Arthur McIvor's distinguished track record of publications, including the excellent Working Lives: Work in Britain since 1945 (2014), has established him as one of the UK's foremost historians researching the lived experience of work, industry, and occupational health from an oral history perspective. In Jobs and Bodies, he focuses specifically on the intersection between work, health, and the bodies of workers as the “ecological core of the workplace” (33), documenting the various ways in which employment and industry marks and takes its toll on the physical and social wellbeing of those who work, and who have worked. The focus is largely (but not exclusively) on the postwar period and draws heavily on the experiences of those in heavy industry settings like mining, manufacture, and shipbuilding, sectors whose vitality has declined in parallel with the health of many of those once employed within them. It draws on memoirs, published accounts, oral testimonies, and contextual sources to present the memories and experiences of workers themselves, and so offers a rich, deep, and detailed account whose freshness and clarity of insight adds significant value to our understanding of a relatively well-documented period and issue.

One of the undoubted strengths of McIvor's book is the self-consciously “personal lens” (4) that is deployed, both in terms of the reflexive oral-history methodology used and the positionality that informs it, and in the purpose and energy that animates and suffuses the project. At the start of chapter 1, McIvor narrates his own family history and the ways that the experiences and impacts of work informed their lives and his own; this project, in particular, feels as if it matters more and is closer to home than even his previous work, and this is reflected in the care and empathy with which the voices of participants are presented and handled, and the contextual sensitivity to issues like individual agency, class, gender, and masculinity that is displayed. The explicit aim is to “bear witness” (6) to the lived experiences and realities of death, injury, and disease of those whose voices are included, showing both the causes and the effects of those experiences. The narratives to which individuals contribute are creatively, persuasively, and vividly presented, and McIvor is present throughout as a guiding hand within the text, telling us what has struck him about the stories he presents and the meanings of the experiences he documents. This mirrors his account of the role of interviewees in “taking us on their shoulders” (42) to share a view with us, the reader; McIvor is not blankly accepting or uncritical of their motives in doing so, and is instead attuned to the multiple drivers that inform the process of narrative construction within workers’ accounts—to bear witness, to construct a self-identity around valorized ideas of graft and sacrifice, to self-justify, to inculpate or exculpate, or to enact a form of gender politics.

One important theme within the book is that of “sacrifice”; McIvor identifies and critiques the tendency for formal mechanisms of power and authority to present the toll that work takes on the bodies of workers as a trade-off or price worth paying for the social benefits of employment, progress, and productivity. He positions these phenomena as elements within a complex social transaction, so that the negative impacts of working conditions are damaging, but may be deemed tolerable if there is a need for them, either at the level of society, of the firm or the job in hand, or on the part of the worker themselves (such as better rates of pay). The result is that McIvor avoids providing a simple condemnation of the exploitative nature of work and instead develops a more nuanced account of that transaction and the forces that shape it; traditional working life is not romanticized and the impacts of work, for good and for ill, are explored and reflected on. Importantly, he also avoids uncritically lionizing the traditional, masculine, solidaristic working culture of these industries and workers (which many accounts of this area laud and lament) and ignoring the costs associated with it—working men are repeatedly portrayed as being constrained by this value system, which is capable of being both supportive and a source of joyful camaraderie, but also brutally judgmental and exclusionary, demanding the maintenance of a hard-man image based on competition and respect (by working themselves to death, or refusing even basic safety precautions), or risk facing ostracism, derision, and shame.

Finally, it is worth mentioning some of the other key strengths of this book. Chapter 3 is particularly powerful because it focuses on the legacy of occupational health and safety and exposure to risk, going beyond an account of “what happened” to really consider “what happened afterward,” and the sometimes-heartbreaking legacies of poor mental and physical health that follow on from work itself. The book also sets out the social legacies of dangerous work and industry—the impacts on communities and the environment, the legacies of unemployment and deindustrialization, the crises of identity once men are no longer “units of production” (112) but rather find themselves to be unemployed, dislocated, or broken relics of a system of work that has disappeared. In engaging at length with issues of stress and mental health, and the Covid-19 pandemic, the book broadens its focus well beyond traditional heavy industry and also retains a focus on issues that also speak to the future world of work, providing a timely reminder that the politics of this issue are not ones that have gone away. Jobs and Bodies is a powerful, dynamic, but sensitive account of working lives and health which deserves careful consideration as a sophisticated and valuable contribution to the history of industry, labor, death, and injury, and of twentieth-century British working culture more widely.