The Rise and Fall of the Healthy Factory: The Politics of Industrial Health in Britain, 1914-60 - Hardcover

Long, V.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0230283713 ISBN 13: 9780230283718

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Synopsis

The factory was an iconic symbol of modernity in early twentieth-century Britain. Epitomising the triumph of rationalisation and technological innovation, factories were lambasted by critics as hazardous and dehumanising environments which robbed work of meaning and destroyed workers' health. The Rise and Fall of the Healthy Factory reveals how the interwar health movement, modernist architecture and new forms of advertising attempted to refashion factories into sites of health
improvement, and investigates why these plans never came to fruition. Focussing on the role of the Trades Union Congress, it analyses the politics of industrial health, studying the negotiations which took place between the government, the unions, employers and the medical profession as efforts were made to actualise the vision of the healthy factory and implement a national occupational health service. This book makes a major contribution to debates on health education, the NHS, industrial illness and injury, industrial relations and British politics.

About this title

Review:

'Vicky Long's wide-ranging book makes a welcome contribution to the field by concentrating upon the twentieth-century factory, an area so far largely neglected. The book...offers new insights to historians of labour and industrial relations, business historians, and political historians concerned with the role of the state in twentieth-century society. That the book speaks to these diverse audiences is a mark of its success.' - Mike Esbester, Oxford Brookes University, Social History of Medicine

Book Description:

Tracing the contested politics of industrial health, the book explores how the relationship between health, productivity and the factory was reconfigured over the course of the twentieth century

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0230283713
• ISBN 13: 9780230283718
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 300