Negotiating Both Sides of the Plant Gate: Gender,Hazardous Facility Workers and Community Responses To Technological Hazards

Abstract

Workers at hazardous facilities and their families play an important and virtually undocumented role in determining community responses to technological disasters. Community researchers must pay closer attention to whether hazardous facility workers reside locally, to their roles in the community, how gender affects their relations with family members and authorities, and how they affect their neighbors and local attitudes more broadly. Risk is `socially constructed' by workers based largely upon their structural positions in their firms, their level of control over hazards at the workplace, the firm's ties to local economies, the effectiveness of corporate safety and environmental relations campaigns, and whether gender relations in the home buffer anxiety and concern over hazards in the workplace.