Industrial Sanitation

INDUSTRIAL SANITATION forms a part of occupational hygiene (see Occupational Hygiene); it studies the questions of the correct design, equipment, and maintenance of industrial enterprises and other places of productive labor from the standpoint of protecting the health of the people working there and the surrounding population, elaborates hygienic requirements, establishes corresponding norms for sanitary legislation, and develops methods for their practical implementation in the design of newly constructed industrial enterprises and the sanitation of existing ones. In pre-revolutionary Russia, systematic industrial-sanitary legislation did not exist, and the separate legislative acts that did exist established precise and definite requirements for the opening and maintenance of industrial enterprises only in both capitals and the capital provinces. The main drawback of the industrial-sanitary legislation of the pre-revolutionary period was its sharply expressed class character of protecting the interests of entrepreneurs and neglect of the actual health interests of workers. Since industrial sanitation develops the issues of the correct design and equipment of industrial enterprises and through its legislative norms interferes with the relations between the capitalist and the worker, it is, by its very essence, a social science, and "there can be no impartial social science in a society built on the class struggle" (Lenin, Works, 2nd ed., Moscow–Leningrad, 1930, vol. XVI, p. 349). And indeed, industrial sanitation, as it developed and took shape in bourgeois countries, bears a definite class character, indirectly reflecting or even directly defending the interests of the capitalist class. This "spirit of capitalist production," as K. Marx noted while tracing the history of factory legislation in England, is clearly revealed in the following circumstances: a) "sanitary rules are extremely meager, actually limited to regulations regarding whitewashing of walls and some other rules on measures for maintaining cleanliness, ventilation, and protection against dangerous machines" (Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. XIII); b) "slovenly wording in factory laws of individual clauses," "making it easier for the capitalist to bypass them"; c) "the absence of" (special) "administrative supervision," without which "the requirements of the law" "in most cases become illusory"; d) "the opposition of manufacturers even against the law" "and their tricks and subterfuges, which serve to bypass it in practice" (Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. XIII). The most striking illustration of this class character is the provision found in the industrial-sanitary legislation of almost all capitalist countries, according to which "entrepreneurs are obliged to arrange and maintain workspaces, production devices, machines, and tools in such a state"