Alice Hamilton Quotes

OSHA was created to regulate jobs that cause injury or illness to workers. Increasingly, though, OSHA sees its purpose as improving the general welfare of working Americans, whether work itself is hazardous or not.

Whether we, as individuals, are motivated by simple humanity or by simple economics, we can no longer permit profits to be dependent upon an unsafe or unhealthy work site.

There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few.

In 1890, nearly everyone died on the job, and if they lived long enough not to die on the job, the average age of retirement was 85.

Ask the widows and orphans of the thousands of men killed annually through the avarice of railroad corporations refusing to avail themselves of modern appliances in coupling and other improvements on their railroads. Inquire from the thousands of women and children whose husbands or fathers were suffocated or crushed in the mines through the rapacious greed of stockholders clamoring for more dividends.

In 1896 one out of every 11 steel workers would die on the job.

Good health and safety really matters - we need to protect people against death and serious injury in the workplace.

I've urged employers to address workers' pain.

I've been unfortunate enough to be working, and recovering from a few injuries now and again.

Latinos are disproportionately more likely to be injured on the job than other ethnic groups.

When I was a child, I was unable to go to any type of sleepaway summer camp because of health issues. Once I learned about the Lopez Foundation, I knew I wanted to get involved, send kids with kidney disease away to camp so they can still experience overnight camp with medical needs at hand.

Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease, but it's not a disease itself.

Writing in certain environments carries with it an occupational risk.

Illinois then had no legislation providing compensation for accident or disease caused by occupation.

It was easy to present figures demonstrating the contrast between lead work in the United States under conditions of neglect and ignorance, and comparable work in England and Germany, under intelligent control.

We have common enemies today. It's called childhood poverty. It's called cancer. It's called AIDS. It's called Parkinson's. It's called Muscular Dystrophy.

In the developed world, we live 30 years longer, on average, than our ancestors born a century ago, but the price we pay for those added years is the rise of chronic diseases.

Mining is a dangerous profession. There's no way to make a mine completely safe: These are the words owners have always used to excuse needless deaths and the words miners use to prepare for them.

The long, cold Minnesota winters instilled in me a fascination for exotic far off places; I aspired toward a career in tropical diseases and world health problems.

So much of what we are currently seeing as far as human suffering and misery comes from diseases that should have been preventable but were not.

[Industrialists] maim and slaughter workers by thousands.

Disregard for workers' health protection is not what American industry is supposed to be about.

The memory of the 146 people who lost their lives in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire stands as a reminder that legal protections and workplace safety standards were won through a long struggle for social justice and at great human cost.

In terms of medicine, I've generally been pretty interested in public health issues as they relate to sub-Saharan Africa on a broad scale - HIV/AIDS, malaria etc.

When you're a parent, your child's health is your number one concern, and to get the news that your child has diseases or is unhealthy, I'm sure, is absolutely crushing.