Chemicals in the Workplace

Early legislation and other actions to improve worker safety in the United States focused on machinery, as it was the main cause of worker death and injury in the 19th and early 20th centuries. By the mid-20th century, however, workers and the public faced a new hazard: chemicals.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development summarizes the growing concern about chemicals: "In the 1960s, while the chemical industry was experiencing enormous growth, it was already becoming clear that there were serious issues with regard to the safety of certain chemicals. Concern was steadily growing about their widespread distribution and the fact that their presence in the environment could be provoking profound health and environmental problems."

As awareness of the chemical hazards began to increase, labor unions argued that the public's concern for the effects of chemicals on the environment should extend to concern about worker health. Workers, after all, were the first to come into contact with these chemicals. Exposure levels were much higher, labor unions argued, for workers than for the environment's plants and animals, and longstanding effects of these chemicals were often unknown.

New legislation was needed to address the hazards of chemicals in the workplace.

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