I. Definition. Occupational health includes the conditions of any workplace which affect the mental or physical health of the men and women working there-in both long and short range terms. It includes workplaces such as hospitals, offices, and farms as well as factories. For women it includes the added effects of exposure to potentially harmful substances during both child-bearing years and pregnancy. It also includes the physical effects of the corporation on the community.

II. Occupational health issues clearly demonstrate the clash between the logic of profit and the wellbeing of the vast majority of the population. The program therefore sharply demarcates the class divisions in our society, putting on one side the corporations and the array of supporting institutions, from universities, to hospitals to government, and on the other the working class and its allies.

III. Occupational health questions are particularly important for NAM. The ruling class solutions to the economic crisis, as exemplified by Nixon’s New Economic Policy, mean efforts to increase productivity. When the,re is a drive for increased production, safety and health procedures are precisely the first to be ignored. A program around occupational health and safety will be the specific institutional embodiment of the view that the working class is pivotal to the struggle for socialism.

IV. Work in the area of occupational health allows radicals who are not in the workplace to work with rank and file movements or approach less organized workers in a legitimate way. Radicals can be important in linking local groups centered around individual workplaces to broader alliances. Such links will be objectively necessary because many struggles around occupational health and safety occur in isolated places of work, in plants which are part of large corporations-often unionized by many different unions or partially non-union. It has been common for large companies to shift production processes during periods of worker unrest.

V. The legitimate relationship between radicals and the workplace is also reflected in the self-interest of groups working on the problems of ecology, pollution, and consumerism. If the workplace remains poisonous, the outside community cannot be cleaned up. This relationship points to a potentially successful method of approaching the problems of pollution, because it clarifies authentic class alliances and will reveal in struggle the power of the working class—its strength and organization on the job. The solutions raised by coalitions of consumer or ecology groups with worker groups have the potential of uniting the working class with allies. And these solutions need not counterpose clean environment to jobs or decent pay as they have in the past.

Other possible coalitions arise as well: Women workers have special problems. Exposure to toxic substances during pregnancy has often devastating effects in the pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and insecticide industries. Men and women in hospital laboratories and radiology departments who are exposed to excessive radiation any time during child-bearing years may pass damage to unborn generations. Women need rotations and special work considerations during pregnancy (and even during menses) in some jobs. Protective regulations which allow for breaks from work and limitations on lifting would also be healthy for men. Non-white workers are forced into the lowest paying and most dangerous jobs. Finally, the tedium, racism and sexism which accompany the jobs of most women and non-whites add further, immeasurable strains. Victories for a shorter work week at full pay and protection from compulsory overtime not only limit the damaging effects of the workplace but supply more jobs.

VI. Issues of occupational health and safety are at the fore of many shop struggles. Particularly in heavy industry, ferment around intolerable conditions has produced wildcat strikes and work stoppages. Socialists can help spread this kind of activity to other occupations and workplaces. To ignore such problems would be to ignore an important question which is central to the lives and present concerns of many of the most militant people in the working class.

VII. The issues raised by struggles on occupational health and safety are ceritral to the struggle for a socialist transformation of society. The basic antagonism between those who own and run the corporations (and supporting institutions) for private profit and the mass,of the American people who must work in order to survive is sharply drawn. By integrating workplace issues into struggles in. a number of other areas as well, NAM can not only build power for particular struggles, but clarify the class connections between sets of issues that now seem fragmented. And finally, it is ultimately impossible to talk realistically about authentically safe work environments-or external environments-without raising the issues of workers’ control over the organization of the workplace on the one hand, and, on the other, popular control over the ends of production-prqduction dictated by the human needs of all. (A pamphlet describing strategies and tactics of organizing in some detail is preparation)

-Harry Boyte, member National Interim Committee

TASKS

  1. Bring a socialist analysis and program to struggles around occupational health and safety.
  2. Overcome isolation and politically unite individual workplace struggles around occupational health and safety.
  3. Develop joint actions among workers, national, and community groups.
  4. Develop technical resource groups

METHODS OF IMPLEMENTATION

I. National N.A.M. should establish a committee with full-time staff, responsible to the elected national interim administrative body, to implement the following:

  1. Communication
  • among rank-and-file groups through a national rank-and-file news service
  • through NAM publications
  • through the media
  1. Establish and publicize resource pools for technical information about occupational diseases and their treatment.

II. Local

Chapters should establish local occupational health and safety committees composed of workers, technical resource people, radicals, and members of community action groups to carry out the following:

  1. Education Polling workers and community residents to gain and publicize information and to make contact teach-ins using local media, including columns in local newspapers and in local rank-and-file papers, and talk shows election campaigns as a means of raising the occupational health & safety issue.
  2. Direct Action strike support encouraging treatment of occupational diseases in existing free clinics and and demanding that research and treatment facilities of establishment health institutions be devoted to occupational diseases encouraging workplace organizing against dangerous conditions—e.g., slowdowns, refusing to work in unhealthy conditions or to pollute the community forming coalitions with local groups, such as women’s, ecology, and consumer groups, and MCHR