ABSTRACT

To appreciate the history of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (hereinafter referred to as the OSH Act),1 we need to place the OSH Act in context with the social changes that were going on in the United States during the 1960s. The decade of the 1960s was the era of the Vietnam War; the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; the hippie movement; protests in the streets; Kent State; burning draft cards and bras; marijuana and LSD among other drugs, and, above all, a youthful call for social change in America. During this decade and the decade that followed, Congress enacted numerous laws, such as the Civil Rights Act,2 which changed the landscape not only within the law but also within our workplace and our society.