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The article focuses on the essay entitled "Bitter Wages," by Joseph A. Page and Mary-Win O'Brien. According to the author this essay is a dramatic, well-written indictment of American industry and of the administrations of the former U.S. Presidents Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Nixon, for their failure to protect adequately the health and safety of the American Industrial worker. Historically, labor leaders have approached the problem of occupational safety with two closely related objectives in mind. First, the incidence of accidents and industrial diseases had to be reduced, and second, the disabled worker had to be compensated for lost income. The workers in occupations in which most of the accidents could not be attributed to employer negligence, convinced the representatives of groups of workers, who stood to gain more from suing their employers for accident damages, that the welfare of the less fortunate workers should not be sacrificed for the benefit of the favored workers.

In November 1968 an explosion in the "safe" No. 9 mine of the Consolidation Coal Company at Farmington, West Virgina, killed seventy-eight miners and produced a brief but potent public outcry for new federal safety legislation. In December 1907, ten miles from Farmington at Monongab, West Virgina, 361 miners died in an explosion in the "safe" Monongah No. 6 and No.8 mines of the Fairmont Coal Company. Participants in the coal-mining safety movement included miners, mine inspectors, scientists, journalists and government officials. All played important roles, but the coal-mine operators, more than any other group, defined the response of the Progressive years to the problem of safety in the coal mines and determined the perimeters of state, national, and private action. The national component of the Progressive movement was the logical product of a transformation of the coal industry which began in the 1850s and which, by 1900, had produced an intensely competitive bituminous industry with national coal and labor markets as well as scientific problems which transcended state boundaries. The movement failed to the extent that operators were divided and unable to transcend local frameworks and this, unfortunately, was the usual state of the industry.