Abstract
There has been a major awakening of interest in occupational health and safety in Australia in recent years. This has manifested itself in a number of ways. This article primarily consists of an examination of one of the most important—an increased willingness on the part of unions and their members to treat occupational health and safety as an industrial relations issue. It does this through the medium of a detailed study of a strike in the winter of 1981 at a Melbourne electronics factory over the proposed dismissal of seven women who had contracted an increasingly common industrial disease, tenosynovitis. As background to this study, the article briefly examines the reasons for the current upsurge in interest in health and safety issues and outlines some of the other manifestations of that interest.
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