CRYSTAL EASTMAN: WORK ACCIDENTS AND THE LAW (1910) 

Location: Market Square, Pittsburgh, PA 15222

Workplace health and safety is an enduring concern for organized labor. Twenty-six-year-old Crystal Eastman came to Pittsburgh in 1907. With a law degree from New York University and a Masters from Columbia, she undertook perhaps the most important study of industrial safety ever accomplished. She did an in-depth study of 526 deaths by industrial accident in Allegheny County in a single 12-month period. She extensively interviewed workers and their families and documented variables of occupation and ethnicity. She totally undermined the almost universal assertion that 90 percent of accidents were the workers’ fault. Through analysis and investigation she showed that at most 30 percent were caused by worker error. She recommended engineering controls like machine and drive belt guarding.

Crystal Eastman

Eastman dramatically exposed the pitiful amounts of compensation paid to injured workers and families devastated by a breadwinner’s fatality or crippling. Her Pittsburgh Survey volume led to an invitation by the governor of New York to write the state’s workers compensation law.

Crystal Eastman Work Accidents and the Law marker, PPG side, Market Square

Crystal Eastman was a pioneer in other areas as well. She actively organized a women’s resistance movement to World War I. She was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and wrote an early version of the Equal Rights Amendment. She believed that women would only achieve true equality when a woman’s labor in giving life and care to her child was recognized and compensated by the state.