Confined Space

A newsletter of workplace safety and labor issues

Books, Resources and Publications

Resources

Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect (2025): The AFL-CIO’s must-have resource for everything you every wanted to know about the state of workplace safety and health in the United States

Books

  • Alice Hamilton: A Life in Letters: Letters of Alice Hamilton, a pioneer in the study of diseases of the workplace, a founder of industrial toxicology in the United States, and Harvard’s first woman professor.
  • American Apocalypse, Rena Steinzor. In the spirit of “Know Your Enemy,” the time couldn’t be better for this book by (retired) University of Maryland Professor Rena Steinzor. Steinzor describes how corporations, the Tea Party, the House Freedom Caucus, the Federalist Society, What Evangelicals and armed militias, all the basic elements of MAGA are fighting a battle of attrition against the federal government, attempting to deconstruct the administrative state that provides essential protections for workers, consumers and the environment. Her goal is to remind us that only by recognizing what we are up against can we hope to bring about change.
  • American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment, Shane Bauer. Bauer describes conditions in America’s privately run prisons where corporations cut corners on the safety of prisoners and corrections officers, skimp on training and don’t pay enough to keep quality staff.
  • Bargaining for Stop Work Authority to Prevent Injuries and Save Lives, The United Steelworkers Union. Stop Work Authority (SWA) is the right of workers to stop unsafe work and processes until the potential hazard is thoroughly investigated and abated to the satisfaction of workers, the union and management. The publication is intended to help local unions win effective SWA processes in collective bargaining agreements with management.
  • Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present and Future of American Labor, Steven Greenhouse. Former New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse describes the rise and fall of American labor and how the labor movement made America a fairer, more democratic country.  Explores how workers are trying to take that power back.
  • The Cancer Factory, Jim Morris. Veteran investigative journalist Jim Morris tells the stories of one group of workers that fell victim to this country’s failure to control chemical exposures. Morris focuses in on workers at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company chemical plant in Niagara Falls, New York, who were exposed to ortho-toluidine, a chemical used in the plant since since 1957 to make tires more pliant. Ortho-toluidine also causes bladder cancer. Full Confined Space review here
  • Code White: Sounding the Alarm on Violence against Health Care Workers, Margaret M. Keith and James T. Brophy. Describes the root causes and possible solution to violent assaults against health care workers in Canada. Just as relevant for American advocates.
  • Deceit and Denial, Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner. Details the attempts by the chemical and lead industries to deceive Americans about the dangers that their deadly products present to workers, the public, and consumers.
  • The Desperate Hours: One Hospital’s Fight to Save a City on the Pandemic’s Front Lines, Marie Brenner. In the spring of 2020, COVID-19 arrived in New York City. Before long, America’s largest metropolis was at war against a virus that mercilessly swept through its five boroughs. It became apparent that if Covid wasn’t somehow halted, the death count in New York alone would be in the hundreds of thousands. And if New York’s hospitals failed, what chance did the rest of the country have? A remarkable depiction of a city in crisis – based on new, behind-the-scenes reporting – that captures the resilience, peril, and compassion of the early days of the Covid pandemic.
  • Dirty Work Essential Jobs & the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, Eyal Press. A groundbreaking, urgent report from the front lines of dirty work–the work that society considers essential but morally compromised. Drone pilots who carry out targeted assassinations. Undocumented immigrants who man the “kill floors” of industrial slaughterhouses. Guards who patrol the wards of the United States’ most violent and abusive prisons. In Dirty Work, Eyal Press offers a paradigm-shifting view of the moral landscape of contemporary America through the stories of people who perform society’s most ethically troubling jobs. As Press shows, we are increasingly shielded and distanced from an array of morally questionable activities that other, less privileged people perform in our name.
  • Diseases of Workers, Bernardino Ramazzini: Originally published in 1700 (not a typo) by the true father of workplace safety and health.
  • Doubt is Their Product, Dr. David Michaels: Michaels reveals how the tobacco industry’s duplicitous tactics spawned a multimillion dollar industry that is dismantling public health safeguards and how product defense consultants have increasingly skewed the scientific literature, manufactured and magnified scientific uncertainty, and influenced policy decisions to the advantage of polluters and the manufacturers of dangerous products.
  • Dying to Work, Jonathan D. Karmel. Karmel offers readable, powerful human stories of workplace injuries and illnesses, and well-presented arguments for addressing these issues.
  • Exploring the Dangerous Trades, Alice Hamilton, the autobiography of the mother of occupational safety and health.
  • Failure to Learn: The BP Texas City Refinery Disaster, Andrew Hopkins: The causes of a major explosion at the Texas City Oil Refinery on March 23, 2005, that killed 15 workers and injured more than 170 others.
  • Fight Like Hell, Kim Kelly. Kelly celebrates the untold stories and unsung heroes of the American labor movement, taking great care to center voices that have historically been sidelined or silenced in mainstream conversations around workers’ rights. The result is an inclusive, fascinating, and galvanizing retrospective that mines the depths of the history of the working class to extract precious insight and inspiration for its future.
  • Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, Peter Robison: A tragic and infuriating story of how corporate greed, regulatory malfeasance and racism led to the death of 346 persons.
  • Ghost Map, Steven Johnson: A thrilling historical account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London, and a brilliant exploration of how Dr. John Snow’s solution revolutionized the way we think about disease, cities, science, and the modern world.
  • The Good Hand, Michael Patrick Smith. Michael Patrick Smith tells the story of migrant workers who came from all across America and other continents to get jobs they couldn’t get back home. It’s the story of fear, danger, exhaustion, suffering, loneliness, and grit that explores the struggles of America’s marginalized boomtown workers — oil field hands who, in the age of climate change, put the gas in our tanks.
  • The Great Escape, Saket Soni. In early 2007, Saket Soni, a 28-year-old, Indian-born community organizer received an anonymous phone call from an Indian migrant worker inside a Mississippi labor camp. He and 500 other men were living in squalor in Gulf Coast “man camps,” surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, crammed into cold trailers with putrid portable toilets, forced to eat moldy bread and frozen rice. Worse, lured by the promise of good work and green cards, the men had desperately scraped together up to $20,000 each to apply for this “opportunity” to rebuild oil rigs after Hurricane Katrina, putting their families into impossible debt. During a series of clandestine meetings, Soni and the workers devise a bold plan. American Promise Soni traces the workers’ extraordinary escape, their march on foot to Washington DC, and their 31-day hunger strike to bring attention to their cause. Along the way, ICE agents try to deport the men, company officials work to discredit them, and politicians avert their eyes. But none of this shakes the workers’ determination to win their dignity and keep their promises to their families.
  • Inviting Disaster: Lessons From the Edge, James Chiles: a riveting investigation into the causes and often brutal consequences of technological breakdowns. Insights into the increasingly frequent machine disasters that haunt our lives.
  • Janesville, Amy Goldstein: An intimate account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, and a larger story of the hollowing of the American middle class.
  • The Jungle, Upton Sinclair. The original American novel about working conditions facing American workers — many of them immigrants — in the early part of the 20th century. A classic.
  • Life’s Work: A Fifty Year Photographic Chronicle of Working in the U.S.A., Earl Dotter. This book contains 500 of Earl’s photographs of working Americans. Buy several.
  • Living and Dying on the Factory Floor, David Ranney. Ranney’s vivid memoir describes his work experiences between 1976 and 1982 in the factories of southeast Chicago and northwest Indiana. The author takes the reader on a walk through the heart of Chicago’s South Side, observing the noise, heavy traffic, the 24-hour restaurants and bars, the rich diversity of people on the streets at all hours of the day and night, and the smell of the highly polluted air. Factory life includes stints at a machine shop, a shortening factory, a railroad car factory, a structural steel shop, a box factory, a chemical plant, and a paper cup factory. Along the way there is a wildcat strike, an immigration raid, shop-floor actions protesting supervisor abuses, serious injuries, a failed effort to unionize, and a murder.
  • The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor, Les Leopold: The life of the late Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union leader who’s struggle to address the unconscionable toxic exposure of tens of thousands of workers led to the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act and included work alongside nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood. His noble, high-profile efforts forever changed working conditions in American industry–and made him enemy number one to a powerful few.
  • New Jack, Ted Conover. Conover, a journalist and university professor, recounts his experience of learning about the New York State correctional system by becoming a correctional officer for nearly a year.
  • Normal Accidents,  Living with High-Risk Technologies, Charles Perrow provides a detailed analysis of complex systems and how to analyze accidents from a sociological perspective.
  • On the Job The Untold Story of Americas Work Centers & the New Fight for Wages Dignity & Health, Celeste Monforton and Jane M. Von Bergen. The two health and safety specialists tell the inspiring story of worker centers that are cropping up across the country and transforming the labor movement. “The real story is that while traditional labor unions have declined in membership, labor organizing is alive. It’s inspiring and succeeding. Workers in low-wage and other precarious work arrangements are building and growing worker support organizations in their communities.”
  • Pain and Prejudice: What science can learn about work from the people who do it, by Karen Messing. For decades, Messing has studied cases of workers around the world-factory workers, cleaners, checkout clerks, bank tellers, food servers, nurses, teachers-suffering and in pain without any help from the very scientists and occupational health experts whose work was supposed to make their lives easier.
  • Poisoned City: Flints Water & the American Urban Tragedy, by Anna Clark. The first full account of the Flint, Michigan, water scandal, an American tragedy, with new details, from Anna Clark, the award-winning Michigan journalist who has covered the story from its beginnings.
  • The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of Americas Shining Women, Kate Moore, This is the tragic story of the girls who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with self-luminous paint.
  • Rise gonna rise: A portrait of southern textile workers, Mimi Conway
  • Refinery Town, Steve Early: A chronicle of the fifteen years of successful community organizing that raised the local minimum wage, defeated a casino development project, challenged home foreclosures and evictions, and sought fair taxation of Big Oil in a town that was home to one of the largest oil refineries in the state, suffering from poverty, pollution, poorly funded public services, one of the highest homicide rates per capita in the country and a jobless rate twice the national average.
  • Scraping By: Wage Labor Slavery & Survival in Early Baltimore, Seth Rockman. Enslaved mariners, white seamstresses, Irish dockhands, free black domestic servants, and native-born street sweepers all navigated the low-end labor market in post-Revolutionary Baltimore. Seth Rockman considers this diverse workforce, exploring how race, sex, nativity, and legal status determined the economic opportunities and vulnerabilities of working families in the early republic. Rockman describes the material experiences of low-wage workers—how they found work, translated labor into food, fuel, and rent, and navigated underground economies and social welfare systems.  Rockman argues that the American working class emerged from the everyday struggles of these low-wage workers. Their labor was indispensable to the early republic’s market revolution, and it was central to the transformation of the United States into the wealthiest society in the Western world.
  • Soul Full of Coal Dust The True Story of an Epic Battle for Justice, Chris Hamby. A gripping story by award-winning investigative journalist Chris Hamby about how the coal industry, backed by their stable of the best attorneys and “expert” doctor money can buy, cheated thousands of miners suffering from black lung, out of the compensation they deserved. You don’t know whether to cry at the tragedy or feel gratified by the dedication of those who spent their careers fighting for the miners.
  • Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, David Von Drehle: This book tells the tale of the 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory where 146 garment workers—123 women and girls and 23 men—died from the fire, smoke inhalation, falling, or jumping to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Italian or Jewish immigrant women and girls aged 14 to 23. The book also covers the aftermath of the fire where, despite enormous industry resistance, major improvement in workplace and labor law achieved.
  • The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception, Dr. David Michaels. In this easily readable follow-up to his first excellent book, Doubt is Their Product, Michaels describes campaigns by chemical companies and the Republican party corrupt science to sow doubt in the science behind regulations that protect workers, citizens and communities from health and safety hazards.
  • What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis Resistance and Hope in an American City by Mona Hanna Attisha. From the heroic pediatrician who rallied a community and brought the fight for justice to national attention comes a powerful firsthand account of the Flint water crisis–a dramatic story of failed democracy and inspiring citizen advocacy and action.
  • The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, Kirsten Downey. Biography the woman named Secretary of Labor by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, the first woman cabinet member, who spearheaded the fight to improve the lives of Americas working people while juggling her own complex family responsibilities.

Note: Most of the books link to new hard or soft cover copies at Powells, a unionized bookstore in Portland. (And where I get a very small percentage of sales via this blog.) Politics and Prose in Washington DC is another excellent union bookstore.

Where Powells or Politics and Prose doesn’t carry a book, I’ve (reluctantly) linked to Amazon. You may be able to get used or cheaper copies elsewhere. Some are out of print. That’s why God made the internet. Good luck.

Organizations

OSHA: Occupational Safety and Health Administration
NIOSH: National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
ELCOSH: Electronic Library of Construction Occupational Safety and Health
National Council for Occupational Safety and Health: Umbrella organization for the nation’s COSH groups.
United Support & Memorial for Workplace Fatalities: An organization of families who have lost family members in workplace tragedies.