文章基本信息

标题：Labor Unions: A Public Health Institution
本地全文：下载
作者：Beth Malinowski ; Meredith Minkler ; Laura Stock 等
期刊名称：American journal of public health
印刷版ISSN：0090-0036
出版年度：2015
卷号：105
期号：2
页码：261-271
DOI：10.2105/AJPH.2014.302309
语种：English
出版社：American Public Health Association
摘要：Using a social–ecological framework, we drew on a targeted literature review and historical and contemporary cases from the US labor movement to illustrate how unions address physical and psychosocial conditions of work and the underlying inequalities and social determinants of health. We reviewed labor involvement in tobacco cessation, hypertension control, and asthma, limiting articles to those in English published in peer-reviewed public health or medical journals from 1970 to 2013. More rigorous research is needed on potential pathways from union membership to health outcomes and the facilitators of and barriers to union–public health collaboration. Despite occasional challenges, public health professionals should increase their efforts to engage with unions as critical partners. We need not look any further than Broad Street to understand that place matters. 1,2 When physician John Snow strongly suspected that contaminated water from a local pump was causing the cholera epidemic in London in 1854, his use of maps and his storied removal of the pump handle became a potent symbol of the importance of intervening on the environmental level to prevent disease and improve health. 3,4 More than a century later, a wealth of strong epidemiological evidence documents that health and environment—its physical, social, and economic conditions—are linked. 5,6 Recent emphasis on this interaction may be traced to the 1986 Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, through which global health leaders called for international action to promote the health of all peoples by addressing how “health is created and lived by people within the settings of their everyday life.” 7 ^(p3) In public health’s increasingly place-based intervention model, the literature on place emphasizes sites in which we learn (e.g., schools), play (e.g., parks), and love (e.g., home). Ironically, however, although “work and health are intimately connected,” 8 ^(p101) outside the occupational health and safety literature, and with some notable exceptions, 9–14 sites of work and workplace policies are seldom featured in public health efforts, nor are management and labor viewed as key actors. We argue that organized labor and the worksites, industries, and communities labor represents are and should be accorded greater consideration as critical and active participants in the public health arena. With a steady decline in union membership over the past half century, 15–18 mainstream media often elects to discuss unions as a relic of the past, and many political and government figures try to erase them from our collective memory. 19,20 In stark contrast, we challenge the public health community to view unions as a vital part the past, present, and, most importantly, future public health infrastructure of the United States. Using the social–ecological model as a framework for analysis, we have used historical and contemporary efforts to illustrate how unions have helped create healthier workers, workplaces, and communities.