Abstract
Why should bioethicists now be concerned with occupational health and safety? Why should they turn their attention from the traditional domain of medical practice to the industrial workplace? The answer is embarrassingly simple. In comparison to the magnitude and incidence of harms typically covered by discussions in bioethics such as human subjects research, psychosurgery, and the definition of death, workplace-related harms are staggering in both number and severity. Roughly 700,000 Americans now suffer long-term total disability as a result of occupational accident or illness. Although it is often difficult to assign cause of death to workplace exposures because of the multiplicity of contributing factors, especially in diseases of long latency such as cancer, it has been estimated that as many as 100,000 each year are attributable to occupationally related diseases.1 We believe that the ethical issues raised by the intersection of work and health have been neglected and deserve more attention from the bioethics community.
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Notes and References
US Department of Labor, “An Interim Report to Congress on Occuational Disease” (Washington DC, Government Printing Office, 1980), p. 2.
Bruce W. Karrh, “Workplace Hazards: The Responsibilities to Assess, to Report, to Control.” In Health Services and Health Hazards: The Employee’s Need to Know, Richard H. Egdahl and Diana Chapman Walsh, eds. (New York: Springer Verlag, 1978).
Thomas O. McGarity, “Hazardous Materials in the Workplace: The Worker’s Right to Know versus the Employer’s Trade Secret Interests.” Paper delivered to the Hastings Center Occupational Health Research Group.
US Department of Labor, Occupational Health and Safety Administration, “Access to Employee Exposure and Medical Records,” Federal Register. May 23. 1980. 35219.
Ibid.
Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company and Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, Locals 6–418 and 6–77, AFL-CIO, Case No. 32-CA-551, April 9, 1982, 261, NLRB, No. 6; Colgate Palmolive Company and Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, Kansas City, Local 5–114, AFL-CIO, Case No. 17—CA-8331, April 9, 1982, 261 NLRB, No. 7.
Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company, 109 LRRM 1348.
Ibid. , p. 1349.
McGarity, ibid.
Mary Melville, “Risks on the Job: The Worker’s Right to Know.”Environment, 23 (9), November 1981, 12–20, 42–45.
Lawrence E. Blades, “Employment at Will vs. Individual Freedom: On Limiting the Abusive Exercise of Employer Power.” Columbia Law Review, 67, 1967, 1404–1435. Cites relevant cases on p. 1405, fn. 10.
Laurence H. Tribe, The Constitutional Protection of Individual Rights: Limits on Government Authority. (Mineola, NY: Foundation Press, 1978), p. 919.
David Zimmerman, “Coercive wage offers,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10 (2), Spring 1981, 121–145. Robert Lane, “Personal Freedom in a Market Society.” Society, March/April 1981, 63–76. Howard Lesnick, “ The Consciousness of Work and the Consciousness of Freedom.” Paper delivered to the Hastings Center Occupational Health Research Group.
William F. May, “Code, Covenant, Contract, or Philanthropy,” Hastings Center Report, December 1975, 29–38.
See, e.g., President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, Protecting Human Subjects (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1981).
Congress of the US Office of Technology Assessment, The Role of Genetic Testing in the Prevention of Occupational Disease (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1983).
OTA, ibid.
OTA, ibid.
J.B.S. Haldane, Heredity and Politics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1938), p. 179.
Herbert E. Stokinger and John T. Mountain, “Tests for Hypersusceptibility to Hemolytic Chemicals,” Archives of Environmental Health 6, April 1963, 57–64.
H. E. Stokinger and L. D. Scheel, “Hypersusceptibility and Genetic Problems in Occupational Medicine-A Consensus Report,” Journal of Occupational Medicine 15(7), July 1973, 564–573.
Gilbert S. Omenn, “Predictive Identification of Hypersusceptible Individuals,” Journal of Occupational Medicine 24(5), May 1982, 369–374.
OTA, ibid.
Thomas H. Murray, “Warning: Screening Workers for Genetic Risk,” Hastings Center Report, February 1983, 5–8.
For a full discussion of the controversy see: Ronald Bayer, “Reproductive Hazards in the Workplace: Bearing the Burden of Fetal Risk,” Milbank Memorial Quarterly, Fall 1982, 633–656.
“Women’s Lib Hits a Safety Rule Intended to Protect Fetus,” Medical World News, June 14, 1976, 57–61. See also: “Protection for Unborn Work Safety Issue Isn’t as Simple as It Sounds,” Wall Street Journal, August 2, 1977, 1.
Rebecca L. Rawls, “Reproductive Hazards in the Workplace,” Chemical and Engineering News, February 11, 1980, 31.
Ibid., p. 30.
“Employment Rights of Women in the Toxic Workplace,” 65 California Law Review, 1977, 1113–1142.
Wendy Williams, “Firing the Woman to Protect the Fetus: The Reconciliation of Fetal Protection with Employment Opportunity Goals under Title VII,” Georgetown Law Journal, February 1981, 641–704.
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, “Interpretative Guidelines on Employment Discrimination and Reproductive Hazards,” Federal Register February 1, 1980, 7514.
See for example Jeanne Stellman, Women’s Work, Women’s Health: Myth and Realities (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).
K. Berg, ed., Genetic Damage in Man Caused by Environmental Agents (New York: Academic Press, 1979). See also J. M. Manson and R. Simons, “Influence of Environmental Agents on Male Reproductive Failure,” in Vilma Hunt, ed., Work and the Health of Women (Boca Raton FL: CRC Press, 1979).
Council on Environmental Quality, “Chemical Hazards to Human Reproduction,” (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1981).
Paul Kotin, “The No—Smoking Program at the Johns—Manville Corporation. ” Paper presented at a meeting of the Hastings Center Occupational Health Research Group.
Diana Chapman Walsh, “Corporate Smoking Policies: Goals, Choices, and Motives.” Paper presented at a meeting of the Hastings Center Occupational Health Research Group.
President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavior Research, Securing Access to Health Care (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1983), see pp. 22–25.
For an interesting discussion of the role considerations such as fault and prevention can play, see Guido Calabresi, The Costs of Accidents (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
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Murray, T.H., Bayer, R. (1984). Ethical Issues in Occupational Health. In: Humber, J.M., Almeder, R.T. (eds) Biomedical Ethics Reviews · 1984. Biomedical Ethics Reviews. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59259-440-5_6
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