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Journal of Applied Communication

Research
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Health on the Line: Identity and

Disciplinary Control in Employee
Occupational Health and Safety
Discourse
Heather M. Zoller
Published online: 10 Jan 2011.

To cite this article: Heather M. Zoller (2003) Health on the Line: Identity and Disciplinary Control
in Employee Occupational Health and Safety Discourse, Journal of Applied Communication
Research, 31:2, 118-139, DOI: 10.1080/0090988032000064588

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 Journal of Applied Communication Research
Vol. 31, No. 2, May 2003, pp. 118–139

Health on the Line: Identity and

Disciplinary Control in
Employee Occupational Health and
Safety Discourse
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Heather M. Zoller

ABSTRACT Based on an ethnographic case study and interviewing at an automobile

manufacturing plant, this essay examines employee consent to health hazards and to the
discursive and regulatory mechanisms that exclude employee experiences from official
reports of workplace injury and illness. The article redresses the lack of scholarly
attention in the occupational health and safety literature to the role of discourse in
defining and negotiating risk and in constructing norms about reporting health and safety
issues among employees. Findings demonstrate how employees themselves may partici-
pate in the construction of shared identity norms that act disciplinarily to shift responsi-
bility for safety from management to individual workers. Understanding these hegemonic
norms provides a basis to question occupational health and safety statistics, and offers
strategic points of intervention to improve worker health protections.
KEY WORDS: Occupational health and safety, identity, organizational culture, consent

I n the year 2000, there were a total of 5,915 recorded fatal injuries in the
workplace (US Bureau of Labor Statistics). Although the 5.3 million total
injuries recorded in 1999 reflect a decline in reported incidence from previous
years (US Bureau of Labor Statistics), these statistics show that seventeen
workers die on the job each day in the US (Hasek, 1998). Manufacturing reported
the highest injury rates, with 6.3 cases per 100 workers. In addition to injuries,
workplaces produce illness through exposure to chemicals, poor ergonomics,
stress, and inactivity (Skillen, 1996).
Improvements in occupational health and safety cannot be made without
adequate understanding of the hazards employees face in the work process.
However, these statistics about workplace health, as disturbing as they are,
reflect only those incidents that were recognized, named, and recorded through
official channels. Given conflicting interests in the workplace between produc-
Heather M. Zoller is an Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati. This research was conducted
as a part of a dissertation directed by Dennis K. Mumby at Purdue University, and funded by a grant
from the Purdue Research Foundation. The author wishes to thank Gail Fairhurst, Dennis Mumby, and
Steve Depoe for helpful comments on drafts of this essay. Address correspondence to the University
of Cincinnati, Department of Communication, Cincinnati OH 45221-0184, USA or email:
zollerhm@email.uc.edu.

Copyright 2003, National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/0090988032000064588
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tivity and health (Levenstein & Tuminaro, 1997; Skillen, 1996), I view the
production of knowledge about health and safety through managerial and regula-
tory procedures as a discursive, political process.
Improvements in employee reporting are necessary to better reflect em-
ployee experiences of illness and injury, particularly because independent
assessment of workplace safety standards is rare, given that OSHA has less
than 2,000 compliance officers to assess more than 6 million establishments
(Weil, 1999). Moreover there is little understanding about the communi-
cative processes among employees that influence decisions to report health
problems, and produce consent to the political process of managing workplace
hazards.
This oversight may be due in part to simplistic conceptions of communication
in the occupational health and safety literature, which rely on conduit
metaphors (Axley, 1984) to study the packaging and transmission or exchange of
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safety procedures to employees (see for example Davis, 1995; Erickson, 2000;
Hutter, 2001). Such perspectives ignore the constitutive role of communication
in defining and negotiating risk (cf. Sauer, 1996).
Heath and Gay (1997) call for an “infrastructural” approach to risk communi-
cation that “opts for a cultural interpretation, seeking to know the ripple effect
by which information and opinion make their way through networks of individ-
uals and institutions” (p. 342). However, when the occupational health literature
does address organizational culture, it tends to construe culture as a product of
managerial values that influences employee compliance with safety procedures
(Erickson, 2000; Weinstein, 1996). Such an approach ignores the co-construction
of organizational reality through the communicative interaction of organizational
members, as well as the role of conflict and power imbalances in those construc-
tions.
Because the occupational health and safety literature tends to focus on indi-
vidual compliance (Atkinson, 1999; Skillen, 1996), we know little about the
discursive construction of employee norms about health and safety procedures,
and their relationships to the ideological and material circumstances of regula-
tory rules, managerial control, work processes, and social relationships. Thus,
this essay critically examines the discursive, cultural dimensions of workplace
health and safety at an automobile manufacturing plant. Through an ethno-
graphic case study, I seek to understand the role of employee-constructed social
norms around occupational health in conflicts between employee health and
organizational productivity. The next section reviews the occupational health
and safety literature from a Foucauldian perspective. This review demonstrates
the political construction of knowledge about occupational risks at the regula-
tory and organizational levels and calls for investigation of employee consent to
such regulations.

A Critical Framework for Examining

Occupational Health and Safety Discourse
The Occupational Safety and Health Act and the creation of the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) imposed a “general duty” to provide
healthy and safe work environments. The Department of Labor creates standards,
the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission reviews these stan-
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dards, and the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety provides
OSHA with established scientific “facts” it needs to create regulations (Noble,
1997). However, today, OSHA is under-funded and under-staffed, resulting in
few inspections and small fines for violations (Gallagher, 1998; Levenstein &
Tuminaro, 1997). The recent failure of ergonomic protection legislation symbol-
izes the difficulties involved in protecting worker health (Adams & Bettelheim,
2001; Martin, 2001).
Drawing from Foucault (1975; 1979; 1980a), I articulate OSHA regulation and
implementation systems as a disciplinary discourse that manages and structures
procedures of knowledge about workplace risk. Disciplinary power operates
through multiple discourses to produce forms of knowledge and identity. “Bio-
power” is Foucault’s (1973) term for the exercise of disciplinary power in and
through the body, a means of achieving broad social control through the
establishment of a web of norms that give meaning to the body and bodily
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practices, rendering them both docile and useful. Professional discourse pro-
motes the internalization of these norms, resulting in panoptical surveillance of
self and other (Foucault, 1979). Discursive, ideological practices produce and
normalize these constructed power relationships by framing what is considered
possible in any given moment (Barker & Cheney, 1994). In this section, I examine
OSHA as a discipline that constitutes both risk and its management, and then
provide a framework for examining the role of communication in producing
employee consent to these disciplinary strategies.

OSHA as Disciplinary Discourse

I argue that OSHA standards act disciplinarily to establish control by constitut-
ing what counts as an occupational injury and illness, and defining the range of
responses to workplace hazards. First, statistics about workplace health, injury,
and fatalities are dependent upon the criteria used to determine what is a “risk”
and what is “reportable” by OSHA standards. The regulatory system relies on the
discourse of science to establish the existence of workplace-induced illness and
injury; however, such decisions produce rather than discover reality as they
structure the disclosure of employee experiences of injuries, illness and even
fatalities. The Department of Labor requires substantive evidence as the basis for
creating risk standards. However, the meaning of substantive evidence is con-
tested among the vested interests involved in the process, and corporations use
this to deny the role of production processes in illness (Noble, 1997). For
example, exposure to radon was associated with cancer in 1879, yet this
information was ignored for a century. The data were considered inadequate
even though the only scientific controversy regarded the dosage, not the risk
itself (Berlinguer, Falzi, & Figa-Talamanca, 1996).
Second, occupational illness and injury data act disciplinarily by establishing
causation. This task is a difficult endeavor in medical and health contexts due to
incomplete information and an inability to use controls (Levenstein & Tuminaro,
1997). Health problems are often cumulative, and pinpointing the origins of
diseases that show up years after exposure can be difficult. Cumulative and
synergistic workplace health hazards such as chemical exposure and repetitive
injury also lack immediacy, and thus can be ignored in favor of production goals
(Skillen, 1996). Problems that manifest themselves outside of work such as those
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related to shift work, stress, and lack of job control (e.g., alcoholism) do not
count in health statistics (Sass, 1995).
This discursive construction of knowledge privileges managerial interests. For
example, management has greater control than employees in this political
process of establishing causation. The terms cumulative stress disorder, repeti-
tive strain injuries, or repeated traumas are being replaced with the term upper
extremity musculoskelatal disorder because industry objects to the implied
causation of the former terms (Bettendorf, 1998). Practitioners promote blame-
free language in the workplace such as the term defect to refer to errors and
failures (Weinstein, 1996), and the term accident removes responsibility for the
managerial decisions that result in workplace hazards (Sass, 1999).
Third, OSHA systems constitute risk because in the workplace, it is primarily
management and the health care professionals they employ who control the
reporting of hazards and their causes. Managerial interests can include the
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reduction of risk, but also may include discouraging reporting and steering
employees to company-approved doctors who will return employees to the job
quickly (Atkinson, 1999; Frederick & Lessin, 2000). Management has adopted
“behavioral-based safety programs” that focus solely on altering employee
behavior. Proponents claim that workers cause 80 to 96% of injuries and illness,
citing studies that have been shown to be methodologically flawed (Frederick &
Lessin, 2000). Such programs operate disciplinarily, as they discourage reports
from employees who fear being labeled as an unsafe worker or provide monetary
or other rewards for employees without incident reports (Frederick & Lessin,
2000).
Finally, much of the professional occupational health literature discursively
constructs knowledge in ways consistent with managerial goals. This literature
often locates risk within the individual worker by focusing on traits such as
accident-proneness or compliance that obscure the work process (see for exam-
ple Auerbach, 1996; de Almeida, Binder, & Fischer, 2000; Frederick & Lessin,
2000). As a risk manager explains, “Whenever we find a large number of claims,
we look for poor attitudes on the part of employees” (Atkinson, 1999, p. 28). As
Skillen (1996) argues, “The literature concentrates on the modification of indi-
vidual behavior and neglects the hazardous context in which it is embedded”
(p. 113).
As a result of these discursive processes, occupational health and safety
mechanisms act as disciplinary strategies that shape our understanding of
workplace risks and structure possible responses to those risks. These policies
hold the potential for the systematic distortion of employee participation and
experiences (Deetz, 1992). The discourses of science and law privilege mana-
gerial interests while disguised as objective and unbiased. As official reports
become accepted as objective truth, they reduce participative communication
about workplace risks through false consensus. This regulatory discourse results
in protection systems that largely fail to eliminate risk in the workplace; instead,
these systems reduce exposure, provide technical support, or compensate for
loss of health and life (Levenstein & Tuminaro, 1997).

Communicating Consent in the Workplace

Employees are subject to OSHA disciplinary mechanisms, but also “subjects”
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in terms of active agents in the process. The occupational health and safety
literature does not explain how these policy issues are interpreted and enacted
by employees in the day-to-day practices of organizations. From a critical-
interpretive perspective, the power of regulation is not fixed but achieved
through a dialectic of consent and resistance negotiated in the daily interaction
of social actors (Mumby, 1997). Thus far, the organizational and safety literature
largely fail to consider “how worker consent to exposure is negotiated” (Skillen,
1996, p. 112).
Worker consent involves identification with hegemonic constructions
(Mumby, 1988). Understanding consent involves examining the discursive
development of ideology, or “rules of right”—those taken for granted disci-
plinary practices that normalize and control individual and collective behavior,
arising from and contributing to systems of power (Barker & Cheney, 1994;
Foucault, 1980b). Ideology is conceptualized as taken-for-granted assumptions
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that guide behavior, rather than false belief systems (Deetz, 1992; Mumby 1997);
thus, ideological critique allows us to examine the discursive construction and
reproduction of power relations as an active process.
Burawoy (1979) argues that consent arises from relations of production on the
shopfloor. His study of a manufacturing plant found that workers developed
rules and norms of “making out” aimed at defeating the production system, but
which actually reproduced and obscured capitalist imperatives of surplus value
by increasing output as means to improve pay. However, Burawoy failed to
address those resources of consent that arise from outside the production system,
including a theory of subjectivity (Collinson, 1992) or culture. I will argue that
understanding consent in occupational health and safety involves examining the
development of shared norms, values, and identities, particularly in team-based,
post-Fordist and Japanese managed organizations that rely on unobtrusive con-
trol to inculcate employee commitment to organizational goals (Barker & Cheney,
1994; Graham, 1993; Tompkins & Cheney, 1985).
The development of consent is intimately connected with identity issues
(Collinson, 1988; Mumby, 2001). Postmodern perspectives reject notions of the
self as fixed and stable, recognizing identity as socially constituted through
discursive practice (Schrag, 1997), produced through power/knowledge forma-
tions (Foucault, 1980a). As Kunda (1992) describes, employees create a sense of
self as they negotiate with the organizational culture. The “Organizational Self”
arises from “Balancing acceptance and rejection of the organizational ideology
and the member role it prescribes” (p. 162). These identities include construc-
tions regarding organizational position, gender, class, and ethnicity, and they
contribute to relationships of domination and submission (see for example,
Nadesan, 1996; Trethewey, 1997).
Identity formation is an active and mutual process and at times, organizational
members may participate in the construction of identities that work hegemoni-
cally against their own interests (Ashcraft & Pacanowsky, 1996; Kunda, 1992).
However, little is known about the relationships between identity processes and
employee health and safety. Hutter (2001) found that employees estimated that
half of worker injuries were not reported in the British railway system, yet she
failed to address the role of organizational norms and identity issues in produc-
ing such hegemonic decisions. Thus we need to understand the relationships
among consent, identity, and worker safety.
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The management of occupational health and safety is a political site of

ideological struggle. Research is necessary to understand the processes by which
regulatory and managerial standards are accepted by employees when they
arguably conflict with employee health. Hence, the research question that guides
this project asks: How do communicatively constructed norms and identities
operate disciplinarily to influence employee participation in reporting work-
place risks and facilitate consent to these risks?

Nihon Kuruma Automotive: A Case Study

My research text is based upon a two-year qualitative case study of a post-
Fordist, team-based Japanese automobile manufacturing plant in the Midwest,
which I will call Nihon-Kuruma Automotive (NKA). NKA employed approxi-
mately 3,000 “Associates” to produce cars, trucks, and sport utility vehicles.
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Gaining a position at the plant is competitive because of high pay for manufac-
turing work and full benefits.
The company is organized using self-managing work teams throughout its
production process. NKA employs a number of strategies to develop and main-
tain a cohesive culture, from orientation and training to company songs and
“Associate Appreciation Days.” All organizational members are called
“Associates” and wear the same uniform to reduce distinctions among workers.
In 1998, the company built the “Associate Recreation Center,” with extensive
exercise and sports facilities without charge to employees, and the following
year they added a training facility offering degree-track courses, and a fee-based
child-care facility.
Automobile production is physically demanding work. Each team is respon-
sible for a certain production area (Stamping, Body Assembly, Paint, Trim and
Final), and each team’s work is divided into stations, which Associates rotate
among. To deal with the physical nature of the work, new Associates go through
a “Work Conditioning” program, also known as “Ramping Up.” During this time,
Associates spend several weeks lifting weights in preparation for the physical
work ahead, gradually moving to full-time work on the line.
Since the late 1980s when the plant opened, the tact time, or the time each
Associate had to complete their task, decreased from eight minutes to one
minute and fifty four seconds through the Kaizen (continuous improvement)
process. Production increased from 4,087 automobiles produced in 1989 to
approximately 227,000 automobiles in 1998. During the study, high consumer
demand resulted in mandatory overtime for Associates. At that time, the United
Auto Workers of America (UAW) attempted to organize the plant. The unioniza-
tion attempt was unsuccessful; Associates voted against joining the union, and
NKA remains a non-union plant.

Methods
I became involved with NKA as a limited participant in a team of consultants
hired to assist with the development of the Associate Recreation Center (ARC).
In exchange for this assistance, I gained access to observe health promotion
events at the ARC, interview Associates who volunteered, and collect written
material such as the company newsletter and health reports from the ARC. The
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primary research method for this study involved semi-structured, open-ended

interviews, which ranged from 40 to 90 minutes. These interviews facilitated
in-depth understanding of Associate perspectives about health and work by
allowing employees to describe their own interpretation of organizational life,
and to reflect upon the implicit meanings and assumptions that emerged in their
discourse (Cortazzi, 2001; Heyl, 2001).
Audio-recorded interviews took place with 22 line Associates, team leaders
and engineers, as well as 3 plant administrators. I obtained contacts with
interviewees through recommendations from ARC staff, the physical therapists
in the company’s Rehabilitation Center, and personal contacts in the community.
I attempted to interview a cross-section of Associates. To this end, I formally
interviewed 16 men and 12 women. Although the majority of Associates are
white, the group included two Hispanic females, one Hispanic male, one African
American male, and one Indian male. Interviewees ranged in age from 23 to 50
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and their tenure with the organization ranged from one year to a full, twelve-year
tenure.
I also conducted subject-specific interviews with the Director of Safety, two
physical therapists, and the staff of the ARC. Additionally, I informally
interviewed about eight Associates at a restaurant/bar near the plant, and
five Associates as they were exercising at the plant Rehabilitation Center.
These interviews continued until I noticed significant repetition among
responses.
Participants knew that their identity would be confidential. I made clear that
my consulting role was complete and that I would share with management only
feedback that Associates explicitly asked me to share (without identifying
sources). Trust developed in interviews as Associates shared personal infor-
mation with me and critiqued organizational practice. Some Associates were
concerned about depictions of their workplace to the general public, and they
expressed relief that I was contractually bound to keep the identity of the
company confidential. For these reasons, I have confidence in the interview
texts.
The research text for analysis was the more than 300 pages of transcribed
interviews, and over 200 pages of fieldnotes. Additionally, I assessed health
issues at the plant by taking a walking tour of the plant to understand working
conditions, examining health self-reports from the ARC’s mandatory registration
form, and obtaining public documents from OSHA.
In my interviews, I asked Associates how their job affected their health, how
they and management addressed any health problems caused by work, and to
comment on unionization. I also asked Associates why some Associates did not
choose to exercise at the ARC. These questions were designed to elicit em-
ployees’ understanding of how their work influenced their health and the degree
to which they felt the company responded to concerns. The unionization
question helped to elicit the perceived need for representation in the workplace.
Questions about fellow employees led to discussion about identity issues at the
plant.
Although this study does not examine the micropractices of workplace interac-
tion, I draw upon Fairclough’s (1995) conception of critical discourse analysis as
the attempt to understand the role of ideological discursive formations in
naturalizing ideologies and transforming them into common sense. Discourse
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involves “wide communicative arenas within which social actors operate and
influence one another, to the oral and written language used by social actors to
describe their organizational experience” (Whalen & Cheney, 1991, p. 471).
Thus, analysis of interviews and observation allows critical researchers to
elucidate and deconstruct those naturalizations and examine their effects on the
implicatives of discourse and structure.
In this study, I examine employee sensemaking regarding health and work in
order to understand the development of disciplinary mechanisms, the “rules of
right” that construct meaning and guide what is considered possible in a given
context. Using grounded theory, I employed thematic analysis (Glaser & Strauss,
1967) in order to interrogate the taken-for-granted assumptions Associates
expressed in interviews. I initially developed etic categories based on the
interview questions I asked (what is health, how does your job affect your
health?). I then refined the categories to better reflect the emic, everyday
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explanations of research participants themselves.

Based on this analysis, I interpreted a contradiction in Associate discourse
between their knowledge of health hazards and their support of the organization
as a safe workplace. I then re-examined the thematic categories to understand the
role of consent in supporting this contradiction. This process identified inter-
twined norms of health and work among employees that acted disciplinarily to
support that contradiction and produce consent to existing levels of workplace
hazards. Additionally, this reading suggested that identity issues were central to
each of those norms. In the next section, I describe the contradictory articula-
tions of health and safety Associates expressed. Following that, I describe the
disciplinary identity norms about health and work that contribute to employee
consent, using employee discourse to illustrate each norm.

Contradictory Discourse of Health and Work Among Associates

In this section, I present Associate descriptions of the effects of work on their
health, illustrating two closely connected contradictions in these descriptions.
First, there was a contradiction between their knowledge of hazards and Associ-
ates’ support for NKA as a safe workplace. Second, Associates articulated
multiple ways in which their voices were excluded from safety reports, while
simultaneously using that data as evidence of plant safety.

Contradiction 1: Health Problems in a Safe Place to Work

Every Associate I spoke with described experiencing a physical problem
resulting from work or knowing someone who did. Associates reported experi-
encing numb arms and hands, carpal tunnel problems, broken teeth, back pain,
and breathing dust and lead. A women in her thirties described a common
problem, “Well, right now, I think, I’m having a lot of trouble with my hand right
now, I mean at home on the weekends when I’m trying to bake or cook or
whatever my fingers will go numb, so I’m just trying to hold up as long as I can,
but it worries you.” Barbara was considering reporting the problem so that she
could have carpal tunnel surgery, but she had not done so yet.
Associates described a hierarchy in terms of the difficulty of various jobs,
although they often said that every job had difficult stations. For example, Mitch
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described his first years at the plant using a phrase I heard repeatedly to describe
difficult jobs: “Of course I was twenty years old when I was doing that, and there
were nights when I left and I thought there is no way I’m gonna come back and
do that again” [emphasis added]. Mitch did stay, and with tenure he moved to
a less physically demanding position.
Members of administration also reported health problems such as weight gain
from sedentary work, carpal tunnel problems and eyestrain from computer work.
However, it was line workers who faced serious injury. All the Associates I
spoke with described multiple ways in which their job threatened their health
status. According to several Associates, a group of fifteen workers tried to sue the
company for firing them after they sustained work-related injuries that left them
unable to perform their jobs. An Associate was knocked unconscious by a forklift
in the first week of my study, and I noted that approximately one-third of the
Associates using the ARC self-reported manufacturing-related injuries and health
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problems.
However, despite the plethora of stories about health problems arising from
work, Associates, as a rule, spoke in positive terms about the company and their
job. Florence talked about experiencing numbness and pain in her hands,
adding, “but I think it’s being on the job and getting used to it more.” Despite the
loss of sensation in her hands, when I asked her if there was anything NKA
could do to improve employee health, she said, “I’m really happy with my job.
I don’t, not really, not off hand, I can’t think of anything.” A team leader who
told me about the employees fired after sustaining injuries started by saying,
“They’re pretty good about injuries.” In the same interviews where Associates
told me about health problems, they said NKA was a great place to work. Despite
their willingness to share with me the risks associated with their jobs, Associates
insisted that these health issues were not significant problems. This necessitates
an examination of the production of consent among employees to the work
hazards they articulated.

Contradiction 2: Proof of Safety in Distorted Reports

Workers not only consented to a level of risk in the workplace, but to the
regulatory and managerial mechanisms that manage that risk. In 1998, the plant
celebrated its lowest injury rates in its history, as measured by OSHA. The
Director of Safety (who described his job as OSHA compliance) reported the
event to me with some pride. When line Associates reassured me that NKA was
a safe place to work, they often cited these statistics as proof. This proof seemed
to contradict their own experiences.
I would argue that this proof represents a deeper contradiction, because,
without coaxing, the Associates I interviewed provided insight into the multiple
cultural and structural processes that excluded employees’ experiences from
official reports of ill-health and injury. They told me explicitly about practices by
line Associates, team leaders, and company doctors that discouraged or pre-
vented them from reporting health problems and requesting job redesigns. These
practices prevented Associates’ lived experience from gaining official status in
OSHA reports.
First, all but three Associates told me that they prefer to deal with workplace
injuries with their private doctors because they receive more pay for lost days
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(eleven weeks of full pay) due to personal injury than they do through Workers’
Compensation (light duty at work for 60% pay). Additionally, the company
doctor had a reputation for refusing to classify what Associates, and their
personal doctors, felt were work-related injuries as such. As one Associate
described, “I mean there’s a doctor up there if you get hurt at work, but if you
have anything very major wrong with you, I’d crawl home and tell them I did it
at home before I’d report it here. . . . So you don’t have to go through Worker’s
Comp and be at their mercy.” The choice to use private doctors affected the
plant’s apparent injury rates. The OSHA reports that resulted then operated
epistemologically to hide these incidents.
Second, OSHA records were also systematically distorted due to heavy mana-
gerial reliance on temporary workers. There was a high degree of agreement
among Associates that temporary workers as a group were at greater risk for
injuring themselves, and that these workers should not and did not report
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injuries. Because of high demand, NKA was often in great need of employees to
work long hours without preparation. Temporaries did not receive the “Ramping
Up” training and exercise program; therefore, temps might go on-line without the
physical strength, flexibility, or training they needed. They also rotated between
positions less, increasing risks of repetitive injuries.
Many of the Associates I spoke with started at NKA as temps, and they
described having been afraid to report any problem or to miss work. Melissa told
me, “I was scared, because you know, when you’re temporary, nothing is for
sure.” She broke her tooth out on her first day, and “I came back to work . . . I had
to go have a root canal when I got home, because I knew, and this was my first
day, and I knew if I left I wouldn’t have a job. Temporary people don’t, it’s not
a good idea.” Both males and females expressed similar feelings of fear and
uncertainty that made them unwilling to report problems as a temp. Brandon
told me, “When you’re a temporary, you don’t.” Thus, plant statistics about
health and safety were skewed because of the relative lack of power and voice
of temporary workers.
Third, Associates described team leaders who discouraged or disallowed team
members from visiting the clinic so as to avoid reporting official statistics. Jerry,
a team leader, described his experience as a line worker, “We did have a group
leader that was very conscious about not getting OSHAs.” In one case, “I was
bleeding through the bandages, and they didn’t want me to go to the clinic and
get it taped up right because it would be recorded.” Melissa explained subtle
pressure from team leaders from the perspective of a line worker. I asked her if
people report health problems, and she replied, “No, I don’t think most people
report it. . . . It makes you feel like it’s a big hassle if you have to go to the clinic
and get therapy done or anything.”
Team leaders capitalized on their positions to discourage clinic visits by
deciding what injuries merited such attention, but nonreporting resulted from
pressure from coworkers as well as management. Melissa added that when
Associates go to the clinic, “You know you get made fun of by the team.”
Although Melissa added, “but that’s no big deal,” other Associates described
feeling pressure to keep quiet about injuries from their fellow teammates. As
Rose said, “If you go to the doctor or therapy, they see you as being a whiner.”
In the next section, I examine the disciplinary norms that underlie such pres-
sures among Associates.
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Health, Identity, and Practices of Consent

Given that Associates told me explicitly about health problems and their
exclusion from reports, the central question becomes, why was there no collec-
tive or systematic effort to make changes in these problematic practices? The
official reports depicted NKA as a safe place to work, and Associates actively
agreed with this depiction, even while describing their own health problems and
the structural barriers to reporting them.
Associate interviews reflected the development of normative standards that
operated disciplinarily to promote consent to existing practices of health and
safety at the plant. I argue that Associates constructed and reinforced shared
ideologies about risk and the body that produced norms regarding the identity
and behaviors of the good worker. These identity norms served to undermine
collective action towards health protection. By shifting responsibility for health
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from NKA and the regulatory system to individual Associates, these construc-
tions operated hegemonically to allow official statistics of health and safety to
gain truth status. In the following section, I present six interrelated norms with
illustrative quotes, each of which provide insight into different sources of
consent.

Identity Norm 1: “It’s physical, that’s why I like it here.”

For many Associates, “being active” was a job description, an important way
to stay healthy, and a part of their identity. Associates’ disciplinary approach to
health promoted strong identification with physical work and dis-identification
with the “inactive” work of management. Florence worked the door line, an area
considered difficult by many workers. I asked about the pace of the job, and she
responded, “I like it because I don’t have to watch a clock, time goes fast, I’ve
always been a person that would rather go go go than stand around and watch
the clock . . . I like the pace, I like the movement of it.” Similar to Burawoy’s
(1979) workers, Florence’s means of coping with the demands of her job
produced consent to increasing production demands and the accompanying
physical risks.
Many Associates identified themselves as active people, and linked physical
demands with health. For example, I asked a young woman how long she had
worked with the company: “I’ve been here full time for a year and a half, and uh,
I guess I like my job, it’s hard, it’s physical, that’s why I like it here.” Although
she described having trouble with her hands, joints, and “carpal tunnel,” she
said of the effect of work on health: “But otherwise, I think it’s good, because you
don’t want to be, I’m the kind of person who doesn’t want an office job, because
it would drive me nuts to be that inactive, so.” She added, “I think that if I
weren’t working here . . . I probably wouldn’t be as healthy as I am.”
This disciplinary approach to health as an outcome of hard work (Crawford,
1984) encourages Associates to identify with physical benefits and de-emphasize
risks. Despite the team environment, these stories constructed opposition be-
tween on-line Associates as blue-collar workers and management as planners.
These distinctions reinforced the association between workers as body and
management as mind, potentially limiting employee participation in decision
making as they identified with execution rather than planning (Braverman, 1974;
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Collinson, 1992). Thus, identification with physical labor reconstructed mana-

gerial/worker distinctions in this post-Fordist work environment.

Identity Norm 2: “Come out here, be prepared to work.”

When employees described themselves as active, and factory work as physi-
cally demanding, they correspondingly constructed the good employee as some-
one who could take the hard work, the fast pace, and the physical problems that
come with the job. Consonant with hegemonic constructions of masculinity that
emphasize physical strength and tolerance of pain (Good, Sherrod, & Dillon,
2000; White, Young, & McTeer, 1995), particularly in blue-collar settings (Gibson
& Papa, 2000; Gottfried & Graham, 1993), a good worker should take those
physical demands and not let the job beat him (or her). Andrew was a junior in
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college who lifted weights four times a week and told me that he did so because
he wanted to be “Superman.” He told me, “The money is not too bad out here.
Come out here, you better be prepared to work. Be prepared to take a fast-paced
job.” Andrew worked in Trim and Final, a notoriously difficult place to work.
“As far as my health-wise, you have to be fit, because sometimes you have to
pick up heavy carpet, seats, and it’s stressful for your lower back. It’s real
fast-paced work, gotta be healthy if you want to keep up.”
Comments such as “you have to be fit” reified and naturalized the hazards
associated with manufacturing and shifted attention from making changes in the
work process to the individual’s ability to withstand the work. Reinforcing the
constructedness of gender roles in the workplace, women as well as men
expressed the need to be tough. Indeed, women were particularly sensitive to the
appearance of weakness in front of men1 (see also Gottfried & Graham, 1993).
This traditionally masculine, blue-collar ideology paired with the group re-
sponsibility of teamwork resulted in disciplinary surveillance of other em-
ployees in support of organizational productivity. For example, Paul had been
working at NKA for almost ten years at the time of the interview. He complained
that new hires at the plant were not accustomed to hard work because they did
not have a blue-collar background. Kelly, his fellow employee and spouse,
agreed:

Paul: So these guys who sold insurance for ten years, and these people like that,
and never, a lot of those are ones in rehab all the time, because they’re just,
they think this place is killing them, well if you worked in a factory before,
that’s just what comes with working in a factory. Some of them start at 18,
19 years old, and they worked at McDonald’s or something like that, I mean
some of the jobs in trim, it’s tough, I wouldn’t want to go out there and work.
And if you just walked off the street you’re going to think this is horrible. But
they pay 18, 19 dollars an hour to do that, so unless you want to kill yourself,
go back and work at McDonald’s as far as I’m concerned. People outside NKA
might think it’s horrible but it’s just-
Kelly: Factory work.

As Associates reified bodily harms in manufacturing, they treated health risks as

largely immutable. Paul and Kelly describe “killing yourself” as “just factory
work.” This discourse produces divisions among workers between those who
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can and cannot “handle the work.” By focusing on strength and toughness,
employees consent to the notion that job demands must be born well by
individual Associates.

Identity Norm 3: “We’re supposed to be able to adapt.”

Associate stories further suggested that a good worker could take the demands
of the job, even if he or she had to “work” on their bodies on personal time in
order to do so. Many Associates focused on strengthening and toning their
bodies to meet the demands of the job rather than on changing the job process.
Employees actively constructed the ARC as the appropriate place to go if
someone was having a problem with work.
All of the Associates I formally interviewed who exercised at the ARC or the
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rehabilitation center reported that they were motivated to work out to prevent or
ameliorate work-related problems. For example, Bill told me that he started to
work out because, “I didn’t want the job to beat me. I wanted to be able to be able
to keep working.” Barbara explained that she worked out because: “Part of it is
for work, to try to keep myself healthy for work, because it does wear on you
after a while. I’ve been here eight years, so you know I’m just trying to keep
myself going [laugh].” She added that, “I think working on the treadmill really
lessens the stress.”
When Barbara described working out as a way to “keep myself healthy for
work,” she failed to question the work processes that “wore on” her, or even to
demand work time for this conditioning. Several Associates at the ARC felt that
handling stress was a personal issue to be managed by individual employees. As
Bill told me matter-of-factly, “I think one of the reasons we get hired here is
we’re supposed to be able to adapt.”
This norm communicates the internalization of managerial standards for
judging the self, such that Associates themselves believed that good employees
would adapt themselves to the job rather than make attempts to change the work.
The ARC strengthened and reinforced this ideology, as employees interpreted
the ARC to be proof that anyone could adapt to the work if they chose to do so.
This disciplinary identity norm contributed to the notion that injuries arising
from work were problems of the individual, not the company or even OSHA.

Identity Norm 4: “They offer us so much, and we appreciate it.”

The ARC was an important resource in producing consent to work hazards by
offering a means of adaptation, and it also played a role in producing a sense of
gratitude that divided and silenced employees. A majority of interviewees felt
that NKA’s policy of heavy employee investment (typical of Japanese manage-
ment) should be rewarded with hard work and appreciation. Associates valued
their pay, benefits, and other Associate “appreciation activities.” Jerry, a team
leader, put it succinctly: “People have to realize that you’re just paid damn good
money to go there and do a job. You may not like it sometimes, but you’re well
paid for what you do.” Kelly, who had been with the plant since its opening,
said, “There are days when I thought, ‘I’m not coming back’ . . . but I think that
NKA, with the holiday party that they throw for us, and the Rec Center they built
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and the Day Care center that they’re going to build . . . they offer us so much, and
we appreciate it.”
These Associates defined appreciation as hard work and no complaint. As
Barbara described: “I mean I guess I feel that it’s hard work, but then I’m
thinking I’m getting paid twice as much as at my other job . . . there’s nowhere
else you’re going to find that kind of money in this town, so I guess I accept that
I work a little bit harder, than you know, other people.”
Thus, good employees were expected to trade their bodies for high pay and
good benefits. We should not assume that this construction lacks rationality by
overlooking the logic of the argument (Burawoy, 1979; Collinson, 1992). The
difficulty of their job is what made Associates unique and separated them from
the McDonald’s employee who made minimum wage. Improving the work
process might make it too easy and increase competition for their jobs. However,
we must place this system of rationality in its political context, recognizing that
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the bargain of physical health for money can be criticized for failing to contest
the notion that a choice between the two must be made at all (Crawford, 1977;
Sass, 1995).
Constructing divisions among the grateful versus the ungrateful allowed work-
ers to dismiss any form of complaint or protest. When employees define exit as
the proper response to dissatisfaction, they suggest that leaving the plant and
moving to lower paying jobs is the only way to avoid physical risk at the
blue-collar level.

Identity Norm 5: “I respect somebody that just does their job.”

Each of the preceding constructions regarding identity and the body con-
tributed to the negotiation of consent to physical harms in the workplace. These
norms had consequences for the ability to report health problems or to formulate
and demand improvements in the work process. When the good employee was
defined in terms of their ability to bear harms, and the space of appropriate
action was defined in terms of the individual body, then complaint directed at
management was deemed inappropriate. Thus, a preferred team member did not
call attention to work-related illness, did not go the clinic unless they “really
needed to” (a judgment made differently by different Associates), or ask for
changes in the work process.
A team leader described the positive rewards associated with meeting disci-
plinary standards and refusing to complain. Although he said that he had no
problem sending someone to the clinic or taking workers off positions that were
troubling them, he added,

I’ve heard . . . that so and so is hurt and won’t say anything because they’re just
afraid of you. Like I have two ladies on my team, older like forty or fifty that are just
the best workers I have. . . . In ways I like that, in ways I don’t. Because if it’s really
bothering you, you should let me know so I can do something. But I respect
somebody that just does their job [emphasis added].

Given team responsibilities and time pressures, it is easier for team leaders and
fellow employees to pressure people not to leave the line than to demand
changes in the work process.
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There were sanctions for those workers who transgressed disciplinary norms
about adapting to the rigors of the job. Associates were highly suspect of those
employees who wanted to report health problems. Associates described fellow
employees who were injured or wanted to go to the clinic as faking injuries
because they were lazy, had bad attitudes, and did not want to work. For
example, I asked Jerry if there was any pressure on team leaders to reduce injury
reports: “I never thought anyone discouraged us from having people go to the
clinic. There are people that I discourage from going to the clinic but that’s a
personal thing because they’re people who have attendance problems, or they’re
lazy and don’t want to work, they always come up with some kind of problem.”
Although some Associates may fake injuries, leaders such as Jerry also may
dismiss employees with serious or chronic health problems as fakers rather than
investigate job processes.
Many line-level Associates also told me that fellow workers who reported
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injuries were faking it to get off-line. I asked Ben and Brandon if they felt free to
report health problems. Ben told me, “I think there’s a lot of people who get
injured just so they can get off of work.” Brandon agreed, “Oh yeah, I mean
there’s so many people that I don’t think are actually hurt.” Brandon told me that
people fake injuries so that they can be assigned to “light duty.” He was
surprised to learn from Ben that Associates working light duty were paid at a
60% rate.
The assumption that most people who report injuries are faking it serves to
maintain worker ideology that NKA is a very safe place to work. The perception
also discounts the importance of exclusions from OSHA reports—false cases may
be seen to equalize true cases excluded from OSHA statistics.

Identity Norm 6: Injury—“It’s work ethic, it’s your morale.”

Associates also believed that many of those who did suffer injury or illness
actually deserved them because they did not exercise and remain physically
active. For example, Paul believed that NKA built the ARC to improve work
performance:
You know, if you’re working out, and you got your body in good shape a lot of the
injuries that people get over there I don’t think they’d get. You know, I spent
probably a month and a half, two months up there rehabilitating my shoulder, and
the same people were up there the whole time, and most of ‘em are probably fifty
pounds overweight, and you know, I walk by there now . . . and there’s still the
same people in there that were injured all the time.

This highly individualized victim-blaming discourse (Crawford, 1977), wherein

injuries result from being out of shape, served to silence Associates by labeling
as deserving those who were injured or reported illness. It was particularly in the
context of discussing unionization that workers made links among complaint,
laziness, and health problems. The binary oppositions chained out in such
terms: lazy/active, out of shape/in shape, whiner/grateful, injured/well, and
pro-union/anti-union. As Rose explained,
That’s another thing, the people on second shift really don’t want a union, strong
supporters of it were on days. . . . It’s a, it’s work ethic, it’s your morale. The people
who I have come into contact with in my group who are supporters, maybe it’s just
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coincidence. They are overweight, sloppy people, who when given the opportunity
to even do our little exercises program that NKA is giving us the chance to choose
[during a plant shut-down for re-tooling] to improve yourself or not, or to keep your
body at the level it is, they aren’t taking advantage of it.

Divisions developed around the issue of the union, but also between old and
new employees and first shift and second shift, which shifted blame for injury
to line-workers rather than management and prevented collective action. (Rose
herself might have been considered by many to lack a strong work ethic because
she periodically spent time in rehabilitation.) The harsh depiction of union
supporters as overweight and sloppy reduces the ability for dialogue among
employees by drawing deep divides between self and other.
The union stood in contradistinction to the value of hard work and activity
that Associates espoused. Therefore, those who supported the union (old or
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young, first shift or second shift) were lazy. The UAW clearly heard stories
similar to those I have shared about the forces preventing Associates from
reporting health problems. The UAW sent out material with these stories to
challenge the notion that NKA was a safe place to work. A team leader
commented on this:

I guarantee that eighty percent of the people who had stories in there, or had articles
in there or supported that, were lazy asses. They don’t realize they’re getting paid
over forty thousand dollars a year with a high school degree with a job that sixty
percent of monkeys off the street can do.

Matt’s statements, while they focused on hard work and appreciation, simul-
taneously denied the value of line work (a monkey could do it) and the union’s
role in protecting that work. Line Associates such as Brandon expressed the
same idea—people support unions because they do not want to work: “The
people that wanted the UAW, because they didn’t want to work, and they
already had cush jobs, aw man, that shit pisses me off.”
Associate discourse about unions articulated an association among com-
plaints, reporting health problems, discontent, and laziness. Union supporters
were simply dismissed by many Associates as lazy people who failed to enact
organizational goals or to appreciate what NKA did for them. Yet union presence
strongly increases injury reports and OSHA enforcement (Weil, 1999). A union
is not the only means of collective action within the plant, but it provides one
possible means for representing the needs of Associates in the workplace. Health
and safety, potentially a topic that unites employees, was a divisive wedge that
kept discussion about health improvements at the plant to a minimum. Implic-
itly, employees valued individualism and independence, de-valuing the collec-
tivism and dependence they associated with both the union and occupational
health systems.
As an alternative, Associates used the strategies available to them within the
organization. Associates tended to focus on achieving seniority in the plant and
rotating to another, “better” position in the plant where the work was less
wearing and less monotonous. This individualized approach left the “hard” jobs
unchanged. Thus, occupational health issues helped to maintain managerial
control systems at NKA.
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An Exception: Recognizing Conflict

Employee discourse communicated expectations about job performance that
contribute to consent to health risks and existing job protections. The identity
norms I have described here are highly interrelated, yet they provide insight into
different resources of disciplinary control. Identification with physical work led
to the reification of work hazards and the expectation that good workers could
handle the pain and injury that come with their jobs. Given widespread health
problems, workers expected that Associates would use the ARC to ameliorate the
problems that did arise. The team system itself encouraged Associates to press-
ure teammates to stay on the line rather than report problems. Workers who
experienced and reported health problems failed to live up to these expectations,
and faced disciplinary sanctions in the form of labels as lazy, whiners, or fakers.
These sanctions justify the perception that health problems are an individual
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problem rather than a systemic issue to be dealt with collectively.

It should be noted that some injuries were serious enough to symbolize the
conflicting interests of management and employees. Associates described several
examples where the experience of serious injury led people to support the union.
For example, Kelly, who believed that union supporters lacked work ethic, also
told me, “I know two people specifically, two cases that they’re injured and they
cannot probably ever find another job anywhere else, so they have to continue
working here, but NKA isn’t working with them very well.” One of the women
had lost functioning in her right arm: “I feel very sad for her, and it’s too bad that
there’s not some sort of representation that she can go through.” In those
instances when the interests of NKA management and line workers openly clash,
collective action may become a more serious alternative among Associates. In
this case, a strongly anti-union Associate endorsed the choice to support the
union for those employees whom she felt had been treated unfairly. Thus health
discourse does provide potential sources of resistance.

Conclusion
This study situates occupational health and safety as political discourse at
both the policy and day-to-day organizational level, and it provides insight into
the suppression of conflict at each level. This research adds to evidence suggest-
ing that workers often do not report work-related injury and illness (Hutter,
2001; Noble, 1997), or face serious barriers from management, physicians, and
regulatory procedures when attempting to do so. By focusing on the ideological
construction of social reality, it also provides insight into the often-overlooked
development of disciplinary norms among employees themselves that reduce
reporting and produce consent to existing protection systems that exclude their
experiences.
The identity norms explicated here uncover multiple resources of consent,
including the ideologies of health, individualism, and working-class masculin-
ity, and their complex relationships with organizational structures including the
team system, employee benefits, and a health and recreation center. Each of these
contributed to the taken-for-granted identity of a good Associate, establishing a
disciplinary apparatus that promoted surveillance of self and other in pursuit of
managerial goals over health. This web of norms encouraged Associates to
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manage the contradictions that were manifest in their discourse between knowl-
edge of health problems and support for NKA as an employer by shifting
responsibility for safety from NKA to Associates, thus discounting voice in
occupational health issues.
This study demonstrates the potential for ethnographic, organizational com-
munication research to provide in-depth, situated knowledge regarding the lived
experience of governmental policy in the workplace, and it responds to calls for
attention to policy issues in organizational communication (Mumby & Stohl,
1996). This research uncovered interrelationships among identity norms, organi-
zational and regulatory structures, and consent, which demonstrate the material
consequences of ideological discourse. The study warrants additional examin-
ation of conflicting interests and the production of consent in protection policies
ostensibly designed for workers.
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Practical Applications
Researchers and practitioners interested in developing strong safety cultures
must take notice that cohesive cultures with commitment to managerial goals
may actually reduce reporting rates and promote adaptation among employees
rather than improve safeguards. Likewise, we must be cautious about proposed
participation schemes. OSHA has called for greater worker participation in
occupational health and safety (Dear, 1995; “Workers Input Key,” 1996), and
practitioners recommend this to management in the safety literature (Kincaid,
1996; Minter, 1997; Weinstein, 1996). Given that employee knowledge of haz-
ards may not surface in traditional monitoring methods, such participation is key
to developing effective protection systems. However, this study cautions that
worker participation alone is unlikely to improve reporting or health standards,
but instead reproduce existing conflicts between efficiency and worker health.
Critical education must precede such participation initiatives. The findings in
this essay regarding employee identity norms provide strategic points of inter-
vention if such education is to achieve improved employee control over protec-
tion systems. Critical training can improve employee advocacy skills by
addressing the taken-for-granted assumptions among workers that privilege pro-
duction over health and safety (Rosskam, 2000).
First, critical education should denaturalize the association between active,
physical work and pain and injury. It is possible for employees to identify with
the health benefits of physical labor by actively rejecting pain and injury rather
than reifying it. Second, training should encourage the deconstruction of work-
ing class and masculine identity as strength, toughness and independence (Good
et al., 2000). In order to improve help-seeking behavior, training might re-frame
these masculine values in terms of strength as the ability to report problems in
the face of pressure, or improving safety features as an element of efficiency and
maximized job performance.
Third, education should challenge the belief that conditioning the body
outside of work is the most appropriate response to work-related health prob-
lems. Corporate recreation facilities should not replace workplace improve-
ments, and good employees should not be expected to use them for therapy
without remuneration. Fourth, appreciation for corporate policies should not be
expressed by suppressing conflict regarding occupational injury. Improved safety
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standards in the work process should be seen as beneficial to both employees

and management. At the policy level, critical safety education must challenge
the false choice between wages and health. Such an approach would reach
beyond the workplace to demand re-skilling, and national and international
policies that prevent global competition among workers for low wages
(Berlinguer, 1999; Navarro, 1999).
Fifth, training should focus on the value of communication in the workplace,
so that a complaint can be seen as a positive step that leads toward organiza-
tional improvements rather than as “whining.” Finally, and closely related to
this, in order to promote worker solidarity, critical training would allow
employees to become familiar with injured employees in order to reduce stereo-
types about who gets injured and why. Creating solidarity among workers (as the
recognition of common interests) is a critical first step in creating policies that
value workers’ health (Sass, 1995). Associates at NKA resisted dominant norms
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and managerial ideology when exposed to serious conflicts between health and
productivity. At those moments, Associates identified with injured Associates
and overcame victim blaming.
Although unions provide an important mechanism for such training, resist-
ance to unionization demonstrated in the study requires that other voices within
and outside the workplace take up such education. Management must be
required to support this training in order to insure that these ideas are enacted.
Additionally, systemic changes are necessary to improve occupational health
reporting. Regulatory mechanisms such as workers’ compensation rules must be
altered to reduce disincentives for reporting through the political process, and to
create adequate enforcement abilities. Independent health assessments and data
collection through employee health clinics are valuable protections, and they
require legal status and open access to workplaces (Lax, 1997), which necessitate
broader political changes. Thus, political organizing is central to prevention, and
communication scholars can play an important role in political advocacy for
occupational health and safety reporting and monitoring.

Future Research
Additional research is necessary to understand the interaction of managerial
and employee constructions of health and safety. This study was limited to the
often-silenced voices of employees. We can gain additional insight by pairing
these stories with safety and training messages and transcripts of actual interac-
tion in the workplace. Such studies would highlight the centrality of communi-
cation at the everyday level to improved policy-making for the workplace.
Researchers interested in developing employee participation in reporting, job
redesigns, and environmental health improvements must continue to address the
confluence of regulatory structures, work processes, and the ideological con-
struction of identity among workgroups.

Endnote
1. For example, Violet expressed the need to appear strong with her male teammates, who often
joked with her that it was her job to clean up after the shift because she was female.
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Submitted to O’Hair’s editorship April 22, 2001

Transferred to Keyton’s editorship October 25, 2001
Final revision received February 25, 2002
Accepted by Keyton May 13, 2002