DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Workers At Risk

Voices from the Workplace

Michael S Brown author Dorothy Nelkin author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:The University of Chicago Press

Published:1st Apr '86

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Workers At Risk cover

Workers at Risk is a powerful and moving documentary of workers routinely exposed to toxic chemicals. Products and services we all depend on—glass bottles, computers, processed foods and fresh flowers, dry cleaning, medicines, even sculpture and silkscreened toys—are produced by workers in constant contact with more than 63,000 commercial chemicals. For many of them, the risk of death is a way of life.

More than seventy of them speak here of their jobs, their health, and the difficult choices they face in coming to grips with the responsibilities, risks, fears, and satisfactions of their work. Some struggle for information and acknowledgment of their health risks; others struggle to put out of their minds the dangers they know too well. Through extensive interviews, the authors have captured in these voices that double bind of the chemical worker: "If I had known that it would be that lethal, that it could give me or one of my children cancer, I would have refused to work. But it's a matter of survival and we just don't consider all these things. Meanwhile, we've got to make money to survive."

ISBN: 9780226571287

Dimensions: 23mm x 15mm x 1mm

Weight: 340g

238 pages