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An essay is presented on the subject of cigarette smoking among U.S. laborers in factories, corporate spying on workers, and the social culture of shopfloors in the U.S. during the 20th century. It examines the records of Erie, Pennsylvania, paper manufacturer Hammermill Paper Company concerning employee cigarette consumption, how employees attempted to evade corporate surveillance of their smoking, and labor relations in the U.S.

In this paper, we examine discourse in public deliberations in pre-development locales in the UK and US about advantages and disadvantages of future shale development ('fracking'). We aimed to understand how people anticipate potential health effects, broadly construed, of environmental toxicity and disturbance in the context of planned, but not yet implemented, energy development. In day-long deliberations with small, diverse groups in two cities in each country (London, Cardiff in the UK; Los Angeles, Santa Barbara in the US), participants discussed impacts on health and well-being using three main rubrics: 'It's money or health', 'Why take chances?' and 'Beyond the tipping point'. Throughout, participants framed health as an intrinsically moral issue, with collective responsibility as a dominant normative frame. We identify the concept of compound risk to underscore effects of multiple risks and hazards on people's sensibilities about anticipated future health and environmental harm. The findings demonstrate how and why diverse publics in pre-impact sites in both countries saw shale extraction as high stakes development that poses significant, often unacceptable, risks to human and environmental health and well-being. Risks extended beyond toxicity to broad threats to health, including, for some, the end of life as we know it on the planet. Overall, participants' discussions of health were more connected to social categories and their underlying moral principles than to technological details. This work contributes evidence of blurred boundaries between environment and health as well as the importance people place on social risks in the context of proposed energy system change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grounded in ecosocial theory, this paper discusses the mental health disparities of working-class Latinas from multiple perspectives. An overview of working-class Latinas' prevalent mental health disorders, barriers to care and suggestions for interventions and future studies are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the linkages between gentrification and the displacement of small-scale manufacturing and blue-collar work in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Although the link between global economic change and gentrification has been made for the upper classes who are the consumers of the gentrified landscape, very little work has been done on the bluecollar work and workers that remain in the central city despite the assumption by policymakers that deindustrialization is complete. I argue that manufacturing is still a viable sector of the urban economy that is increasingly at risk of displacement because of the conversion of industrial space to residential use and speculative real-estate pressure. In this way, gentrification is encouraging industrial displacement, which in turn is leading to the degradation of the blue-collar work that remains and to the increasing informalization of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]