When Scientific Knowledge and Ignorance Make It Difficult to Improve Occupational Health: A French and European Perspective

Abstract

This article analyzes the consequences of the increasing reference to scientific expertise in the decision and implementation process of occupational health policy. Based on examples (exposure limits and attributable fractions) taken from an interdisciplinary seminar conducted in 2014 to 2015 in France, it shows how the measurement or regulation of a problem through biomedicine-based tools produces blind spots. It also uses a case study to show the contradictions between scientific and academic aims and public health intervention. Other indirect implications are also examined, such as the limitation of trade unions' scope for action. Finally, the article suggests launching a broad political debate accessible to nonspecialists about collective occupational health issues-a dialogue made difficult by the rise of the afore-mentioned techno-scientific perspective.

Keywords: collective action; expertise; field knowledge; interdisciplinarity; public policy.