ABSTRACT
In 1972, the Robens Report, Safety and Health at Work, set the tone for health and safety debates for several decades in the UK and in a number of English-speaking countries (Walters, 2003). High rates of injury at work were explained by the prevalence of employer and worker “apathy” toward health and safety questions. One year later, Theo Nichols and Peter Armstrong wrote a penetrating critique of the Robens Report (Nichols and Armstrong, 1973), warning that it was based on flawed assumptions and that regulations based on these assumptions would leave “millions of men and women” exposed to unacceptable levels of workplace risks. With clarity of analysis that became the hallmark of his writing, Nichols was critical of the superficial analysis upon which the apathy argument was based. He argued that it was relatively easy to attribute accidents to factors such as “lack of attention,” “inadequate supervision,” or “worker’s fault,” but that behind most
accidents was a more fundamental explanation. He stressed that Robens was explaining accident rates without seeing them in the context of the “social relations of production.” According to Nichols and Armstrong, most accidents occurred due to the pressure workers were under to keep production going. Accidents had more to do with the drive for profits than workplace apathy.
