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6 - Discrimination Technicians and Human Weeding

from Part II - New Machineries of Injustice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2020

Nate Holdren
Affiliation:
Drake University, Iowa
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Summary

Chapter 6 uses public writings by physicians and business records, especially from the Pullman Corporation, to show how physicians employed by large companies became the front line in employer efforts to control compensation costs by discriminating against disabled people. The chapter shows how the medical subfield of industrial medicine was always rooted in perspectives and practices that treated working-class people as economic objects. At the same time, early on specialists in the field emphasized that industrial medicine could be a source of mutual benefit for both employers and employees. The field matured and became more independent at the height of the aftermath of the creation of compensation laws, with industrial physicians forming their professional association in the mid-1910s. The leading lights of the field quickly came to emphasize benefits to employers over and against employees, above all medicalized employment discrimination in the form of physical examinations of applicants and employees. Those examinations in turn rapidly lost most medical value for the people examined, focused as they were on employer-side cost control.

Type
Chapter
Information
Injury Impoverished
Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era
, pp. 218 - 252
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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