Was Health and Safety a Strike Issue? Workers, Unions and the Body in Twentieth-Century Scotland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In February 1949, 5,000 or so asbestos miners downed tools and went on strike in a dispute which centred on excessively dusty working conditions which were considered inimical to the health of those breathing this toxic mineral into their lungs. This occurred in the mining town called Asbestos in Quebec, Canada, where Irish migrants were amongst the strike’s participants. The Catholic Church was drawn into the conflict, with the nearby Archbishop of Montreal supporting the strikers and organising fund-raising which quickly accumulated over $500,000. After a long, bitter and violent five-month struggle the strike was defeated and the men returned to working in the dust. Two decades or so later, in the 1970s, the legacy was evident in uncontroversial medical evidence of spikes in asbestos-related disease deaths amongst Canadian asbestos miners. This episode is revealing because it appears to be such a rare occurrence: a workers’ strike explicitly over occupational health where a substantial number of employees were responding directly to the threat towards their bodies of the labour process, the work environment and the materials on which they worked.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".