Confined Space

A newsletter of workplace safety and labor issues

Books, Resources and Publications

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 member in workplace tragedies.

Resources

Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect (2024): 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 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Inviting Disaster, 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.
  • 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 from a sociological perspective.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 bookstore that was recently unionized.

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