Clearing the Air: The Rise and Fall of Smoking in the Workplace by Gregory Wood

Book Review| May 01 2018 Clearing the Air: The Rise and Fall of Smoking in the Workplace by Gregory Wood Clearing the Air: The Rise and Fall of Smoking in the Workplace, Wood, Gregory, Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2016, viii + 248 pp., $45.00 (cloth); $36.00 (e-book) Donald W. Rogers Donald W. Rogers Central Connecticut State University, University of Connecticut-Storrs, Housatonic Community College Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2018) 15 (2): 145–147. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-4353938 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Donald W. Rogers; Clearing the Air: The Rise and Fall of Smoking in the Workplace by Gregory Wood. Labor 1 May 2018; 15 (2): 145–147. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-4353938 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search Gregory Wood’s new book opens by quoting writer activist Barbara Ehrenreich about her stint as a waitress for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed. “Almost everyone smokes,” she remarked about her restaurant coworkers (1). To Wood, her observation captured a pervasive but neglected element of twentieth-century working-class life. Cigarette smoking evolved as a central on-the-job worker experience during the 1900s, and it figured broadly into the process of work, labor-management relations, workspace use, occupational health, worker solidarity (or lack thereof), and collective bargaining, intersecting with changing public attitudes toward tobacco use throughout the twentieth century. Allan Brandt, Robert Proctor, Richard Kluger, and others have written histories of cigarette smoking, but Wood for the first time examines its workplace parameters.Clearing the Air addresses that part of labor history involving the worker-management struggle to control workplaces. The book explores smoking’s role... Copyright © 2018 Labor and Working-Class History Association2018 You do not currently have access to this content.