Les valeurs de la santé

In the late Sixties, several French labor unions became the cradle of a “working-class environmentalism.” This combined a critique of the monetarization of occupational risks with a claim for protecting the environmental against industrial pollution. The period studied extends from 1966 to the late Eighties, which makes it possible to study as a whole two sequences that are often examined separately, as this shed light on the entanglement of the collective mobilizations of the Sixties and the change of the industrial hazard regimes in the late Seventies. Labor unions then called to sanctuarize human health and the environment. By challenging the regulatory framework inherited from the laws on industrial accidents and occupational diseases, unionists advocated for these issues to be removed from negotiations between employers and workers : health was not to be sold anymore, and it was then defended as a “value per se.” For a group of unionist, this approach also became a lever for questioning the social uses and ecological sustainability of production choices.