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The Occupational Safety and Health Act

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"The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 heralded a new era in the history of public efforts to protect workers from harm on the job. This Act established for the first time a nationwide, federal program to protect almost the entire work force from job-related death, injury and illness," (MacLaury). Occupational health and safety awareness pre-dates OSHA by decades, though, and it is important to place the administration within its historical context. The Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth century proceeded like a locomotive, without any barrier or restriction. However, working conditions became increasingly dangerous. Social and political activism spawned the labor movements that led to early occupational safety regulations. As United States Department of Labor Occupational Safety and Health Administration states, the nation's first occupational safety regulations were passed in Massachusetts in 1877. Several states followed suit, paving the way for the United States Department of Labor to take federal action. Special investigator for the Department of Labor, Alice Hamilton, conducted some of the first forma surveys of factories and other industrial workplaces. These formative surveyed provided the methodological foundations upon which modern occupational safety research and practice are built. In 1934, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins created the Bureau of Labor Standards, to provide a list of regulations and codify them in law. The Bureau of Labor

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