Abstract
IN a paper “Factory Inspection: a thirty-five years' Retrospect”, given before the Royal Statistical Society on May 20, which has now appeared in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Sir Duncan Wilson gives a most interesting picture of the developments under the Factory Acts leading to the prevention of accidents and the elimination of industrial disease, as well as indicating points at which statistical information is still lacking or incomplete. Between 1904 and 1938 the staff of the inspectorate more than doubled. Sir Duncan Wilson paid a warm tribute, which was endorsed in the subsequent discussion, to the way in which from the start the factory inspectors, relying on education and persuasion rather than on the full exercise of their statutory powers, had secured the co-operation of employers and managements. In the same period the expenditure had more than trebled and the figures quoted by Sir Duncan Wilson emphasized the huge increase in the use of mechanical power. While the number of factories has increased by about 70 per cent, the number of workshops or places without mechanical power has been reduced to about one half. The data show that industrial diseases have been fought with much greater success than accidents. Fatal accidents per 100,000 employed decreased from 17.6 in 1904 to 11.2 in 1938 and this decrease may be taken as a measure of the severe accident rate. On the other hand, reported accidents almost doubled in the same period. As the criteria were more stringent in 1904 the difference is much greater than would appear from the actual figures.
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CONDITIONS IN FACTORIES. Nature 149, 116–117 (1942). https://doi.org/10.1038/149116a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/149116a0