Documents Waldman, Linda 3 results

"The paper argues that this lack of regulatory oversight, combined with the informal, contractual, and small-scale work undertaken in domestic homes weakens the basic premise of occupational health and safety, namely that rational decision-making, technical measures, and individual safety behavior lead concerned parties (workers, employers, and others) to minimize risk and exposure. The paper focuses on UK council or social housing, examining how local housing authorities — as landlords — have a duty to provide housing, to protect and to care for residents, but points out that these obligations do not extend to health and safety legislation in relation to DIY undertaken by residents. At the same time, only conventional occupational health and safety, based on rationality, identification, containment, and protective measures, cover itinerant workmen entering these homes. Focusing on asbestos and the way things work in reality, this paper thus explores the degree to which official health and safety regulation can safeguard maintenance and other workers in council homes. It simultaneously examines how councils advise and protect tenants as they occupy and shape their homes. In so doing, this paper challenges the notion of risk as an objective, scientific, and effective measure. In contrast, it demonstrates the ways in which occupational risk — and the choice of appropriate response — is more likely situational and determined by wide-ranging and often contradictory factors."

"This paper explores people's experience of asbestos-related diseases in relation to medicine, identity and gender. The paper adopts a comparative approach, examining the experiences of impoverished former asbestos mine workers in South Africa and working class factory workers and laggers in the United Kingdom (UK). These two areas are connected through the activities of Cape plc, a company that dealt with asbestos for about a hundred years, mining in the Northern Cape of South Africa and manufacturing and processing in Barking, in the UK. As indicated in the title, these industrial diseases are not contracted through worker negligence, but rather because of governments' and managements' framing of risk and the implementation of safety measures. The first part of the paper therefore contrasts authoritative and emic values through the examination of governmental recognition of risk and people's own understandings of danger. The second part of the paper examines gendered and identity issues, focusing on how men's masculinity is both undermined and bolstered through their involvement with asbestos production, while women's identity is primarily vested in their household and primary caretaker role. Throughout the paper, a comparative anthropological approach focuses on the similarities of ‘meaning' and subjective interpretations – as contrasted with the country specific medical, legal and political categorisations of disease with which these people regularly engage – highlighting how people experience, interpret and respond to asbestos-related diseases. Using an ‘effects made by gender approach', the paper also examines how asbestos diseases intersect with identity, leading people to emphasise conventional gender roles."

"This paper examines asbestos issues, mobilisation and citizenship in India. It shows how asbestos has been considered as a tool for Indian economic growth and modernisation and explores the scientific debates around its ‘safe' use. In seeking to locate experiences of citizenship within a globalised context, this research has focused on anti-asbestos mobilisation and protest in cosmopolitan cities as well as more decentralised contexts. It argues that the state's narrow definition of asbestos diseases enables it to officially document the lack of asbestos diseases experienced by Indian workers. This process, which defines sufferers as politically invisible and inconsequential, accompanied by the 30 year delay between exposure and the onset of disease, hinders anti-asbestos organisations as there is no constituency to be mobilised. Parallel (and partially interrelated) grassroots asbestos movements which are more worker-orientated are, however, marginalised from the transnational protests. The paper argues that mobilisation around identity issues thus creates different contexts in India, in which activists are simultaneously both intimately connected and enormously distant to different aspects of the mobilisation process. In addition, while geographic and political differences are compressed through transnational mobilisation; class, regional and educational differences are expanded."