Safe workers: The National Safety Council and the American safety movement, 1900--1930

In 1912, an estimated 2,000,000 American industrial workers were injured annually in the United States, and another 35,000 workers lost their lives each year. As the public outrage surrounding industrial accidents began to coalesce into a large social movement, much of the debate surrounding safety issues started to focus on the engineers who planned the layout of the industrial workplace, designed the machines used by the workers, and streamlined production for maximum efficiency.; Led by Lew Palmer, a group of engineers in the Association of Iron and Steel Electrical Engineers planned the First Cooperative Safety Congress in 1912 as a way of both addressing industrial safety concerns and responding to the criticism directed toward their profession. As they tried to achieve progress in terms of meaningful accident reduction, NSC engineers were surprised at the stiff resistance the workers offered to many of their safety programs, including their educational efforts and their massive poster campaigns. In their attempts to counter this phenomenon, corporate safety officers tried to make adherence to their safety programs compulsory through disciplinary procedures, mandatory physical examinations, and crusades against saloons and other ethnic enclaves. While these efforts were widely applauded by the corporate sponsors and executives involved in the council, they seem to have only increased hostility and resistance to NSC programs among industrial employees.; At about the same time, however, safety engineers at Illinois Steel began to experiment with safety committees comprised entirely of workmen. These committees had the power to examine accidents, impose discipline on co-workers, recommend procedural changes, even critique company management and its policies. Volunteer safety committees began to have a dramatic impact not only upon accident rates, but upon employees' sense of ownership of their working environment.; In trying to prevent industrial accidents, National Safety Council engineers never intended to create a means of increasing worker solidarity or enhance employee participation in management decisions. However, as they sought to find the most efficient and cost effective means of preventing accidents, they inadvertently created and then supported a means of accident reduction that not only saved industrial workers' lives, but also enhanced them.