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September is the Cruelest Month
- By Ronnie Rittenberry
- Sep 01, 2008
Key events transpiring in years past within this span of 30 days have shaped the OH&S landscape, for better and worse.
Summer has come and passed
The innocent can never last
wake me up when September ends. --Green Day
In his epic work "The Waste Land" (1922), T.S. Eliot wrote convincingly that "April is the cruellest month," but a case can be made for September. Throughout American history, all varieties of disasters have transpired in this ninth month of the year--from shipwrecks to plane crashes to terrorist attacks--the aftermath of which have changed the way we live, work, and simply function as a society. Some of these changes have been subtle, others, such as the events of 9/11 seven years ago, comparatively drastic.
Occupational health and safety industries, ever at the heart of the nation's operation, have been affected by September events in sundry ways. And, of course, not all of these have been negative. It was, for example, on Sept. 20, 1853, that Elisah Graves Otis sold his first "hoist machines" (later called elevators), featuring his patented safety brake that guaranteed to automatically stop a rising platform from falling if the ropes that held it broke and soon equally ensured the transformation of America's (indeed, the world's) landscape, as the invention gave literal rise to the development of skyscrapers.
Twenty-five years later to the day (Sept. 20, 1878), Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, which turned out to be an auspicious birth for the OH&S industry. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author's novel The Jungle, which dealt with deplorable conditions in the U.S. meat packing plants, caused such a sensation upon publication in 1906 that it helped lead to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act later that same year. The PFDA paved the way for the eventual creation of the Food and Drug Administration, and, since its first appearance, The Jungle has never been out of print.
Another industry positive came on Sept. 5, 1882, when the first U.S. Labor Day parade was held in New York City. Created by the labor movement to honor America’s workers, the idea soon caught on in other states. It was 12 years later, in 1894, that Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September an official national holiday, and it is one we have celebrated ever since, even if many of us know nothing about its origins (see sidebar).
Ironically, though, it was also in 1894, on Sept. 4 (the day after that year's Labor Day), that some 12,000 tailors held a strike in New York City against the sweatshop working conditions then prevailing. Seeking to accomplish for the garment industry what Sinclair's novel had done for the meat packing industry, labor leaders and strikers decried the small, overcrowded, poorly ventilated, fire-prone, rat-infested tenement rooms in which the workers toiled, often for little pay. Significant changes in the form of fire safety codes and labor laws affecting minimum wages and worksite conditions were still years away, but the focus on improving if not eradicating the sweatshop milieu was a major force behind workplace safety regulations to come. Conditions were still inferior by March 1911, when a fire inside the Triangle Waist Company factory in the city's garment district--the same district in which the workers held the 1894 strike--killed 146 workers, mostly immigrant Jewish and Italian women in their teens and early 20s. It was the deadliest workplace incident in the city's history until 9/11, and it galvanized the public’s attention, furthering the strikers' cause.
Land and Sea
Henry H. Bliss, age 68, became the first-recorded U.S. traffic fatality when he was struck and killed by an automobile at Central Park West and 74th Street in New York City on Sept. 13, 1899. Things went downhill from there. As more and more people began cranking up motorized vehicles, more and more people died on the nation’s roadways. By 1913, when the National Safety Council was founded (in September--yet another positive for the month), it began working broadly on safety issues, but especially those involving traffic safety and industrial safety. NSC eventually received a congressional charter signed by President Dwight Eisenhower in August 1953.
But the death rate attributable to motor vehicles continued to rise. By 1925, the annual fatality rate was 18 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, which was significant compared to 1899 but nothing compared to 1960, by which time, according to NSC, unintentional injuries caused 93,803 deaths, 41 percent of which were associated with motor-vehicle crashes. Simply put, with the motorization of America, casualties increased incrementally. So it was that on Sept. 9, 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act and the Highway Safety Act, which brought changes in both vehicle and highway design. Vehicles were built with new safety features such as shatter-resistant windshields and safety belts, while roads were improved with better markings, signage, illumination, guardrails, and barriers. It became quickly clear that such measures were working. By 1970, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (a product of the Highway Safety Act), motor-vehicle-related death rates were decreasing.
This article originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.