Organized Labor and the Problem of “Smokers’ Rights”

This chapter examines the relationship of the labor movement to the decline of smokers' work cultures from the 1970s to the 1990s. As newspaper articles, letters to lobbyists, and published National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decisions illustrate, the demise of smoking at work often intersected with the efforts of many employers to roll back the power of organized labor. Employers sometimes used no-smoking rules to discipline workers, committeemen, and union organizers for unwanted efforts to shape managerial policy making. Unions often fought for working-class smokers and their vanishing privileges, as the increasing marginalization of smoking and smokers seemed to portend the overall demise of labor's power in the late twentieth century. The NLRB discovered in numerous cases brought by workers and unions that employers tried to sidestep collective bargaining by abruptly creating new no-smoking rules and using smoking restrictions to harass union supporters.

Smoking Bans and Shop Floor Resistance during the Early Twentieth Century

This chapter explores early-twentieth-century employers' opposition to smoking in the workplace, focusing on a case study of smoking practices and shop floor disputes at the Hammermill Paper Company in Erie, Pennsylvania, during the long, hot summer of 1915. Uniquely detailed reports of working conditions and workers' behaviors in this large mass-production factory, written by a pair of curious labor spies, documented nicely the ongoing efforts of many workers to circumvent the company's prohibition of smoking. In response to the refusal of management to allow smoking, workers improvised an assortment of surreptitious strategies that would allow them to smoke at work and enjoy time away from their jobs. As the Hammermill case illustrates, the wide extent of worker subversion made the no-smoking rule a dead letter, much to the constant frustration of management and the spies themselves.

Nicotine and Working-Class History

This introductory chapter explores the intertwined histories of smoking and the working class, pointing out the ubiquity of smoking in twentieth-century workplaces despite its marginalized presence in histories of labor. Moreover, the chapter shows that, as cigarette smoking and subsequent nicotine addiction became significant components of many working-class lives in the twentieth century, smokers in a multitude of workplaces shaped, established, and defended the work cultures that sustained their need to use nicotine regularly during the workday. These developments at times accommodated or challenged employers' rules that limited or even banned working-class smoking practices outright. Worker demands for the right to smoke, and their abilities to cultivate spaces and times (sometimes clandestinely) for smoking, underpinned a new dimension of shop floor politics in the cigarette century.

Quitting Smoking and the Endurance of Nicotine

This concluding chapter explores the persistence of addiction to nicotine at the turn of the twenty-first century, as well as the incentives for quitting smoking. Despite the development of behavioral and pharmaceutical assistance to help smokers give up their addictions to cigarettes, the transition from dependence to a smoke-free lifestyle can be, at least for some, “sheer hell.” Moreover, despite declining overall numbers of tobacco users since the mid-1960s, nicotine survived the “cigarette century” that was the twentieth century. While quitting smoking is the new normal among tobacco users, there are many “holdouts,” frequent relapses, aborted quit attempts, and harm-reducing electronic cigarettes that allow nicotine addiction to endure.

Antismoking Politics in Postwar Workplaces

This chapter examines how the prevalence of smoking in postwar indoor workplaces gave rise to mounting opposition from nonsmoking workers in the 1970s and 1980s. Nonsmokers in postwar offices, for instance, recoiled from their colleagues' continual spewing of toxic and irritating secondhand smoke, lobbying managers and government officials for new restrictions on smoking. The most determined and energized nonsmokers took disinterested employers to court and built nonsmoker advocacy groups from below that lobbied for a clearing of the air at work. Much to their frustration, though, nonsmoking workers faced active opposition from working-class smokers, and managers often did not want to provoke smokers' opposition by revoking their privileges, even as medical knowledge about the health risks of smoking (and secondhand smoke) became abundantly clear in the 1970s through the 1990s.

Workers, Management, and the Right to Smoke during World War II

This chapter explains that World War II was a major historical moment when cigarettes became respectable in American culture and soon became permissible in the industrial workplace. Wartime popular culture connected smoking to military service and support for soldiers' sacrifices, making the cigarette an acceptable and respectable symbol of patriotic expression. At the same time, workers pressed employers for the right to smoke on the job, and smoking disputes played a significant role in several strikes in the automobile-turned-defense plants of Michigan. By 1950, many major employers such as General Motors and the Ford Motor Company had rescinded their bans on smoking.

“Exiled Smoking” and the Making of Smoke-Free Workplaces

This chapter discusses smoking bans during the 1980s and 1990s. By this time, smokers' work cultures groaned under the weight of increasing pressure from employers and the state, as concerns about public health, health care costs, and worker productivity led to a new ouster of tobacco use in the workplace. Smokers struggled to adapt to their banishment by relocating to outdoor spaces they would claim as new sanctuaries, while at the same time lodging complaints with interested tobacco lobbyists in Washington, DC, about those employer actions that had triggered their exile from indoor spaces of work. Some employers took their new prohibitions of smoking to the fullest extent possible by requiring workers to quit smoking altogether, a development that highlighted the limited means at smokers' disposal for responding to the demise of their rights and privileges in the workplace amid the ebbing strength of organized labor.

Reformers, Employers, and the Dangers of Working-Class Smoking

This chapter examines the importance of class, manhood, and youth in turn-of-the-century conversations about cigarettes, when moral reform crusaders such as Lucy Page Gaston of Illinois viewed “coffin nails” as a sure path to physical and emotional doom. Reformers warned that smoking stunted the potential of young working-class males for growth to respectable and healthy manhood and crushed their chances of adult success as workers. The wrecked lives of young smokers, according to reformers, were prima facie evidence of the corrosive and harmful impact of cigarettes on modern society. At the same time, the relationship between cigarettes and urban fires suggested the growing presence of smoking at work, as dropped cigarettes and matches ignited deadly fires such as the Newark Factory Fire (1910) and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (1911).