection of workers in
making their contract, no less than the social side of propriety of
arrangements in the workplace, and direct or indirect protection of
women, home life, and children’s training. The time has come, however,
when there is a new readiness for the interchange of ideas between this
country and others on the question of general provision for sanitation
and special regulation for dangerous, unhealthy, and injurious
occupations. As I have said elsewhere, “with the rise and development
of new methods and even entire industries in new places, old and new
dangers and diseases are rapidly becoming clearer. The international
interest in applying science at an equal pace to the development and to
the sanitation of injurious industries is at once more equal and more
urgent than in the indirectly hygienic questions of hours and holidays
for industrial workers. At the same time the difficulties of regulation
are far less prominently economic, legal or social, and more especially
questions for treatment by expert scientific advisers.”
In order to estimate with an approach to accuracy the value of special
measures adopted in other countries, it is necessary to obtain some
idea of the ordinary scope of factory legislation, and of the degree
in which the laws are made operative by methods of administration, and
by sanctions attached to contraventions. The regulations for ordinary
health and safety, which “at first blush” bear considerable resemblance
to each other, are found on closer examination to have widely differing
effectiveness, owing perhaps in one case to lack of precise definition
or to special limitation of the class of workplaces covered; in another
to the powers conferred both on local and on central authorities to
sanction exceptions either to the Industrial Code, or orders made
under it; in another to local variations in economic organisation of
industries affected. For example, on the first point, more cases of
disputed application of the code, which contains no _definition_
of the term “factory,” have in Germany come before the courts than
in England, and in Germany the special restrictions as regards hours
and health for women and young workers apply only in “factories.” The
various decisions, on particular instances, of the Supreme Court lay
stress now on one feature, now on another, of what is understood as a
factory, such as numbers employed, size of the building, subdivision
of labour, active personal share of the employer in the processes.
Application of mechanical power to manufacture by machinery generally
brings a workplace under the scope of the factory regulations, but
power is retained for the Federal Council to exempt even from this
rule any special undertaking. The Austrian Industrial Code does define
the term “factory,” but very much on the lines threshed out by the
decisions of the German _Reichsgericht_. In both these countries
there is much less control of conditions of labour in workshops than
in factories, although Austria makes rather less distinction than
Germany between the two. Whereas England distinguishes these two
classes of workplace only by relegating general sanitary control of
the workshops to the local authority, not by differing requirements,
France makes none of the distinction between factory and workshop which
in one form or another is found in other European countries. In both
these countries the general protection of the law covers alike factory
and workshop employé; in Germany the Code has not gone further than
to empower the Federal Council to extend the factory regulations, if
cause should be found, to workshops. “Domestic workshops” are entirely
exempt from regulation of labour in Germany and Austria. England
stands alone in defining limits in domestic workshops for the labour
of children and young persons, but hitherto has not taken the power of
applying special sanitary regulation,[24] which both France and Belgium
possess, for protection against dangerous or unhealthy occupations
carried on in them. From even so brief a review of the classes of
workplaces covered, it easily appears how in the past in some countries
the domestic workshops in dangerous industries, _e.g._, lucifer
match making (unknown except in factories in England), have furnished a
disproportionate number of victims of industrial disease.
While the first question necessarily is, what are the workplaces
covered by the regulations? the second and equally important is, what
is the system of inspection? In most countries, as in England, the
institution of a special inspectorate has followed, not accompanied,
the enactment of measures of protection, even though in some countries
the idea of sanitary regulation has preceded limitation of hours for
women and minors. In Belgium, Holland, and Sweden the institution dates
from 1888–9; in Switzerland, and some of the German States, beginning
with Prussia, it dates from 1878; in Austria, from about 1887; France,
from 1874; Denmark, 1873. About 1892 to 1893 both France and Belgium
undertook the reorganisation of their inspectorate, which corresponds
to the thorough reconstruction that in England followed the Royal
Commission on Factory Legislation in 1876.
In several of these countries, all of which had originally to some
extent looked to the far earlier example and experience of England in
enforcement of the law, the important step was taken, considerably
in advance of England, of bringing into the factory service medical,
engineering, and chemical expert knowledge. No doubt in England, the
delay in this matter is directly traceable to the character stamped
on the institution by the educational, moral, and social origin of
our Factory Acts, and to the very recent beginnings of development
(1883–1891) of a special basis of factory hygiene. The delay in England
was probably further increased by the introduction (referred to in my
historical sketch) of tentative investigations of industrial diseases
under the ægis of an entirely separate Government Department, concerned
with local government and administration of the law relating to public
health. This delay as compared with Germany was, however, more than
compensated, when the Act of 1891 had introduced special means of
control of injurious trades, by the centralised, organised character
of the English inspectorate. Although the German Federal Council can
make regulations for injurious industries throughout the Empire which
over-ride special state or local rules, still each state has hitherto
appointed its own inspectors, and when appointed these inspectors in
order to enforce the rules must ordinarily report infringements to the
local police authority, who may or may not always take action. Thus
in Germany uniformity of administration in such matters outside the
boundary of any state, so far as it depends on centralised supervision,
can hardly be looked for. Much more closely knit is the Austrian
inspectorate, with its chief inspector, who has some expert advisers
on his staff, and power himself to take part in final decisions on
cases brought up, on appeal, to the industrial authority of third and
final instance at the Ministry of the Interior. Only in Austria, so far
as I know, is it obligatory in fixing a penalty for a contravention
to take into account both the amount of advantage the offender might
expect from the infringement and the amount of harm that the worker
may suffer. The latter consideration would be weightiest in questions
of health and safety, and since the fines have to be paid into local
provident funds for workers, would correspond to the penal compensation
in case of injury through neglect to fence machinery possible under
English law. Medical and chemical reports are less prominent in the
Austrian inspectorate than the German, and it has been distinctly laid
down that the inspectors are not so much engineering and sanitary
experts as a special institution for the protection of labour; since
1876 the supervision of dangerous and unhealthy industries has been
one of the functions of the provincial authorities for public health.
Although in France the inspectorate has been organised on lines, so far
as territorial divisions are concerned, similar to those in England,
_i.e._, with district and superintending inspectors, it is without
a chief inspector, and works under the general supervision of a
commission (_Commission supérieure du Travail dans l’Industrie_).
This system has been declared by one of the oldest superintending or
divisional inspectors to work most unsatisfactorily in the matter
of control of dangerous industries where the great need is that the
circumstances not of a locality, but the country as a whole, should be
considered by a chief having under his directions both expert officials
and an organised staff. The special expert character of the central
Belgian inspectorate is determined by the fact that the earliest
inspectors were appointed (1889) under the law relating to sanitation
and safety in dangerous or unhealthy industries, and not under the
law limiting hours of labour for women and children. The latter were
first appointed in 1891, and the whole service organised as one in
1895. Of the Scandinavian countries Denmark has had the most definitely
constituted inspectorate, but here the central authority has hitherto
been divided (as it was before 1876 in England) between two principal
inspectors. This is now altered. An Act which came into force on 1st
January 1902, not only amends and strengthens the law relating to
factories, but also centralises the control by providing for a single
chief or director with two expert secretaries, one trained in economic
questions, the other in technical questions. Of the remaining European
countries Hungary possesses an organised and centralised inspectorate
of the English type. In Russia control of the methods of inspectors
is by a system of Provincial Boards under the supreme supervision of
the Chief Factory and Mining Board, presided over by the Minister of
Finance, who places some of the principal inspectors on the Board.
I may turn from the field of application of the laws and methods
of organising inspection to the methods of securing _general_
sanitary conditions and security in workplaces. England stands alone in
both delegating certain sanitary powers to local authorities, and at
the same time retaining power to the Government inspectors to intervene
in these matters in case of default of the local authority, and yet
we have nothing quite comparable to the powers of health authorities
in Belgium, Germany, and Austria, to lay down in certificates of
authorisation for large numbers of workplaces, conditions aimed at
securing the health of the workers as well as the public health. In
some cases, particularly in Belgium, this power extends beyond the
trades here classed as noxious or offensive, and includes amongst
many trades recognised as injurious to workers even laundries, one
of the last of the great manual industries to be regulated in this
country. Quite early in the nineteenth century we find laundries
appearing in French lists of noxious or offensive trades under two
classes, (_a_) as requiring authorisation for establishment near
dwellings, (_b_) as requiring internal supervision on account of
decomposing soap and water. In Germany and Austria, lists of trades
subject to preliminary authorisation are shorter than in Belgium, but
there is nothing in other countries equivalent to the absolute duty
placed upon German local authorities, apart from all initiative of
numerous Government inspectors, to visit every industrial establishment
where protected persons are employed at least once in six months, in
order to apply the provisions of the industrial code in all matters
relating to safety, sanitation, and propriety of arrangements. Further,
we have in England nothing comparable to the powers of the separate
State Authorities in Germany to call in the advice of the Accident
Assurance Associations under the Accident Insurance Laws in order to
restrict hours of labour in dangerous occupations, or to carry into
effect the general requirements of the Code relating to safety and
health. In general, in comparing special rules against dangers in
industry as between England and Germany, due weight must be given
to the consideration that for many years in Germany there has been
insurance for workers both against accident and sickness; also it must
be remembered that the Civil Code lays a positive obligation on every
master to secure for his servants arrangements for health, safety,
and morality in their employment such as are also required in the
Industrial Code. We are, moreover, in Austria and Germany reviewing
countries in which traces of the old guild organisation of industry
survive both in law and fact, and the industrial codes, while defining
the duties of employers to workers, expressly require obedience and
fidelity from the worker to his employer. Discipline thus is a far
easier matter in a German than an English workplace, a factor of very
considerable importance in regulation of dangerous trades.
It would not be difficult to demonstrate in tabular form that England
and Germany stand easily first among the European countries in respect
of detailed attempts to regulate unhealthy industries by special
Government rules, but it must suffice presently to set forth the
trades so regulated in these two, while touching on some of the salient
features of special rules in other countries. First, however, it must
be indicated how the various countries stand to each other in such
general matters as ventilation and lighting of workrooms, temperature,
provision of meal rooms, cloak rooms, lavatories, drinking water,
arrangements for sanitary accommodation, reporting and prevention of
accidents.
As regards _ventilation_, until the Bill of 1901 to amend the
Factory Acts was introduced by the Government, England stood almost
alone in requiring removal of air from workrooms _only_ so far
as injurious dust, gases, and vapours arose from the manufacturing
process. The laws of Germany, Austria, and Belgium recognised much
earlier the need of ample ventilation in a workroom, quite apart from
the special question of removal of poisonous or injurious products of
manufacture, although for those too sufficient provision had been made.
In Belgium, general ventilation of workrooms was one of the special
conditions of authorisation of unhealthy trades under a decree of 1886,
but in 1894 it was particularly laid down for all workshops that means
of securing renewal of the air equal to at least 30 cubic metres per
hour per worker should be provided, and that where unhealthy processes
were carried on, the removal should be equal to 60 cubic metres. “The
inlets for fresh air and outlets for vitiated air shall be so placed
as to cause no inconvenience to workers.” On this followed the further
provisions for exhaust ventilation for steam, gases, and dust. A French
decree of the same year is rather less exacting in the matter of
general ventilation, but more precise as to the measures necessary for
removing or preventing injurious dusts, gases, and steam. In Austria
and Germany, in addition to the general proviso that workrooms are to
be maintained in such a condition as to secure the health of workers,
both general ventilation and special provision for removing dust and
fumes are required. These requirements are of much earlier date than
the French and German decrees referred to. General ventilation and
removal of dust from workrooms are required in Hungary by the law of
1893, and will be in Denmark by the law to come into force in 1902.
As regards _lighting_ of workrooms, a condition of health almost
as important as ventilation, several of the more important industrial
countries have provisions, although England has hitherto left the
matter untouched. Germany by section 128, and Austria by section 74,
of their respective industrial codes recognise sufficient light as
an essential condition of health in factories. In France provision is
made for proper lighting of workrooms and also of passages, staircases,
and other accessory parts of factories and workshops. In Belgium and
Denmark lighting has hitherto been required as a measure of safety,
not of health. On the other hand, the important sanitary question of
_temperature_ is more carefully provided for by the general law
now in England than in the codes of other countries.