Your committee was appointed at the last annual meeting to outline the immediate problems of industrial hygiene, and the relations of the medical profession to their solution. The importance of these problems is being increasingly recognized, not only because the lives and health of approximately thirty million workers are affected, but because the industrial development of the country is involved.
With the great development of modern industrialism, in which the mutual relations between master and man were replaced by the conflict between capital and labor, many senseless abuses, economic and social, arose. Among them may be mentioned insanitary environment in tenement and workshop, low wages and unreasonable hours, speeding up, seasonal occupation, umemployment, and the existence of a large labor reserve.
In addition to these abuses mention must be made of the stream of newer and unskilled labor, for which no proper and definite channels of distribution were provided.
Equally