ABSTRACT
To understand and improve occupational safety and health (OSH), one cannot stop either at the technical or personal levels. When capitalist owners prepare to abandon a plant in search of a higher rate of profit elsewhere, in some of these cases, the workers and their union succeed in buying the owners out and take full control of the means of production. Beyond the effects of the wider context on self concepts, relations of production, stress, accidents, and disease, there are the wider control structures and measures directed specifically at OSH. Women’s work in the home serves to maintain and reproduce the working class—a major service to capital, especially since it is unpaid labor. The adequacy of a theory of socialization that shows the possibility for liberatory self-activity by workers can neither rely on the pressure of eternal events nor on the reduction to biological urges.
