Steffan Blayney, "Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body" (Activist Studies of Science, 2022)

Mar 23, 2026

Steffan Blayney, historian of health and labor turned labor organizer, explores how 19th–20th century science recast workers as machines. He discusses mechanical metaphors, the medicalization of fatigue, time-and-motion visualizations, Taylorism and assembly lines, and how efficiency ideas migrated into wellness, advertising, and modern labor struggles.

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INSIGHT

Body As Machine Enabled Optimization

The 19th-century shift from divine-body metaphors to mechanical models enabled a new project of bodily optimization.
Thermodynamics cast the body as a heat engine, prompting physiologists to act like engineers maximizing energy conversion into work.

INSIGHT

Fatigue Reframed As Fixable Pathology

The human-machine analogy made fatigue a pathology to be fixed rather than a natural consequence of labor.
Engineers and physiologists pursued incremental efficiency gains by treating friction and useless motions as problems to eliminate.

ADVICE

Don't Reduce Demands To Health Claims

Avoid framing labor disputes solely in terms of health or productivity since that cedes authority to external experts.
Instead prioritize demands framed around justice, fairness, and workers' democratic control of work.

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Our guest today is Steffan Blayney, the author of Health & Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body. In Health & Efficiency, Blayney explores a new model of health that emerged in Britain between 1870 and 1939. Centered on the working body, organized around the concept of efficiency, and grounded in scientific understandings of human labor, scientists, politicians, and capitalists of the era believed that national economic productivity could be maximized by transforming the body of the worker into a machine. At the core of this approach was the conviction that worker productivity was intimately connected to worker health. Under this new "science of work," fatigue was seen as the ultimate pathology of the working-class body, reducing workers' capacity to perform continued physical or mental labor. As Steffan Blayney shows, the equation between health and efficiency did not go unchallenged. While biomedical and psychological experts sought to render the body measurable, governable, and intelligible, ordinary men and women found ways to resist the logics of productivity and efficiency imposed on them, and to articulate alternative perspectives on work, health, and the body.

Steffan Blayney is a former Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield, where his work focused on the relations between health, the body, and society, and on histories of political activism in modern and contemporary Britain. He has taught at Birkbeck, Kent, and Sussex, was previously a member of the editorial team at History Workshop Online, and was a co-founder and organizer of History Acts - a radical history workshop and network connecting activists and historians. He also authored the book Long Live Southbank, which celebrates the history and culture of the Undercroft area of the South Bank - the oldest recognized and still existing skateboarding space in the world - and the community that has evolved there over the years. Today, he no longer works within the walls of academia; instead, he is out in the field as a labor organizer, utilizing his talents, knowledge, and expertise in his work with EQUITY, a performing arts and entertainment trade union based in London.

My co-producer today is Drew Marczewski a student in the MA Program in Communication at Oakland University.

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