Pain and Prejudice : What Science Can Learn about Work from the People Who Do It

Karen Messing

Description

In 1978, when workers at a nearby phosphate refinery learned that the ore they processed was contaminated with radioactive dust, Karen Messing, then a new professor of molecular genetics, was called in to help. Unsure of what to do with her discovery that exposure to the radiation was harming the workers and their families, Messing contacted senior colleagues but they wouldn’t help. Neither the refinery company nor the scientific community was interested in the scary results of her chromosome studies.

Over the next decades Messing encountered many more cases of workers around the world—factory workers, cleaners, checkout clerks, bank tellers, food servers, nurses, teachers—suffering and in pain without any help from the very scientists and occupational health experts whose work was supposed to make their lives easier. Arguing that rules for scientific practice can make it hard to see what really makes workers sick, in Pain and Prejudice Messing tells the story of how she went from looking at test tubes to listening to workers.

Sujets

• Health Issues
• Social Science
• health
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Disease

Informations

• Publié par: Between the Lines
• Date de parution: 02 septembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9781771131483
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Praise for
Pain and Prejudice
A scientific treatise, a page-turner, an exposé. It’s hard to exaggerate the attractions of this extraordinary book. It makes the personal political and the political personal, drawing the reader along in the careful and scientific exploration of the sexism, biases, and silences of science. Pain and Prejudice should be required reading for all scientists.
— Pat Armstrong, Distinguished Research Professor, Department of Sociology, York University, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
How can scientists be objective and empathetic at the same time? Karen Messing’s decades of research into workers’ health, especially the health of women workers and those of the lower rungs of the working class, are examined and analyzed in a very interesting and readable style. Dr. Messing shows how collaboration with community partners such as unions can improve research but how this type of research is increasingly threatened. She shows how research can and should make change in the workplace to improve workers’ health.
— Cathy Walker, past director, National Health and Safety, Canadian Auto Workers
Karen Messing is a riveting storyteller who illuminates areas usually enveloped in the fog of expertise and pedantry. She belongs to a lamentably rare breed; she is a militant intellectual. An accomplished scientist, she tells, in a personal, evocative style, of the way she came to better understand the relationships between employers, science, and labour. Her encounters with, and analyses of, science and scientists hired by capital and government to regulate working conditions lead her to question both the impartiality of science and the accompanying lack of empathy for workers, particularly women. This is a valuable book for anyone interested in social theory, sociology, and, most importantly, the health and safety of workers.
— Harry Glasbeek, author of Wealth by Stealth
Messing has long been one of the leading practitioners of “listening to workers’ stories” as a way of understanding their health. Pain and Prejudice describes how this approach evolved, why it is so effective, and some of the leading findings. It provides a unique window into the world of worker health and safety.
— Wayne Lewchuk, professor, School of Labour Studies and Department of Economics, McMaster University

Pain and Prejudice: What Science Can Learn about Work from the People Who Do It
© 2014 Karen Messing
First published in 2014 by: Between the Lines 401 Richmond St. W., Studio 277 Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8 1-800-718-7201 www.btlbooks.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for photocopying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1E5.
Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Between the Lines would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Messing, Karen, author Pain and prejudice : what science can learn about work from the people who do it / Karen Messing. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-77113-147-6 (pbk.). ISBN 978-1-77113-148-3 (epub). ISBN 978-1-77113-149-0 (pdf). 1. Industrial hygiene. 2. Radiation – Toxicology. I. Title. RC967.M48 2014 613.6'2 C2014-902457-6 C2014-902458-4
Cover design by Jennifer Tiberio. Cover photo © iStockphoto.com/angelhell Text design and page preparation by Steve Izma
Between the Lines gratefully acknowledges assistance for its publishing activities from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program and through the Ontario Book Initiative, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
Contents
Preface
1 Factory Workers
2 The Invisible World of Cleaning
3 Standing Still
4 The Brains of Low-Paid Workers
5 Invisible Teamwork
6 Home Invasion
7 Teachers and Numbers
8 Becoming a Scientist
9 Crabs, Pain, and Sceptical Scientists
10 A Statistician’s Toes and the Empathy Gap in Scientific Articles
11 Can Scientists Care?
Notes
Index
Preface
M ANY RESEARCHERS IN OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH never actually get the chance to talk to people suffering from the work-related health problems they study; their research keeps them in their laboratories, far from the factory floor. But for the past thirty-seven years, I have been lucky enough to be forced into direct contact with the world of work and made to see, hear, smell, and touch the environments that make workers sick.
When I arrived at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) in 1976, its Department of Biological Sciences had only existed for seven years. The political excitement of the 1960s and the “quiet revolution” had inspired the province of Quebec to create a publicly funded university. By the time I was hired, some professors and administrators had persuaded the university that it should do something for “communities not traditionally served by universities,” meaning unions, women’s groups, and community groups. After some negotiations, UQAM promised to pay professors to do research on topics suggested by these groups. UQAM created a community outreach service and even hired co-ordinators to link professors with community needs. 1
One day, the co-ordinators visited our department and asked whether anyone was interested in being a resource. My collaborator and friend Donna Mergler, a professor of physiology, encouraged me to participate; she was already giving educational sessions on the health risks of noise and asbestos. I couldn’t see how my doctorate in molecular genetics of lower organisms could be directly useful to the community, but I put my name down. A couple of months later, the co-ordinators called to tell me they had gotten a request for help from radiation-exposed refinery workers who needed a geneticist. My career took an irreversible turn.
Over the following years, Donna and I developed a research program in occupational and environmental health that benefited from community input. In 1990, we founded CINBIOSE, 2 a multidisciplinary research centre that has been able to support other community-friendly researchers with similar interests.
Stimulated in part by the program at UQAM, Marc Renaud, the new head of a provincial government organization that gave grants for health research, 3 decided to offer a program unlike any other source of support for scientists. The grants would be given to university-community partnerships on presentation of a joint research program. In order to ensure that the scientists would listen to the community group, the group or a co-ordinating organization would control the money. The peer review committee rating the proposals would also have community representation.
CINBIOSE got a call from the community outreach office suggesting we apply. For the next fifteen years, until the program was abolished, we got large amounts of money to partner with the women’s committees and health and safety committees of Quebec’s three largest trade union confederations. Our original partnership included ergonomists, sociologists, and legal scholars, as well as the six union representatives. We called it l’Invisible qui fait mal (literally, The Invisible that Hurts ), referring to the fact that occupational health risks in women’s jobs are often less impressive and obvious than they are in men’s jobs. This group sponsored dozens of research projects and interventions. We created a book on ergonomics and women’s work that European unions translated into six languages and we wrote a United Nations policy paper on gender and occupational health. 4 Our legal specialists helped get new laws passed and old ones respected.
I have been surrounded by a strong, active, nourishing support system, favourable to labour, while doing research in occupational health. This explains why, even while in academia, I have been able to listen to workers’ stories and helped to understand them. I have been allowed to observe how lack of respect and understanding from employers, scientists, and the public affects their working conditions and thereby their health. I have been freed from some of the constraints of the scientific establishment and allowed to see how scepticism towards workers’ pain has influenced and even shaped the academic field of occupational health research.
The context in which we were able to develop these relationships is fast disappearing as the globe veers to the right. Canada’s conservative government has replaced community representatives with industry spokespeople on research granting organizations and “peer” review boards. The Faculty of Science at UQAM expelled CINBIOSE from its sponsored research centres and sent us off to the Faculty of Communication. Our provincial funder closed its doors and its successor decided that our publications were not being seen in the right academic venues. So it will not be as easy for those who come after us to cross the gap between the university and the community of low-paid workers, which I call the “empathy gap” – an inability or unwillingness among scientists and decision-makers to put themselves in the workers’ position.
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