The administrative rules articulating social policy in twentieth-century America largely resulted from a deliberative system dominated by a relatively small number of inside players, with bureaucratic barriers frustrating deep participation by the nonelite members of society often most affected. At the federal level, specialist public administrators and their expert advisers from academia, think tanks, and increasingly sophisticated interest groups generally controlled the implementation of social regulation. However, this pattern did not go unchallenged. Especially in the wake of movements for racial equality, environmental safeguards, and social provision, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the opening of previously closeted policymaking proceedings to a broader segment of the citizenry. The trend toward democratization accelerated in the 1970s. In the controversial area of workplace health protection, workers victimized or at risk of victimization took advantage of the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 to assert their interests in a newly constructed regulatory forum. Officials in charge of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) at times found themselves dealing with men and women lacking the customary credentials of professional authority.^{Footnote 1}

At its inception, OSHA had an essentially simple statutory mandate to make and enforce rules that would protect workers from recognized hazards. Throughout the agency’s initial decade, a series of battles took place over the formulation of standards to limit employee exposure to a number of important health hazards—lead, asbestos, vinyl chloride, and other toxic substances. Social scientists and, to a lesser extent, historians have helpfully provided case studies of several of the principal encounters. The central theme emerging from these inquiries is that of conflict, always intense and usually protracted. Accordingly, historical policy analysis has illuminated the two key issues over which organized labor and organized capital most frequently clashed—biomedical questions of risk and the feasibility of controlling risk. The literature has focused on reviewing the merits of the substantive arguments offered by the expert gladiators brought in by corporate management and its union adversaries, with due consideration of the mediating role of federal administrators.^{Footnote 2}

Attention to the substance of the debates has thus far not been accompanied by serious attention to the possible significance of changes in the composition in the roster of debaters. Scholars have apparently made the generally valid assumption that setting OSHA health standards was an assignment that only those with advanced formal expertise tackled. Accordingly, missing from the historical literature is more than minimal notice of the fresh opportunity that implementation of the landmark federal safety and health law presented for democratizing the regulation of working conditions. Indeed, only journalist Mimi Conway’s account of the involvement of disabled textile workers, mobilized by the Carolina Brown Lung Association in the campaign to restrict exposure to cotton dust, sheds any light on lay contributions. Conway discussed the journey of fifty elderly working-class women and men to Washington in 1977 to discuss their breathless plight with Eula Bingham, the assistant secretary of labor responsible for OSHA, leaving her in tears. In formal testimony at the public hearings on the cotton-dust standard, brown-lung activist Lucy Taylor described her predicament of severe disability. Taylor told federal officials, “We are not technical experts, but we are experts in experience and in telling the truth about our lives.” This study aims to broaden our understanding of occupational health policy formation by exploring the invention of a participative regulatory strategy. The textile workers, as well as other lay challengers since the late 1970s, were emulating an approach first devised by the United Steelworkers of America (USW) in its pursuit of an effective OSHA standard to control exposure to toxic emissions from coke ovens.^{Footnote 3}

For the Steelworkers, extensive lay engagement with established authorities on the forbidding terrain of scientifically informed social policymaking represented an extraordinary departure. No previous experience much prepared the union’s nonprofessional participants—mainly local union officers, along with one local officer who became a member of the union’s central staff early in the coke-oven emissions contest—for this foray. Indeed, Daniel Hannan, the pivotal figure in the USW’s drive to limit the emissions threat, had only a high-school education. To be sure, the union pursued a comprehensive blended strategy throughout this contest, one that combined conventional legal, scientific, and technical expertise with rank-and-file involvement.^{Footnote 4}

For historians of public policy, incorporation of this sort of movement activism into efforts to turn statutory promises into real gains for constituents is somewhat familiar, even though social movements remain more closely identified with the initiation of policy change than with its implementation. A number of studies have captured the ways in which activist proponents of racial and gender equality understood that effective interpretation and enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 required their ongoing scrutiny and occasionally disruptive intervention. Similarly, recent work has brought to light the manner in which environmentalists and advocates for the disabled during the 1960s and 1970s mixed conventional legal tactics with broad-based, confrontational approaches to achieving and expanding regulatory protections. The existing literature shows that this period witnessed numerous ingenious invasions of administrative territory by outsiders ready to take on established interests and their settled ways of carrying out policy. But no scholarly work has examined the extension of these democratizing tendencies to occupational health regulation, an important site of social policymaking after 1970.^{Footnote 5}

Coking is the distillation of coal to make it a more potent fuel for smelting iron. From around the turn of the twentieth century, coke plants with batteries of dozens or hundreds of ovens operated on the premises of steelmaking operations throughout the United States. Baking coal for about eighteen hours at temperatures above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit drives off a variety of volatile substances. Unfortunately, certain coal tar pitch volatiles and other chemicals like benzene emitted in distillation are potent carcinogens. Indeed, the medical history of workplace cancer began in 1775 with the English physician Percivall Pott’s discovery of scrotal cancer among chimney sweeps exposed to coal tar. In the coke-oven environment, however, the primary site for malignancy was not the skin but rather the lungs, with the kidneys also under heavy attack.^{Footnote 6}

When the Occupational Safety and Health Act went into effect, more than twenty thousand workers faced this carcinogenic risk. Although steel production had no shortage of bad jobs, laboring around the coke ovens had always been about the least desirable assignment in or around the mills. The work was infernally hot, dirty, and exhausting. It posed the manifest dangers of severe burns and acute intoxications from ammonia and other noxious chemicals. Although the elevated risks of cancer may have gone largely undetected by employees before the late 1960s, the coke ovens were still generally considered a man-killer that would significantly shorten one’s life. As one Pennsylvania coke worker characterized his situation in a letter to state health officials in 1966, “Its not fit for anything that’s living or alive, the men now are complaining about there [sic] lungs and chest, its nothing but a death trap.” Since the early twentieth century, this work had been a job ghetto for black men. (Prior to that time, when production took place in the coalfields, most coke-making duties fell to fresh immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe.) African Americans hired by steel firms were routinely routed to the coke plant, as was a smaller complement of Latinos. In part because managers imagined that they could better withstand the hottest conditions, men of color got the very most unhealthful jobs within the coke plant, disproportionately assigned to toil on top of the ovens, loading coal into the distillation equipment, often while enveloped by clouds of smoky emissions. The lidmen who wrestled with the heavy closures atop the ovens were not the only laborers overexposed to the miserable mix of such carcinogenic hydrocardons as benzo(a)pyrene, benzo(b)anthracene, and chrysene. Pusher-machine operators who extracted finished coke commonly encountered a high dose of the toxins. A variety of men in other coking jobs inhaled the hazardous chemicals throughout their shifts from leaks around oven doors warped by intense heat and with imperfect seals due to accretions of tar and other materials along their edges.^{Footnote 7}

Limited opportunities existed to use internal labor markets to escape these dangerous positions by transfer or promotion. A combination of supervisory discretion and department-specific or even narrower seniority systems enabled white managers and white-dominated unions to keep African Americans (and to a lesser extent Latinos) trapped in these miserable locations. Although the progressive leadership of the USW consistently supported expansion of civil rights at the national level, its less progressive rank and file effectively blocked advancement by the subordinated minority at the local level. As historian Bruce Nelson put it, the union’s stance combined “glacial incrementalism and hollow declarations of good intent.” But black men had few or no options better than these steady, reasonably well-paying positions with excellent fringe benefits and a modicum of union protection. The result was often twenty or more years of unrelenting exposure to a highly contaminated environment.^{Footnote 8}

Workers’ own assessment of the quality of coking jobs changed dramatically in the late 1960s. At the biggest coke production facility in the world, the Clairton Works of U.S. Steel near Pittsburgh, where workers cooked about thirty thousand tons of coal a day, the USW branch in November 1969 publicized a local thoracic surgeon’s conclusion that prolonged inhalation of coke particles and other airborne pollutants caused respiratory impairment and perhaps lung cancer. A month later, the Clairton union newsletter carried the safety committee chairman’s reflections on yet another coworker’s funeral: “It’s not surprising when an employee on the batteries becomes ill or develops an ailment such as arthritis, emphysema, heart trouble or even lung cancer.” In May 1970, that newsletter reported the recent emphatic testimony of local union president Daniel Hannan before a Senate committee considering the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Hannan discussed lung cancer fears and related them to the state health department’s finding that many of his members inhaled concentrations of coal tar pitch volatiles more than fifty times the limit recommended at that time.^{Footnote 9}

Authoritative confirmation of these concerns followed soon thereafter. This verification did not come from the medical experts on the staffs of the coke workers’ employers, however. In fact, at the 1970 annual meeting of the industry’s trade association, the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI), Robert O’Connor, a physician who served as vice president for personnel and health services at U.S. Steel, declared that over the past century “no study had shown any excess incidence of lung cancer in coke oven workers,” in a presentation both reprinted by the institute and subsequently published in the leading American journal in occupational medicine. However, what O’Connor acknowledged as a “nagging question” had prompted the AISI to cooperate with the research of J. William Lloyd, a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health. Lloyd carried out a mortality study of Pennsylvania steelworkers and then a set of follow-up studies with biostatistician Carol Redmond and others at Pitt. Announced in a series of articles in the Journal of Occupational Medicine, the Lloyd-Redmond epidemiological findings were highly disturbing. Coke workers died from respiratory-system cancer at more than twice the rate of other steelworkers. For those employees working atop the ovens where the emissions were most intense and unavoidable, the lung cancer mortality rate was five times that of the typical steelworker. For workers who spent more than five years in topside jobs, lung cancer mortality rose to ten times that of the average for the steel workforce as a whole.^{Footnote 10}

Lloyd and his colleagues’ revelations fed an incipient protest movement that had already been slowly building momentum. Throughout the formative period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the prevailing climate of dissent and unrest in and around steelmaking centers, and indeed across the nation, served to encourage those demanding improved working conditions. This dramatic interval of pervasive racial strife, antiwar protests, resurgent feminism, and youth revolt displayed the salient characteristics of what sociologist Sidney Tarrow termed a “cycle of contention”: “a phase of heightened conflict across the social system, with rapid diffusion of collection action from more mobilized to less mobilized sectors, a rapid pace of innovation in the forms of contention employed, the creation of new or transformed collection action frames, a combination of organized and unorganized participation, and sequences of intensified information flow and interaction between challengers and authorities.” Spillover from three outsider challenges—the black lung movement, environmentalism, and the African American freedom struggle—especially helped to propel coke workers’ activism.^{Footnote 11}

Coking sites in southwestern Pennsylvania lay but a short distance from the scene of an extraordinary upheaval in West Virginia. Victims of coal workers’ pneumoconiosis—black lung in the vernacular—launched an angry campaign for state workers’ compensation reform that by February 1969 spiraled from mass demonstrations into arguably the largest political strike in American history. Few, if any, coke workers in Clairton or other communities in the vicinity could have remained unaware of a three-week-long illicit work stoppage by forty thousand miners, an episode punctuated by marches on the state capitol and other large-scale public displays of militancy. For coal-processing steelworkers observing the tumult, the main lesson of the black-lung wildcat strike was simply that it succeeded in winning amendments to the West Virginia compensation law. Moreover, this raucous affair plainly increased the pressure on Congress that led to the passage of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act later that year. This statute not only granted federal compensation benefits to the disabled but also sought to prevent future disability by setting a strict standard on exposure to coal mine dust. Even as the coal mine law was still making its way through Congress, coke workers began to agitate for coverage of their respiratory disorders under the proposed benefits plan. In April 1969, the first grassroots group addressing the health issues in coking emerged when five coke locals formed the Steelworkers Black Lung Committee. At the USW’s first national safety conference later that year, physician Hawey Wells, one of the early leaders of the black-lung insurgency, urged the thousand delegates to rely primarily upon self-help—not their employers, the medical profession, or the government—for protection. After the coal-reform measure passed without benefit coverage for coke-induced disease, coke locals of the Steelworkers immediately began to press for an extension of federal benefits. Moreover, the agitation over occupational disease in the coalfields grew in the early 1970s into a general revolt against complacent and corrupt union leadership. Although no similar dynamic unfolded in the steel mills, the general climate of democratic upheaval in the United Mine Workers and in other labor organizations surely added support to bottom-up efforts to prevent work-induced cancer in coking.^{Footnote 12}

One episode of disruptive collective action especially fell within the pattern of insurgency. In 1970, coke workers at the Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel mill in Monessen, Pennsylvania, whose local USW branch had helped start the Black Lung Committee, initiated an inventive job action. In a preliminary skirmish, two hundred workers shut down the coke plant for a day in June 1970 to register objections to their adverse conditions. This wildcat walkout apparently won no concessions. Two months later, coke employees began to exercise their contractual right to refuse unhealthful work, reporting for work and demanding alternative assignments. Wheeling-Pittsburgh management declared that no such work was available and sent the men home. The employee group repeated their defiant demand day after day, meeting the same adamant response. The stalemate continued for more than two months. It finally ended with the company agreeing to improvements in conditions. However modest, the gains in Monessen suggested the efficacy of further collective disruption. The sustained stoppage sent a blunt threat to employers about the determination of their subordinates not to continue suffering in silence. In the immediate aftermath of the dispute, the union’s general convention heard Daniel Hannan speculate that “there really may be walkouts throughout the industry,” given that coke workers were “dying a little bit on the job every day.”^{Footnote 13}

The burgeoning environmental movement also helped drive coke-oven activism. Even before the nationwide outpouring of energy associated with the Earth Day events of April 1970, USW mobilization around air pollution had begun in earnest. In southwestern Pennsylvania, many were predisposed to act based on recollections of the Donora disaster, in which emissions from a U.S. Steel zinc smelter combined with unusual meteorological conditions in the Monongahela Valley to kill twenty residents and sicken thousands of others in 1948. When the Clean Air Act amendments of 1967 granted the public new rights to participate in community rulemaking, John Sheehan, the Steelworkers’ legislative director, pressed union locals and districts to get involved. To that end, Sheehan arranged an unprecedented environmental pollution conference for the union in Washington in March 1969. His introductory remarks sought to impress upon delegates the potential importance of their opportunity: “Only after you have a fuller knowledge of the law will you realize the crucial role which you can play in your community. Once a community is designated as an air quality control region, it must establish anti-pollution standards. The type of standards will depend upon you.” Not long afterward, a small group dominated by middle-class women launched the Group against Smog and Pollution (GASP) in Pittsburgh, with Daniel Hannan, at that time the president of Clairton USW Local 1557, among the founders. As the class-bridging link between affluent environmentalists and his working-class constituency, Hannan was positioned to learn much from the ingeniously savvy confrontations and provocations that soon became the hallmarks of the GASP approach. By November 1969, his band of coke-oven activists had renamed themselves the Steelworkers Black Lung and Air Pollution Committee. Around that time, about fifty women and children, many of whom were members of coke workers’ families, picketed the Clairton Works, demanding the reduction of ambient pollution at its source.^{Footnote 14}

Beyond the broad underlying influence of the African American freedom struggle in encouraging and shaping virtually all rebellious subaltern movements after midcentury, specific developments in the steel industry gave further impetus to the reform efforts in coke plants. Like many other labor organizations, the Steelworkers witnessed the rise in the mid-1960s of militant rank-and-file dissident groups and initiatives among the roughly one-quarter of its membership that was African American. The Black Power movement in the USW formally manifested itself in a loose network known as the Ad Hoc Committee of Concerned Black Steelworkers, whose top priority was to increase minority representation on the union staff and in other leadership positions. Most relevant to the campaign to induce OSHA to control coke-oven emissions was the wave of complaints and lawsuits filed under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, actions that charged both employers and the USW with discrimination. The plaintiffs did not expect to obtain from either the EEOC or the federal courts any amelioration of the unhealthful conditions that they alleged were among the forms of discrimination they had suffered. However, remedial demands did condemn systematic past and present denial of opportunities either to be hired into less hazardous jobs or to transfer into them. They thus drew attention to, and thereby helped to legitimize for future efforts, the dreadful conditions long endured. In the 1967 federal suit against Bethlehem Steel, for example, the attorney general pointed to the long-standing practice of “assigning Negroes to less desirable positions in the Lackawanna Plant, including the hot and dirty jobs in the coke oven and blast furnace departments.” Contentious collective action occasionally mixed in with the predominantly legalistic approach. Beginning in 1967, the African American workers who made up 90 percent of the coking workforce at Republic Steel’s operations in South Chicago strenuously protested their confinement. Throughout 1968 and 1969, coke workers at Republic, led by Eugene Pughsley, pressed union officials to deal with the intertwined issues of risk and racism.^{Footnote 15}

Prior to the 1970s, regulation of hazards of occupational disease was quite a cloistered affair. As numerous historical studies have shown, the deal-making to set guidelines for state labor and health officials largely took place within the confines of a small committee of the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH), a private organization that brought together experts primarily from industry and state government. The ACGIH was a forbidding forum into which ordinary workers and their representatives did not venture. At this regulatory site, firms generating hazards produced most of the data on which an exposure limit, called a threshold limit value (TLV), was based. They often delivered evidence of questionable validity, such as unsubstantiated claims regarding company experience. In 1965, two decades after the conference commenced compiling lists of suggested limits, the group issued a tentative threshold limit of 0.2 milligrams per cubic meter of air (0.2 mg/m³) for the benzene-soluble fraction of coal tar pitch volatiles. The evidentiary base for this assessment of acceptable exposure appears to have been quite weak. In the recollection of C. Wayne Simpson, an industrial hygienist at Armco Steel, “The documentation for this TLV contained no specific references . . . to supporting evidence for the numerical value” and consisted of “unpublished data” of some sort. Two years later, the American Conference converted this tentative guide into a final one.^{Footnote 16}

In 1971, OSHA faced the herculean challenge of safeguarding the nation’s workers against countless threats. The inadequacies of the ACGIH standard-setting process notwithstanding, the infant agency took the expedient step of adopting wholesale the conference’s latest code of limit values, including that for coal tar pitch volatiles, on April 27, 1971. Shortly thereafter, Steelworkers President I. W. Abel demanded that the Department of Labor make “an evaluation of that standard which was developed without labor participation and promulgated as a federally established standard without any review as to its effectiveness.” Abel told the secretary of labor that “the relationship of coal tar to cancer has been observed since 1775. Time enough has lapsed [sic] in the subjugation of workers to this dangerous situation.” At the same time, the AISI protested to OSHA that the ACGIH standard imposed unjustified burdens and should be revoked. Rather than either drop its standard or immediately launch the procedure to replace it, OSHA called for further research and instructed employers that they could comply with the existing regulation by having their coke workers wear respirators.^{Footnote 17}

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) took up the task of clarifying the nature and extent of the risks stemming from breathing air contaminated with coke-oven emissions. Located within the structure of the burgeoning National Institutes of Health, NIOSH was created to place a sound scientific foundation under OSHA regulations. To expand the limited knowledge regarding this hazard, the institute entered into a cooperative arrangement with the AISI to investigate emissions. The reports of William Lloyd and his co-workers seemingly did little to expedite the pace of this study. On March 24, 1972, NIOSH’s deputy director told John Sheehan, “Right now we don’t know which of the many polycyclic hydrocarbons present in the air around coke ovens cause effects, and the cause and effect relationships (epidemiology) will take possibly several years to get.” Aware of management’s preference for a dilatory approach and of the receptivity of Nixon administration officials to it, the union set out to apply the pressure necessary to avoid waiting excessively for relief. As a mobilizing device for the at-risk population, the USW Safety and Health Department held a coke-oven health conference in June 1972. The invitation to coking locals made clear that the purpose of the event was “to expedite Governmental action to correct these intolerable conditions.” To that end, delegates were encouraged to “bring names and case histories of Brothers who have died or became ill while working in coking operations.” At the conference, Marcus Key, the head of NIOSH, indicated that a partial report, formally known as a criteria document, spelling out the scientific basis for regulatory action, would be forthcoming to guide OSHA. George Guenther, the assistant labor secretary overseeing occupational safety and health, suggested that his agency expected to have an improved standard, based on that scientific guidance, next year. However, meeting that optimistic deadline became even more difficult a few months later when the AISI reported to NIOSH that the highly complex chemical composition of coking emissions made the basic exercise of merely identifying the object of regulation a very problematic one. In a further effort to frame the matters at issue, the institute advised the federal authorities of the challenges involved in developing truly protective measures, particularly for the more effective but expensive engineering controls.^{Footnote 18}

Armed with a copy of the AISI report, in late 1972 the union offered its input into NIOSH’s draft criteria document, based in part on recommendations from an assemblage of rank-and-file activists. The USW called on federal scientists to recognize such nonmalignant respiratory disorders as emphysema as significant outcomes of long-term exposure to the coking environment. It pushed for primary reliance on reengineering the workplace rather than encumbering coke workers, many of whom already had compromised respiratory capacity, with respirators. Undoubtedly reflecting local leaders’ close familiarity with the plight of the large numbers of partially disabled coke workers desperately clinging to their jobs, the union urged NIOSH to propose a provision for transfer rights that allowed the impaired to retain their previous rate of compensation after being reassigned to less strenuous and less hazardous jobs, which were in all likelihood going to be lower-paying ones. Further evidence of the bottom-up concerns that might well escape the attention of professors of epidemiology or toxicology appeared in the USW’s suggestion that the forthcoming standard grant employees the right to see any personal medical records generated by employers in the course of compliance.^{Footnote 19}

The resulting criteria document issued in February 1973 met few of the workers’ concerns. NIOSH took a generally cautious stance. It rejected the view that there was no such thing as a safe level of exposure to a carcinogen in refusing to recommend a practical approximation of zero exposure, that is, no detectable level of the hazard. This agnostic starting point gave the institute the freedom to downplay the value of engineering controls, deemed premature in the absence of a clearly defined objective, as well as the unsettled and evolving state of control technologies such as enclosed oven-loading methods. The agency would not go so far as to urge forcing the development of new technology, instead preferring only the adoption of “operating procedures and engineering controls that are both feasible and attainable with existing technology.” Though conceding several obvious limitations of personal protective equipment, NIOSH’s ambivalence did not keep it from promoting their continued use as the primary defense against air contaminants. This reticence stood out as all the more remarkable in light of the report’s findings of high levels of contamination recently observed in coking facilities. Overall, the criteria document’s mix of weak and missing recommendations disappointed those hoping for a mandate for a genuinely protective standard.^{Footnote 20}

OSHA’s hesitance to move forward with the rule-making process after it received the criteria document also frustrated the USW. In August 1973, the union convened a meeting in Washington of its newly created Coke Oven Advisory Committee, composed mainly of presidents of sizable coking locals. The session served as an opportunity to convey to the NIOSH guests in attendance a full indictment of the shortcomings of their recent contributions. John Sheehan wondered why the criteria document had not called for mandatory engineering and administrative controls, leaving in place the central protective role of respirators. He also criticized the institute’s unwillingness to support transfers without loss in pay for the partially disabled. The most dramatic attempt to challenge and reorient the federal officials came from South Chicago’s Eugene Pughsley. Noting that no government agent visiting his workplace at Republic Steel had ever spent more than twenty minutes in the most hazardous locations, Pughsley suggested that “NIOSH representatives should be invited to write their material from on top of a coke battery.” (I have not yet found evidence that any officials accepted this invitation.) Rather than taking NIOSH’s analysis, however flawed, and proceeding to propose a new standard, OSHA issued a regressive call for public comments on whether even to make a proposal, guaranteeing further delay. In December 1973, in an attempt at mollification, John Stender, George Guenther’s successor, told Steelworkers President Abel that bringing in expert consultants to work with OSHA staff at this juncture would serve to expedite the regulatory process. Stender assured Abel that “OSHA will have all major problems ironed out, especially conflicts between labor and industry, prior to publication of a proposed standard.” After OSHA failed to follow through with any meaningful steps in the direction of rule-making, the union threatened to put up a picket line at the Department of Labor headquarters. This prompted Stender to appoint a Standards Advisory Committee in August 1974. The labor delegation consisted of Joseph Odorcich and Daniel Hannan representing the USW and Steven Wodka representing the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, which also had a significant number of members toiling in coke plants.^{Footnote 21}

From its first meeting in November 1974 to the issuance of its report six months later, the transactions of the Standards Advisory Committee resembled trench warfare from deeply dug-in positions. The three industry committee members, for example, voted against a motion to declare that some constituent in oven emissions caused cancer in humans. Throughout the contentious deliberations, Daniel Hannan served as the leading voice of the rank-and-file employees. He also arranged for disabled workers to testify for themselves before the committee, a move that he considered very influential in pushing the group in a progressive direction. To that end, he set up a round of field hearings in Pittsburgh in January 1975. However, OSHA officials aborted these hearings after only one day. In the aftermath, Hannan complained, “There is a lack of grassroots testimony before the committee and none has been invited.” Determined to remedy this deficiency, he would continue to maneuver to transcend the conventional constraints that kept discussion of workers’ protections within narrow confines. In March 1975, he brought more than fifty coke workers to Washington to participate in the hearings; several workers at risk expressed their need for better protection and for the right to transfer to less unhealthful places without penalty. Maintaining ongoing vigilance, Local 2610 at the Bethlehem Steel complex at Sparrows Point, Maryland, had members travel to Washington to attend virtually every committee meeting. At one session, the local’s secretary demonstrated the advantages of the only variety of respirator that the union found tolerable. Hannan requested that NIOSH monitor the air quality in all forty-six coke plants where the USW had representation status, a proposal the industry managed to block. In addition, the tireless troublemaker toured numerous coke-making facilities and brought back a wealth of information on state-of-the-art control methods, puncturing the employers’ claims of infeasibility. Hannan was unintimidated by the formidable credentials of his opponents. At one point, when an industry member of the committee announced that he had failed to complete an assigned chore, he made no attempt to hide his exasperation. “I think we had better concern ourselves in getting the jobs done,” he scolded, “and getting something written here.”^{Footnote 22}

At no point was Daniel Hannan alone in endeavoring to democratize the proceedings. John Sheehan, a veteran political operative but no industrial hygienist, audaciously waded into the technical issues surrounding emissions controls. In a progress report to his coke-oven locals, Sheehan insisted that the advisory committee had to “identify the best available technology … or may even have to force a change toward a new process in coking.” To be sure, the labor side also brought in the requisite authoritative expertise to contend over the emissions hazard and its curtailment, as well as related matters such as medical surveillance and employee training. Union medical consultant Thomas Mancuso’s proposals included an expanded right of employees to be informed of the results of all company-administered medical examinations. Mancuso’s reform plan for automatic reporting of findings to either the employee or his or her personal physician reflected festering resentment over a perceived pattern of nondisclosure and misrepresentation of adverse findings. Here again, lay forces from below had done much to put the right-to-know issue on the regulatory agenda. Distrustful of reports of clean bills of health from their company-controlled examinations, USW Local 2698 in Monessen arranged for a screening of 112 coke workers in 1973. This study determined that 55 percent of those examined had pneumoconiosis, emphysema, bronchitis, or some other work-related respiratory condition. Union official James Smith told the Standards Advisory Committee, “In all of our discussions with coke plant workmen, we have yet to find one who sincerely believes that his employer will furnish him with the truth on such a matter [as evidence of occupational disease] unless the employer is compelled to do so by Union agreement or by public regulation.” On March 4, 1975, Smith went so far as to broach an abolitionist possibility for eradicating the emissions risk: “If there were no way to make coke without condemning a percentage of our members to die of cancer from coke-oven emissions, and another percentage to contract emphysema and other forms of pneumoconiosis, then our duty would be to insist that you recommend an order which would stop the manufacture of coke.” He put forward the Steelworkers’ proposal that OSHA prohibit any visible emissions from the ovens, a valid indication of workplace air quality readily monitored by ordinary workers who lacked training in industrial hygiene. Plainly, the union refused to let its adversaries frame the discussion as one of a hopelessly complicated hazard insusceptible to valid identification and measurement and not amenable to any feasible methods of control, much less elimination.^{Footnote 23}

By the end of April 1975, the union had won the crucial support of the committee’s chairwoman, University of Cincinnati toxicologist Eula Bingham, on at least two key contested issues. After a USW delegation visited Bingham in Cincinnati to plead its case, Bingham accepted a strong emphasis on engineering measures as the means to effective hazard abatement, rejecting an indefinite reliance on respirators. She also endorsed the position that no visible smoky emissions were to be tolerated around the ovens. At the advisory committee meeting on April 30, she observed that the coke batteries presented “a carcinogen rich environment.” Because, she argued, “at the present state of knowledge we cannot define a threshold for a carcinogen . . . , the whole philosophy has to be no exposure.” She operationally defined no exposure as the average background concentration of the indicator carcinogen benzo(a)pyrene present in steelmaking communities, that is, the level of that pollutant generated by motor vehicles and other nonindustrial sources. Shortly thereafter, the committee voted six to three (with the union and public members all in favor, and the employer members all opposed) to recommend a permissible exposure limit on benzo(a)pyrene of 0.2mg/m³. Though comparison with the existing limit of 0.2 mg/m³ for coal tar pitch volatiles was necessarily an apples-and-oranges one, Bingham estimated that this proposal would achieve a ten-fold reduction in workplace pollution. On May 24, the committee submitted a report that carried that recommendation, as well as a strong endorsement of engineering controls. It supported allowing partially disabled workers to move to less unhealthful locations without loss of pay or seniority. Conveying the fraught tone of the proceedings, this report itemized a long list of split votes on decisions, large and small. In defining relevant terms, for example, the group of nine advisers could not even reach a consensus on a definition of a work shift, with the U.S. Steel representative in dissent. The three management members filed a separate brief not long afterward, reiterating their views on the extreme complexity of the hazard and the manifold difficulties of controlling it to the extent proposed by the majority. They dismissed the committee recommendations as a whole as “regulatory overkill.”^{Footnote 24}

OSHA incorporated some of the advisory committee’s ideas into a proposed standard, published in July 1975. The agency chose to replace the single indicator toxin benzo(a)pyrene with the composite of all respirable particulate matter and offered a permissible limit of 0.3 mg/m³. It maintained that in practice this limit would conform with its general policy on carcinogens of seeking the lowest feasible level of exposure. It called for giving priority to engineering and administrative controls with limited interim use of personal respiratory protective gear. But, to the dismay of the USW and OCAW, OSHA at this juncture rejected “detailed specifications on possible methods of compliance,” rather than requiring state-of-the-art measures like enclosed pipeline systems for charging ovens and thorough cleaning of leak-prone door seams after every round of coking. Reflecting the emergence of a right-to-know sensibility, the agency sought to mandate education of at-risk coke workers as well as their access to all medical examination and environmental monitoring records. The proposal reversed the advisory committee’s endorsement of nonpunitive transfer rights for the disabled with the assertion that such an intrusion into the terms (not environmental conditions) of employment lay beyond OSHA’s authority. Additional frustration followed the Labor Department’s announcement that the proposed rule would have to undergo an analysis of its estimated inflationary effect, a reflection of the Ford administration’s overall macroeconomic policy priorities. The American Iron and Steel Institute denounced the proposal as unattainable.^{Footnote 25}

For the most part, each side devoted the early phase of the ensuing period of public feedback to reiterating and buttressing its established positions. Each submitted a lengthy brief. Besides its newfound opportunity to calculate the inflationary impact entailed by such an onerous proposition, the steel institute welcomed the chance to underscore the technological impossibilities it would face. The USW considered the failure to safeguard transfer rights a particularly “bitter disappointment,” which would allow employers to discard the disabled with impunity. To address this and other deficiencies on OSHA’s proposed regulations, the union turned out 150 representatives of coke workers in October 1975 to plan its presentations in impending open hearings. In particular, the activists wanted decision-makers to hear firsthand of the problems experienced by so many coal distillation workers. Daniel Hannan set up a system for notifying locals when their managers were about to testify, so that individuals knowledgeable about plant conditions could be present to challenge any inaccuracies in the characterization of hazards and remedial measures.^{Footnote 26}

The public hearings that commenced in November 1975 gave those who worked or who had worked in the “carcinogen rich environment” their best platform for contesting the main issues at stake. Several panels of rank-and-file workers offered wide-ranging testimony, with more than forty men participating. Longtime coking employees and retirees painted a detailed picture of a dismal pattern of extreme exposure. Not only atop the ovens but throughout the coking facilities as a whole, men labored in a toxic cloud of gases, vapors, and dusts. Most emissions occurred when coal was being dumped into the ovens. Johnny Fair reported that at Sparrows Point, during charging “smoke is gushing out.” Similarly, drawing on his ten years on the batteries, Inland Steel’s James Ross attested that charging regularly generated “a big cloud of smoke,” with flames leaping out of the open oven lids. Prior to the recent implementation at U.S. Steel’s Fairfield Works in Alabama of the re-engineering steps of the kind that the USW sought for all coking sites, Trevor Tidwell recalled that dense pollution rendered invisible co-workers standing approximately thirty feet away. Tidwell also recounted a 1971 episode in which an executive who denied the validity of union remedial bargaining demands refused to walk across the top of a battery to examine the supposedly innocuous conditions in question. Numerous witnesses confirmed that the doors at the ends of the ovens, covering the openings from which distilled coal emerged after eighteen or so hours of heating, frequently did not seal properly. Eugene Pughsley maintained that 80 percent of the doors leaked at his plant in South Chicago. Taken together, these direct, if unquantified and anecdotal, observations represented a sizable body of environmental monitoring data.^{Footnote 27}

Many Steelworkers witnesses connected long exposure to intense hazards to their adverse effects. Active and retired workers often had a close, unobstructed vantage point on the illnesses besetting many of their colleagues. Bester Robinson justified a wildcat strike over hazard abatement at the Fairfield plant by noting that he had “seen a lot of people who have died from lung cancer, from kidney cancer.” Interwoven in this testimony were the clinical features of respiratory disorders and the inability or unwillingness of their employers’ medical authorities to recognize these maladies. Despite his weakened condition, Roosevelt Johns traveled from Warren, Ohio, to Washington to make his statement on December 18, 1975. Johns had had a company medical examination that included a chest X-ray only one month before the onset of lung cancer symptoms. The twenty-five-year veteran of the Republic Steel ovens did not receive any clue from his employer that anything was amiss. In Gary, where U.S. Steel administered annual examinations that also included X-rays, Willie Chapman attested, “I don’t know of anyone that they’ve given the bad news.” Whereas Roosevelt Johns’s disability had forced him out of the workforce, many other impaired workers clung to their jobs out of financial necessity. Wayne Robinson told the hearing officers that “guys are literally dragging themselves to the gate in the morning” at the Clairton Works. Others stayed in steelmaking but had to move from strenuous and polluted work on the batteries to less demanding assignments, usually with a cut in pay. The most common destination for those with shortness of breath appears to have been janitorial jobs, perpetuating the segregation long endured by African American steelworkers. Whether among those staying employed or those dropping out, the mounting toll in cancer, respiratory disease, and cardiovascular disorders forcefully struck those who saw it first-hand every day. Eugene Pughsley reported on the mortality pattern among his co-workers to support his claim that “very seldom does a man live to retire.” Perhaps more than any other fact, intimate familiarity with the tragic trajectory of chronic disease lent urgency to the union’s determination to have OSHA grant protective transfer opportunities to those in the earlier stages of decline, as well as its insistence on ready access of individuals to their company medical records.^{Footnote 28}

Moreover, a chorus of worker witnesses contended that training programs and other management channels of information dissemination neglected to deliver the rudimentary warning that coke-oven emissions caused cancer. As Louis Buchanan described the situation at the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, operations of Bethlehem Steel, “They never tell us nothing about cancer.” Employees instructed to wear respirators were not informed of the risks necessitating this practice. Evidence of these deficiencies underscored demands that the OSHA standard require appropriate hazard warning signs and employee training protocols.^{Footnote 29}

Coke workers gave the regulators a number of insights into the advantages and disadvantages of various methods of controlling hazards. Engineering measures such as enclosures that separated workers from contaminated areas won endorsement, as did administrative arrangements for diligent cleaning of the edges of doors to allow them to seal properly. In contrast, witnesses criticized the difficulty of breathing through respirators, especially for those whose respiratory functioning was impaired. On-the-job experience in several locations illuminated a managerial tendency to cut corners when healthful work practices slowed production.^{Footnote 30}

In a sense, the coke-making activists involved in the standard hearings served as a cadre of barefoot scientists, self-taught experts without conventional credentials. After employers’ attorney Robert Morris confirmed that none of the members of one panel of witnesses possessed expertise in industrial hygiene, occupational medicine, or any scientific training at all, Colorado Fuel and Iron worker Al Lawson shot back, “I think the coke plant background is about all you need to answer these questions.” Morris conceded, “I think that is probably right.” When Daniel Hannan arranged for OSHA officials to tour four major coking facilities in early 1976, the local union representatives familiar with the operational realities at the point of production took on similar unauthorized authoritative roles. To a great extent, as this contest developed, Hannan appears to have instilled in his comrades the attitude he had himself adopted much earlier. In a statement to a congressional committee contemplating occupational safety and health reform in 1969, he declared, “I do not pretend to be an expert on in-plant air pollution, coke plant safety and health hazards, or occupational diseases, but I am here to tell you exactly how it is.” On that occasion, Hannan went on to enumerate the varied forms of pollutants confronting his co-workers.^{Footnote 31}

In general, the final phases of the standard-setting process itself largely fell into the standard pattern of an insiders’ game. When Morton Corn replaced John Stender as the assistant secretary of labor overseeing OSHA early in 1976, union attorney James English immediately met with him to press the case for a stringent rule. Meanwhile, Daniel Hannan attempted to underscore the severity and breadth of the emissions problem by asking OSHA to survey the conditions in the twelve coke plants in Pennsylvania. Although this was a much more modest proposition than his previous request that every plant in the nation be examined, administrators refused it. In a separate set of hearings in the spring of 1976 to resolve the controversial matter of the inflationary potential of this regulation, the USW defended estimates that the proposed standard would not have a significant impact on steel prices. Given that OSHA’s own consultants had already arrived at a similar assessment, this round of sparring with the steel industry proved to be somewhat anti-climactic.^{Footnote 32}

After the inflation issue was disposed of, the union concentrated its efforts, largely behind the scenes, on the thorny question of the transfer options for dyspneic workers. Up to this point, the young regulatory agency had set no clear policy in this area. Some of its health standards had no provision at all for transfer without penalty. The standard for asbestos had opened the door a crack by providing for a conditional right to relocate with rate retention and seniority only if a position were available. As it became clear that OSHA feared moving further in establishing what would be highly controversial employee protections, both the USW and OCAW retreated and took up a defensive position. The unions signaled to the federal administrators that their primary concern was avoiding any mandatory medical removal clauses that would tend to leave ailing coke employees either terminated or relegated to lowly jobs as janitors.^{Footnote 33}

On October 22, 1976, OSHA published a final standard, to take effect three months later. The federal government set the permissible exposure for the benzene-soluble fraction of all particles in coke-oven emissions at 0.15 milligrams per cubic meter of air. It maintained that this indicator had “a reasonably good association with the health hazards which confront coke-oven workers. The [benzene] extract contains all of the organic materials in coke oven emissions that have in any way been implicated in the observed coke oven employee health problem.” Because OSHA had concluded that this definition of the hazard was essentially the same as the benzene-soluble fraction of coal tar pitch volatiles previously the object of regulation, it saw this new limit as a 25 percent reduction in permissible exposure, a significantly higher level of protection and, in its view, the optimal feasible level. In regulating hazard controls, the agency not only prioritized engineering and administrative methods but also made the preferred methods such strict requirements as to force the adoption of novel technologies, effectively mandating replacement of much old equipment. The extent to which this tough approach reflected coke workers’ reports on modifications already in place at their facilities is, unfortunately, unknown. However, it seems quite improbable that such evidence did not contribute to OSHA’s determination to press forward on that front. As expected, the rulemakers refused to require transfer of the partially disabled on favorable terms. However, the standard did not impose any requirement for the removal of impaired workers. Moreover, employees subject to medical surveillance under the standard were to receive a written report of all examination findings. In all probability, this provision followed directly from the numerous statements of rank-and-file workers revealing widespread nondisclosure of adverse information. Overall, the federal standard offered a strong promise of improved working conditions for workers around coke ovens, particularly with respect to their risk of cancer. “The standard as written by OSHA is not that bad,” observed the unsparing critic Daniel Hannan in December 1976, “and I feel will do the job if the steel industry makes a good faith effort to comply.”^{Footnote 34}

Not surprisingly, the steel industry immediately challenged the emissions regulations. The judicial arena offered another chance for the steelmakers to assert the infeasibility and general unreasonableness of the federal rules. In contrast, the union, while defending the standard, devoted itself primarily to prodding OSHA to perform inspections to enforce the new regulations. With the standard in effect while the legal battles played out, the USW locals with coke batteries were able to bring pressure for compliance, especially after the election of Jimmy Carter brought a more sympathetic administration into office. President Carter immediately gave the job of directing OSHA to toxicologist Eula Bingham, whose experience as chair of the Standards Advisory Committee on Coke Oven Emissions had made her uniquely qualified to pursue further this particular problem.^{Footnote 35}

The conclusion of this decade-long contest was an extraordinary one. In August 1980, the steel industry decided not to take its case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Unlike the conflicts surrounding a number of other disputed OSHA standards, such as those involving benzene and cotton dust, steel management refused to press on with its claims of technological and economic infeasibility. Accumulating experience since the early 1970s had shown the industry that it could indeed meet the standard. Doing so had meant scrapping outmoded facilities and methods in favor of more efficient and healthful ones. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss all the incremental steps on the path that brought steel management to systematic reform and enlightening realization, the significant role of worker initiative at the local level to move the industry to modernize deserves attention. Centralized collective bargaining in basic steel focused on wages and benefits, relegating disputes over working conditions largely to workplace-level negotiations. Both the 1974 and 1977 bargaining rounds brought breakthroughs at key locations in abating coke-oven hazards. The deal laboriously wrought at the Clairton Works in November 1974 made numerous advances, requiring U.S. Steel to hire more than a hundred new maintenance personnel and prescribing a long list of retooling measures. Elsewhere, management also gave in to union demands for increased staffing for door-cleaning and other maintenance work, as well as to sizable investments in new equipment. Oversight of contractual commitments also became the responsibility of local activists. At Clairton, Local 1557 used the joint labor-management safety committee not only to see that contractual provisions were implemented but also to raise repeatedly other facets of the emissions problem and to agitate for additional corrective action. Venturing beyond these conventional forms of assertion, in early 1974 a wildcat strike by African American coke workers at Sparrows Point extracted administrative and engineering changes from Bethlehem Steel.^{Footnote 36}

The Steelworkers’ campaign to have OSHA enforce its standard in the late 1970s contributed substantially to putting workplace reforms into effect that eroded the corporations’ resistance to regulation. The union offered an educational program on the many provisions of the standard to prepare its local officers, especially safety committee members, to use their hard-won rights. The USW headquarters staff coordinated a sustained effort to see that the Carter administration followed through with inspections and appropriate sanctions to compel hazard curtailment. In the realm of environmental regulation, the union also gained additional leverage from simultaneous enforcement of restrictions on ambient air pollution. By the end of the 1970s, the steel industry found itself besieged on many fronts and finally prepared to concede defeat in the judicial arena. Unfortunately, by that time another looming factor in industry policy was the growing sense that no thoroughgoing amelioration of working conditions would ever be occurring in plants that would be shut down due to inability to meet the intensifying global competitive pressure that was already producing a flood of imported steel. But for a brief period prior to the industrial collapse, the steelworkers took advantage of a window of opportunity for ameliorative change. Their reform strategy successfully blended the conventional expertise and other resources of a strong national union with the mobilization of rank-and-file employees at risk.^{Footnote 37}

Developing stricter regulations for the potent carcinogenic mix of hazards found around coke ovens represented a significant advance in occupational health policymaking. OSHA affirmed its commitment to placing the primary burden of compliance on employers, rather than on workers. The agency also displayed a notable responsiveness to the racial disparities in hazard exposure by promulgating the first health standard for which the primary beneficiaries were workers of color. It is impossible to gauge the exact amount of influence exerted by the dozens of rank-and-file coke workers, mostly African Americans, over the regulation of oven emissions. Yet at the very least, the democratizing of the standard-setting procedure succeeded in injecting into the regulatory calculus a deeper appreciation of the human dimension of the matters under contention. Certainly, this study indicates that the lay activism in policy implementation previously brought to light by historians of civil rights and other movements did extend to the realm of workplace health standards. Moreover, the coking workers’ self-help initiative suggests that future historians of regulatory affairs assess fully the possible contributions of those benefiting directly from regulatory protections.^{Footnote 38}