I'm not sure what era you had in mind with "before"...I've written about industrial safety in medieval blacksmithing before, which focused on individual workers in smaller workshops (master craftsman or -men, maybe an apprentice, labourers) taking the initiative. Apprentices could and did sue their masters for being excessively abusive, withholding payment, using them as petty personal assistants instead of instructing them in the craft, and interfering with their love lives. (Masters could also sue their apprentices for having a love life.) But that is not the same thing as inspectors on cathedral sites checking the scaffolding each morning.
Also, I recently wrote about factory scalping accidents in a follow-up answerto a thread about accidents in the 19th century, focusing on a special commission set up in early 20th century England to address workplace complaints in a number of industries:
Scalping accidents with women victims absolutely were a major concern within the general growing awareness of/resolution to address industrial accidents over the course of the later 19th century into the early 20th. England's Departmental Committee on Accidents, which met from 1908 to 1911, devoted a session in 1909 to scalping accidents. They brought in factory supervisors and inspectors (often also women) to testify along with male factory owners.
The owners of course tried to cast problems off on women's clothing and hair--their supposed "clumsiness" from having their feet trapped under long full skirts was definitely the cause of machines losing pieces that flew through the air and struck women workers in the eyes, definitely. However, on-floor supervisors had different views of the reasons for the frequencies of these accidents, to which I'll add some framing from recent scholarship.
Most important in the attention paid to scalping accidents, I think, is that they were gendered female in happenstance and in public discussion. Court records, news, and official reports (including to company management) of industrial accidents in 19C are extraordinarily tilted towards male victims. Some of this was highher male employment rates in more dangerous work, like underground mining; some of it was lack of seeing women's work e.g. for private families as launderers and servants as "industrial"; but some of it was a view that machines themselves were the province of men. Women either didn't use machines so weren't using them, supposedly, or didn't know how to use them so any problems weren't "accidents" they were the woman's fault. But the dominance of "industrial accident = men" meant that when there was indeed a category of machine, work-related injury/death that very often victimized women, it stood out all the more to investigators and public rumor-mill.
And as for the accidents themselves, women's--and children's--frequent roles on the factory floor played a major part in tilting scalping accidents towards a female demographic. This was the point that active supervisors stressed to the investigators. First, women's responsibilities to maintain the floor/children and smaller women acting as runners meant they were moving around a lot rather than planted in one spot. Machinery was packed very tighhtly together and very close to walls. Scalping accidents were very common when hair or clothing got caught just the wrong way as a woman climbed up on a bench to open a window, or knelt down to pick up a shuttle for her coworker. The wrong draft as a girl squeezed down a narrow aisle pulled into the spinning machine a wayward hair and ripped off skin.
Investigators stressed that the problem was not the women or their hair, but the mahcines themselves. Even packed so closely together, there should have been guards and fences built around moving parts and openings. These would prevent breakaway pieces hurtling through the air (as mentioned above, another major cause of devastating industrial accidents) as well as keep hair from flying into machines.
People could and did sue after the fact for accidents (the "court cases" mentioned above). However, a component of the laws, known in the U.S. as "fellow servant" laws, exempted employers from responsibility if the victim OR another employee should have "known better."
...But, uh, if you had in mind something like "during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations," hopefully this was not boring even if it did not answer your question.
Work was dirty, dangerous and frequently cut short by death or disability in the early US with no protections except potential lawsuits. Some states passed laws about mine or railroad safety, but for the most part, workers and their lives were cheap. Employers had little economic incentive to make work safe. In 1908, the federal government introduced worker's compensation to railroads. States gradually expanded this to more and more workers, effectively making it far more expensive to kill or maim a worker. Insurance companies imposed safety conditions on insured firms and a body of knowledge and practice developed to limit the financial costs of workplace accidents. Think of hardhats and safety glasses. Unionization of big industries like steel accelerated corporate attention and injury rates fell significantly between WWI and post WWII era. Rapid economic growth in the 1960s also meant more injuries and accidents. OSHA and the Mine Safety Act were both passed in 1970. All of this can be found at the Economic History Association. http://eh.net/encyclopedia/history-of-workplace-safety-in-the-united-states-1880-1970/ I worked summer jobs in factories in Massachusetts during the early 1970s, and it was still very easy to get hurt, especially at smaller firms. At one place, massive iron stamping machines had Liberty Bell style cracks though the body of the machine, patched up with improvised bolting. Even when in good repair, these beasts could snatch off a careless hand any time you hit the pedal and dropped the press. Huge sheets of flexible steel could slice through our cheap gloves and hands as we slid them off a pile. I got a steel chip in my eye because no one told me to wear glasses. Fortunately, no permanent damage. There were old guys with smashed hands and bent backs limping around just to make $1.25 an hour - minimum at the time. We'd barely begun to hear about toxics. One day, I was assigned to dip castings in a sulfuric acid solution in closed basement, no respirator, to clean off corrosion. Worked until we couldn't breath, then went outside to recover and back again. Fortunately it was only one day (for a college boy like me). Things like this were less common in big industries and unionized shops, but little shops with 10-100 workers were being squeezed by buyers and foreign competition - and the bosses were squeezing the workers. To the owners, OSHA was one more nail in their coffins. Thousands of these places were swept away by the recession of the 1970s. Ultimately for the good, but for a lot of middle aged men with no education and basic skills these dirty, dangerous jobs were much better than what came next.