Managing miners’ health: occupational diseases, scientific management and workers’ life in the Italian mines of Peñarroya (1920-1950)
Abstract
The implementation of practices to protect miners’ health was slowly formalized in Europe beginning from the end of the 19th century. The legal pathway was equally long in all countries, especially in relation to the recognition of companies’ liability in the emergence of pathologies related to workplace morbidity . As there were no precise regulations and no medical agreement on the interpretation of certain diseases, health in the mine remained an ambiguous matter for mining companies, especially in relation with psycho-physical selection of workers and qualification of labour. In the interwar period, the problem of occupational health in the mines became more urgent, worsened by the introduction of scientific management and new extractive technologies. As showed by Paul André Rosenthal, silicosis became and it’s still today a global problem, both geographically and conceptually.
In this paper we focus on the case of Italian mines of Pertusola, the Italian subsidiary of the greater group Peñarroya, which became one of the biggest European mining and metallurgical corporations in the first part of the 20th century. At the crossroads between the value of health and that of performance at work, a space was opened for the development of practices, tools, measures, and techniques to act on both performance and occupational health, via the materiality of the human body. By the analysis of the firm strategy and initiatives, this paper aims at clarifying the transformation of occupational health in a managerial issue.
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