Civics and HealthAllen, William H. (WIlliam Harvey)
Science
Civics and Health
Allen, William H. (WIlliam Harvey)
Hygiene; Public health
Emergency hospitals and Y.M.C.A. buildings are sad substitutes for
safety devices and automatic couplers. Christmas shopping in November
is less kind than prevention of overwork in December. Night school and
gymnastic classes are a poor penance for child labor and for work
unsuited to the body. The left hand cannot dole favors enough to offset
the evils of underpay, of unsanitary conditions, of inefficient
enforcement of health laws tolerated by the right hand.
Just because a man is taking wages for work done, is no reason why he
should forfeit his rights as a citizen, or allow his children, sisters,
neighbors, to work in conditions which decrease their efficiency and
earning power. What the employee can do for himself as a citizen,
having equal health rights with employers, he has never been taught to
see. Factory legislation is state direction of industries so far as
relates to the safety, health, and moral condition of the people,--and
which embraces to-day, more than in any other epoch, the opinion of the
workers themselves. No government, however strong, can hope
successfully to introduce social legislation largely affecting personal
interests until public opinion has been educated to the belief that the
remedies proposed are really necessary. Until schools insist upon a
better ventilation than the worst factories, how can we expect to find
children of working age sensitive to impure air? Where work benches are
more comfortable than school desks, where drinking water is cleaner and
towels more sanitary, however unsanitary they may be, than those found
in the schoolhouse, the worker does not realize that they menace his
right to earn a living wage as much as does a temporary shut-down.
Employers are by no means solely to blame for unhealthy working
conditions. A shortsighted employee is as anxious to work overtime for
double pay as a shortsighted employer is to have him. Among those who
are agitating for an eight-hour day are many who, from self-interest or
interest in the cause, work regularly from ten to sixteen hours.
Would it help to punish employees for working in unhealthy places? The
highest service that can be rendered industrial hygiene is to educate
the industrial classes to recognize hygienic evils and to cooeperate
with other citizens in securing the enforcement of health rights.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE LAST DAYS OF TUBERCULOSIS
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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