Making the Workplace 'Safe' in Capitalism : The Enforcement of Factory Legislation in Nineteenth Century Ontario

It is the purpose of this paper to contribute to a discussion of the early development of occupational health and safety regulation in Ontario. Why was the state empowered to regulate occupational health and safety in the late nineteenth century, and why was this power exercised with such little effect? This paper will focus on the later question. Aside from considerations of space, there are at least two reasons for concentrating on the implementation of Ontario's Factory Act rather than on its enactment. First, although no comprehensive study of the enactment of the Act has been published, a number of well-known works have touched on the subject. No one, however, has yet examined the early implementation of that legislation. Second, the failure to study implementation reflects a tendency to conceptualize the state as a monolithic structure that can be analyzed primarily in terms of the activities of its more overt political institutions, processes, and figures. While these are obviously significant, both instrumentally and symbolically, a critical component of our understanding of the role and dynamics of the capitalist state will be lost unless adequate attention is focused on how state power is actually exercised by the officials on whom it is conferred