Cross-Nationalising the History of Industrial Hazard

Abstract

The recent furore over lead-contaminated toys points to how transnational our encounters with industrial hazards have become. Over the summer months of 2007, Mattel, Inc., the world’s largest toymaker, recalled some 20,000,000 toys, nearly 3,000,000 of them because of lead-contaminated paint. The recall mushroomed into an international event. In Germany regulators pulled some 1,000,000 toys from the shelves, in Britain and Ireland, 2,000,000; countries from Malaysia to Bahrain joined the toy returns. In just one of the incriminated Chinese factories, some 83 different kinds of toys may have been painted with lead pigment. Suddenly, this toxic metal, along with carbon monoxide, the world’s oldest recognised industrial hazard, took the Western world by surprise. Despite widespread assumptions that we were safe from its clutches, a whole new vein of lead had turned up, running into our department stores, homes and perhaps also our children. The US coverage was split between blaming and exoner-ating Mattel’s executives, but more uniformly, it construed this as a crisis for American consumers. Coverage did extend to the industrial pollution produced by China’s quarter-century of economic boom. But the insides of its factories were another matter, largely neglected.¹