From Factory Floors to AI: 250 Years of Worker Safety

As the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, it’s easy to forget how dramatically the American workplace has changed. Today, emergency exits are clearly marked, hard hats and protective gear are commonplace, and most workers expect their employers to provide a safe place to do their jobs. But for much of the nation’s history, those expectations simply didn’t exist.

Long before federal safety inspectors, mandatory training, or even the idea that workers had a right to a safe workplace, American factories and mines were places where danger was woven into daily life. Unguarded machinery, toxic air, locked exits, and exhausting shifts claimed thousands of lives as the nation industrialized. Workplace injuries were often viewed as an unavoidable cost of economic progress rather than a preventable failure.

The story of workplace safety is ultimately the story of changing expectations. Over the past 250 years, Americans gradually stopped asking whether dangerous work was simply the price of progress and began asking a different question: How much of that danger was actually preventable? The answer would reshape the relationship between employers, workers, and government — and redefine what it means to have a safe place to earn a living.

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The Cost of Progress

The nation’s rapid industrialization in the 19th century transformed how Americans worked. As factories replaced small workshops and agriculture gave way to manufacturing, millions of workers found themselves laboring long hours in environments filled with powerful machinery and hazards that previous generations had never encountered.

“Before the Industrial Revolution, the typical worker’s knowledge about occupational threats was limited to visible, familiar, physical, and thermal threats, and safety was personal responsibility with some limited help from co-workers and direct supervisors," said David McLain, founder and CEO of ES Metrics in Manlius, N.Y. “Safety policies, training, or engineering were similarly scant.”

As factories expanded, those dangers multiplied. “The transition to early industrial manufacturing introduced an entirely new array of dangers and vectors of harm,” McLain said. “Early industrialization prioritized mechanical throughput over human-system integration, exposing workers to varied, high-consequence hazards.”

Workers had little legal protection, noted Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. For the average factory worker, “workplace safety” barely existed as a concept, she said, with long hours, unguarded machinery, poor ventilation, fire hazards, and few systematic protections. Injuries and deaths were common, employers faced few consequences for unsafe conditions, and workers often had little power to refuse dangerous tasks or speak up without risking their livelihoods.

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When Tragedy Sparked Reform

As industrial accidents became more common, they also became more visible. 

“Disasters, strikes, and exposés made the human cost of industrial work visible to a broader public that did not work in factories and mines,” said Edmondson. “Highly publicized tragedies, large-scale labor actions, and works like The Jungle turned ‘accidents’ into moral and political issues, helping to shift opinion from seeing injuries as an individual worker’s misfortune to seeing them as systemic failures requiring regulation and reform.”

Few events accelerated that shift more than the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, where 146 garment workers lost their lives.

“It was at once highly visible, due to its New York City location, and because it involved the tragic and painful deaths of young women,” Edmondson said. “Moreover, these horrific deaths were clearly preventable by basic safety precautions.”

According to Edmondson, the public outrage that followed “made it much harder to defend a purely ‘hands-off’ approach to the workplace, accelerating fire and building codes and solidifying the expectation that employers must proactively anticipate foreseeable hazards and design work so that errors or accidents do not cost people their lives.” 

A New Era of Workplace Safety

By the mid-20th century, the idea that workplace injuries were simply an unavoidable cost of doing business was giving way to a new understanding: many hazards could be prevented. Employers, workers, labor organizations, and policymakers all played a role in that shift, setting the stage for the most significant workplace safety legislation in U.S. history.

In the first half of the 20th century, some employers “introduced more standardized processes, shorter hours in certain plants, and early safety programs, often motivated by productivity, reputation, or a paternalistic sense of responsibility,” Edmondson said. 

Meanwhile, workers and unions advocated for improved safety through the use of collective bargaining, strikes, and political advocacy. Thus, “the evolution of workplace safety was essentially co-created through tension and negotiation among these three groups,” Edmondson said.

Those efforts culminated in the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. By then, Edmondson said, “lawmakers concluded that a federal agency was needed to set uniform standards, conduct inspections, and enforce compliance nationwide so that basic safety would not depend on where someone lived, which industry they were in, or how enlightened their employer happened to be.”

McLain said that the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) represented more than a new regulatory agency — it reflected a broader shift in how workplace safety was understood. “By the late 1960s, occupational health science had evolved considerably, reaching a level of diagnostic, epidemiological, and toxicological capability that was vastly superior to the rudimentary understandings of the 19th century.”

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The Next Frontier

More than 50 years after OSHA’s creation, the American workplace is changing once again. While traditional hazards like falls, fires, and machinery accidents remain, employers are increasingly confronting risks that lawmakers in 1970 could scarcely have imagined.

“The initial focus when OSHA passed was on tangible, physical and industrial hazards that typically come to mind such as unguarded machines, fall hazards, fires, trench collapses, and explosions,” said Kristina Vaquera, an attorney with Jackson Lewis in Richmond, Va. “These hazards still exist and can be significant, but the number and complexity of safety challenges in today’s workplaces have evolved.”

Vaquera pointed to growing safety concerns including infectious disease prevention and preparedness, workplace violence, musculoskeletal and ergonomic injuries, mental health crises, automation and AI related issues, and risks specific to gig, subcontractor, and temporary workers.

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Melissa Peters, an attorney with Ogletree Deakins in San Francisco, said OSHA’s framework has also been strained by the speed of technological and workplace change. The agency’s “structure was designed for a very different economy,” she said. “Until the rulemaking process catches up, which could take years or possibly even decades, employers will continue operating in a space of regulatory uncertainty.”

Technology presents both promise and risk. Peters noted that “robotics and automation remove workers from certain undesirable high-hazard tasks such as repetitive lifting and toxic exposures,” but warned that “certain developments create ambiguity or unpredictability.” For example, she said, collaborative robots (cobots) “operate outside traditional machine guarding frameworks and machine learning systems that adapt their behavior over time likely will eventually present previously unrecognized hazards.”

Vaquera made a similar point, noting that “AI, robotics and automation improve workplace safety in a number of ways including removing employee exposure to dangerous tasks and substances, reducing repetitive strain, improving hazard detection, and aiding in training.” At the same time, they also present “novel risks including human and robot accidents in shared spaces, overreliance on automation and overconfidence in AI-aided safeguards leading to reduction in skillsets and situational awareness, and unrealistic productivity goals based on AI-generated information.”

The next chapter, Vaquera said, may require a more holistic, systems approach to risk management looking at the workplace as a whole to identify hazards and assess risk aided by modern technology with more active involvement of employees in the process.