Award-winning ergonomist Karen Messing is talking with women—women who wire circuit boards, sew clothes, clean toilets, drive forklifts, care for children, serve food, run labs. What she finds is a workforce in harm’s way, choked into silence, whose physical and mental health invariably comes in second place: underestimated, underrepresented, understudied, underpaid.Should workplaces treat all bodies the same? With confidence, empathy, and humour, Messing navigates the minefield th...

In 1978, when workers at a nearby phosphate refinery learned that the ore they processed was contaminated with radioactive dust, Karen Messing, then a new professor of molecular genetics, was called in to help. Unsure of what to do with her discovery that exposure to the radiation was harming the workers and their families, Messing contacted senior colleagues but they wouldn’t help. Neither the refinery company nor the scientific community was interested in the scary results of her chromos...

Families left grieving; small businesses shuttered; communities in lockdown; precarious workers set adrift; health care workers stressed beyond endurance. The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the world to its core. But the cracks already ran deep.Featuring essays on poverty, health care, incarceration, basic income, policing, Indigenous communities, and more, this anthology delivers a stinging rebuke of the pre-pandemic status quo and a stark exposé of the buried weaknesses in our soci...

The next generation of family from the bestselling Gap Creek confront economic uncertainty and wartime in rural Appalachia in this "moving, lyrical saga" ( Kirkus Reviews , starred review).One of America's most acclaimed writers returns to the land on which he has staked a literary claim to paint an indelible portrait of a family in a time of unprecedented change.In a co...

In Latin, the word for doctor isn’t healer—it’s teacher.Dilan Ellegala, an accomplished American neurosurgeon, had reached the highest rungs of the American medical establishment but was on the verge of burning out. In search of personal restoration, he risked his career to take a sabbatical at a remote missionary hospital in Haydon, Tanzania.He discovered a medical world entirely different from the one he knew. Tanzania has just two docto...

Before 1980, sick building syndrome did not exist. By the 1990s, it was among the most commonly investigated occupational health problems in the United States. Afflicted by headaches, rashes, and immune system disorders, office workers—mostly women—protested that their workplaces were filled with toxic hazards; yet federal investigators could detect no chemical cause. This richly detailed history tells the story of how sick building syndrome came into being: how indoor exposures to chemica...

This is a discussion of the transformation of drug use (especially morphine and cocaine, which was once commonly available in any chemist's shop) into a national menace. It revolves around the death of Billie Carleton, a West End musical actress, in 1918. Its cast of characters includes Brilliant Chang, a Chinese restaurant proprietor and Edgar Manning, a jazz drummer from Jamaica. They were eventually identified as the villains of the affair and invested with a highly charged sexual menac...

In the first half of the 20th century, strikes and Union battles, murders and frame-ups, were common in every industrial center in the U.S. But none of these episodes compared in scope to the West Virginia Mine Wars.The uprisings of coal miners that defined the Mine Wars of the 1920’s were a direct result of the Draconian rule of the coal companies. The climax was the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest open and armed rebellion in U.S. history. The Battle, and Union leader Bill B...

This peer-reviewed series promotes theory and research in the expanding area of occupational stress, health and well-being. Each volume of this series focuses on a particular topic, allowing authors and readers in that area to critically explore the cutting edge work from their discipline. Interest in organizational demography spans several decades (e.g., Pfeffer, 1983). However, in much of the contemporary research on occupational stress and well-being, demographic factors such as gender,...

Nursing is typically understood, and understands itself, as a care-giving occupation. It is through its relationships with patients – whether these are absent, present, good, bad or indifferent – that modern day nursing is defined. Yet nursing work extends far beyond direct patient care activities. Across the spectrum of locales in which they are employed, nurses, in numerous ways, support and sustain the delivery and organisation of health services. In recent history, however, this wider ...

The reform of the financial-industrial infrastructure cannot be undertaken without considering fully the political culture in which it exists. But such reforms can only best be initiated from within the capitalist system itself by those most technically competent to effect necessary change, and hence this book calls upon the business community to take such an initiative.Whilst the first volume of this work traced the development of the new majority and its potential readiness to pr...

For over 60 years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has worked tirelessly to address infectious diseases and other health hazards. Through the vision of Dr. Joseph W. Mountin, the Communicable Disease Center was created in 1946 as the successor to Malaria Control in War Areas (MCWA), a division of the Public Health Service based in Atlanta. The new agency, CDC, was charged with monitoring and controlling malaria, typhus, and other infectious diseases nationwide. Successful in...