Clearing The Air: The Rise And Fall Of Smoking In The Workplace
by Gregory Wood /
2016 / English / PDF
4.5 MB Download
In
InClearing the Air
Clearing the Air, Gregory Wood examines smoking's
importance to the social and cultural history of working people
in the twentieth-century United States. Now that most workplaces
in the United States are smoke-free, it may be difficult to
imagine the influence that nicotine addiction once had on the
politics of worker resistance, workplace management, occupational
health, vice, moral reform, grassroots activism, and the labor
movement. The experiences, social relations, demands, and
disputes that accompanied smoking in the workplace in turn shaped
the histories of antismoking politics and tobacco control.The
steady expansion of cigarette smoking among men, women, and
children during the first half of the twentieth century brought
working people into sustained conflict with managers’ demands for
diligent attention to labor processes and work rules. Addiction
to nicotine led smokers to resist and challenge policies that
coldly stood between them and the cigarettes they craved. Wood
argues that workers’ varying abilities to smoke on the job
stemmed from the success or failure of sustained opposition to
employer policies that restricted or banned smoking. During World
War II, workers in defense industries, for example, struck
against workplace smoking bans. By the 1970s, opponents of
smoking in workplaces began to organize, and changing medical
knowledge and dwindling union power contributed further to the
downfall of workplace smoking. The demise of the ability to smoke
on the job over the past four decades serves as an important
indicator of how the power of workers’ influence in
labor-management relations has dwindled over the same period.
, Gregory Wood examines smoking's
importance to the social and cultural history of working people
in the twentieth-century United States. Now that most workplaces
in the United States are smoke-free, it may be difficult to
imagine the influence that nicotine addiction once had on the
politics of worker resistance, workplace management, occupational
health, vice, moral reform, grassroots activism, and the labor
movement. The experiences, social relations, demands, and
disputes that accompanied smoking in the workplace in turn shaped
the histories of antismoking politics and tobacco control.The
steady expansion of cigarette smoking among men, women, and
children during the first half of the twentieth century brought
working people into sustained conflict with managers’ demands for
diligent attention to labor processes and work rules. Addiction
to nicotine led smokers to resist and challenge policies that
coldly stood between them and the cigarettes they craved. Wood
argues that workers’ varying abilities to smoke on the job
stemmed from the success or failure of sustained opposition to
employer policies that restricted or banned smoking. During World
War II, workers in defense industries, for example, struck
against workplace smoking bans. By the 1970s, opponents of
smoking in workplaces began to organize, and changing medical
knowledge and dwindling union power contributed further to the
downfall of workplace smoking. The demise of the ability to smoke
on the job over the past four decades serves as an important
indicator of how the power of workers’ influence in
labor-management relations has dwindled over the same period.