Traprock Workers: The Culture Of Work And Risk At An Underground Copper Mine, 1900-1945 (michigan).

Abstract

This study of work and occupational risk at a Michigan copper mine compares cultural history of underground mining, based on the historian's analysis of company documents and material culture, with present-day folk historical culture--the past as residents of a mining town remember it and tell it to an outsider. Contrary to the views expressed officially by the company and informally in some interviews, collective folk history and historical research indicate that mining remained dangerous work throughout the twentieth century. Some former employees of the Champion Mining Company in Painesdale, MI, express doubt that mine safety improved with the introduction of a company safety program. Others believe mining grew safer during the 1930s, though they continue to tell stories about worried miners and injured children. In this study, I examine the folk and formal versions of occupational culture and consider the varying degrees of authority with which representations of the past are invested by scholars, the company, and the community. The results show that the safety program succeeded in reducing accidents after the mid-1920s, but that fatalities continued to occur sporadically. The study concludes that management's concern for worker safety was less a reaction to the incidence of serious accidents or to workers' complaints than a reconceptualization of risk which resulted in improvement of the least serious conditions at the least cost and at a time of sagging profits. That improvement was accompanied by a rhetoric of safety which implied greater benefit to workers than was actually the case. The study further concludes that folk history kept communal memories of hardship and tragedy alive despite the success of the safety rhetoric in downplaying risk. Nonetheless, as doubts about the safety of mining became embedded in stories or softened by nostalgia for the industrial landscape over time, some workers grew more inclined to praise the company safety program than to question its benefits. Both conclusions support the claim that conditions of risk are socially constructed ideas as much as they are physical realities.