James P. Kraft. Havoc and Reform: Workplace Disasters in Modern America.

Abstract

James Kraft’s history of recent workplace disasters fills a necessary hole in the historiography of labor in the late twentieth century. As he points out, we have a significant historiography of workplace disasters, but it is firmly entrenched in nineteenth and early twentieth century disasters such as the Triangle Fire and coal mining disasters. However, the modern workplace also remains unsafe, and historians have largely ignored how recent workplace disasters impacted the nation. I have long been struck by the lack of scholarly literature on post-World War II workplace disasters, and, thus, I find Kraft’s intervention extremely useful. Focusing on the Southwest, where Sun Belt growth and anti-union politics created a lightly regulated workplace, Kraft explores five deadly workplace disasters from the 1940s to the 1990s, advancing a simple yet correct thesis: that it takes massive death on the job to convince governments and employers to make workplaces safer. Kraft’s five stories often expand beyond what most of us think of when we consider workplace disasters. His first story is one of the worst disasters in American workplace history, the Texas City explosion of 1947 that killed 568 people. It is astounding that such a catastrophic event has received almost no attention from historians until now. If the Texas City explosion does fit our vision of a classic workplace disaster, Kraft’s chapter on the 1956 mid-air crash between two airliners over the Grand Canyon, which killed 128 workers and passengers, might not; this is also true for the chapter on the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building attack. After all, far more customers than employees died in the former and a terrorist attack feels like a different category of disaster. But in a service-based economy, workplace disasters are more likely to kill persons using the services than workers. Kraft reminds us of this, which should lead to preemptive demands for safety regulations before disasters occur, uniting the consumer and labor movements over issues of safety.