Inspecting Workers: Medical Examination, Labor Organizing, and the Evidence of Sexual Difference

Abstract

�� In 1914, the largest and most important union in New York’s garment industry, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), decided to conduct a systematic survey of the health of Jewish immigrant garment workers. Through their role in the Joint Board of Sanitary Control (JBSC), the body charged with the sanitary inspection of New York’s garment workplace, the union’s leadership requested the assistance of the United States Public Health Services (PHS). The union decided on the survey shortly after Congress passed an important piece of progressive legislation increasing the role of the PHS in the study of “industrial hygiene” and the “health of workers.” In the first such study, between April 13, 1914, and November 1, 1914, doctors of the PHS with the help of JBSC officials and ILGWU leaders examined the 2,000 male and 1,000 female workers. Over 90 percent of the examined workers, all of whom volunteered for examination, were Jewish.1 The medical inspections produced two significant conclusions. First, the PHS discovered that garment workers were desperately and dangerously unhealthy. PHS doctors diagnosed on average 4.36 defects or diseases per worker, with approximately the same numbers for men and for women.2 Second, they found that male and female garment workers faced very different forms of occupational illness. Women’s most common defects involved their gynecological and reproductive sys