working-class jobs are bad for your health:
By now I've done enough of these disability cases to profile my typical client. She'll have done factory work from the age of 14 in Mexico or the Dominican Republic and then more of the same in one of New York's many non-union sweatshops. By her mid-40s her lower back will be an unsteady tower of herniated discs and lumbago; she'll have arthritic pain in at least two of her knees and shoulders; inevitably asthma and more often than not type-two diabetes. On top of all this she'll confide to me that she's "deprimida," and will be taking a daily cocktail of antidepressants accompanied by a visit to a therapist once a month.
(...) Not a happy story, but my prototypical client really isn't an anomaly in America, not even close. For tens of millions of Americans, work itself is the sickness unto death. Consider the following: throughout the 1960s and early 70s, more Americans died every year in automobile plants than died in any year of the Vietnam War. More Americans were struck down with disabling injuries and diseases from work in the auto plants than were hospitalized in any year for wounds from the war. 16,000 dead, 63,000 sick and sidelined, 1.7 million deafened or hearing damaged-every year.
(...) The epidemic continues: In the United States, 65,000 workers die of work-related injuries or illnesses every year, according to the impeccably mainstream American Journal of Publi Health.
(...) That's a lot of disabled workers. But the physically crippling effects of work aren't just normal, they're normalized: a plethora of government programs concern themselves with occupational health and safety, and guess what? They're often useless. OSHA has no teeth and its supposed regulators are a bunch of industry hacks--even the New York Times has gotten wise to that (5).
(...) But there are no special programs for the non-whites and women who make up the majority of poultry processing plant workers, homecare attendants, and hospital workers. And of course the most dangerous jobs- in slaughterhouses, nonunion consruction sites, cleanup the 9-11 wreckage in Manhattan-go to undocumented immigrants. If they get injured on the job, they're pretty much screwed.
(...) But beefing up the welfare state addresses the problem far too late, and creates too many problems of its own. America's medical-industrial complex (15% of GDP!) is plainly and fundamentally broken, and however insatiable Big Pharma, to the American Medical Association may be, diverting another river of cash to them is surely not the answer. Besides, do we really want more doctors, therapists and "counseling" as a response to workplace injustice? Doping people to the gills with antidepressants is not the solution to a political problem, but it does turn out to be a semi-effective way for the medical system to pacify a large group of people with plenty of good reasons to be militantly pissed-off about the status quo.
(...) In short our task is to transform the economy into a source of worthwhile labor that doesn't kill you or make you sick. Hey, nothing wrong with getting a little utopian on May 1st. All of the above is just one of the things that will be on my mind and the minds of my many clients-they may have gotten their disability benefits but they're still pissed off-- when we go out on May 1st and raise some hell for workers' rights y un minimo de justicia. ¡Sí se puede!