Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body. By Steffan Blayney

Abstract

The years of the Covid-19 pandemic have brought the labouring body back into the very centre of public debate. For whom is work safe and unsafe, and who is obliged to perform unsafe work? What are the social and political meanings of the impairment of the working body in terms of deservingness, dependency, and work ethic? How do changing class relations in times of labour shortage or emergency imprint themselves on the body of the worker? While such questions always take on new forms across the history of capitalism—indeed, they are the history of capitalism as it is experienced up close and personal by workers—there also exist deep continuities in their form, as structural imperatives within the logic of capital accumulation cause them to recur again and again. Past experience with questions of the regulation and control of the worker’s body is thus a rich site of historical inquiry, and Steffan Blayney makes much of this resource in his new book Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, The Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body.