Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [133]
Mass vaccinations at American workplaces generated their own dynamics of power and conflict. American workers were vulnerable not only to contagion but to arbitrary dismissal during epidemics. Domestic employers, fearing exposure to infection, shunned servants and laundresses, causing destitution in the tenements. When smallpox broke out, some factory owners abruptly suspended operations, with no thought of compensating their workers for lost wages. In a typical incident in Sayreville, New Jersey, two handkerchief manufacturers, acting upon the advice of physicians, told their employees to stay home until the local epidemic was brought under control. The order affected about three hundred workers, many of them the breadwinners of their families. Workers pleaded with foremen. One factory girl dropped to her knees and prayed. All to no avail. To employers and local health officials, the mere threat of smallpox justified the most overt acts of ethnic scapegoating. When a single Italian worker with smallpox escaped from quarantine in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1902, Bethlehem Steel Company summarily discharged all of its Italian workers. Italians were forbidden to ride the city streetcars until the outbreak subsided .47
Employers normally bristled at workplace health regulations. Key pieces of progressive labor legislation—including factory safety measures and laws to shorten the workday—were justified by reformers as necessary to protect the health of workers and the public. Manufacturers’ associations and individual employers challenged such measures in the courts, insisting they violated the “liberty of contract” between worker and employer. But when faced with the potentially expensive emergency of a smallpox epidemic that had a relatively cheap solution (vaccination), many industrial employers readily cooperated with public health officials. They willingly turned their private workplaces into public health stations.48
Many employers made vaccine refusal grounds for dismissal. In one 1901 episode, six Brooklyn health department physicians, policemen in tow, appeared at the sugar refineries of Havemeyer & Elder, just in time for payday. As each worker stepped forward to receive his wages, a city doctor vaccinated him. Railroad and streetcar corporations, liable for damages if an employee with smallpox infected a passenger, were particularly vigilant. In the winter of 1903, as smallpox raged in the Pennsylvania coal region, officials of the H. C. Frick Coke Company, a vast industrial enterprise of coal mines and coke works, ordered all of its employees and their families to get vaccinated. According to the Chicago Tribune, the order affected 300,000 men, women, and children.49
When employers joined forces with local health officers and police to enforce vaccination, a crowded factory floor could become as confining as a prison. In April 1901, a female worker at the American Tobacco Company in Passaic, New Jersey, died of smallpox. She had continued to work during the early contagious stages of her disease. In such an instance, any responsible employer would want to secure the safety of his workplace by assuring that the workers got vaccinated. But the measures taken at the American Tobacco Company went well beyond that duty. A squad of government physicians and police entered the plant, determined to vaccinate all 350 women and girls who worked there. Informed they would have to submit to vaccination, some workers fainted, “others became hysterical, and there was a general rebellion,” The New York Times reported. Two hundred of the women tried to escape, but they found all of the factory exits locked. “[A]ll were finally vaccinated.”50
As C. P. Wertenbaker observed time and again in the South, workers’ natural fears of vaccination were intensified by their need to earn. Many American industrial workers feared, with good reason, that vaccine would cause their arms to swell, making it impossible for them to support themselves or their families for a period of days or weeks. And they