A Tripartite Epimiology? Policy Instruments, Knowledge and Definition Struggles about Civil Servants’ Occupational Health[Une épidémiologie paritaire ? Outils, savoirs et luttes de définitions relatifs à la santé au travail des fonctionnaires]

This article focus on the mobilization of public officials against asbestos danger, providing a chronology of trade union involvement in the development, implementation and monitoring of epidemiological studies, an instrument for measuring changes in occupational health. By returning to the pugnacity of the "Tripode" union groups – in reference to the name of the asbestos building in Nantes – to discuss the definition of health supervision tools, this contribution sheds light on the conditions of a "parity-based epidemiology" that is not only capable of participating in the construction of a public problem about the harmfulness of asbestos, but also of countering the resistance of the administrative directions to recognize the occupational illnesses of employees, and finally to encourage the State-employer to adopt precautionary practices with regard to this carcinogen. Neither reducible to institutional epidemiology, nor stackable on popular epidemiology, this approach places trade union actors on an equal footing with their supervisory administrations at the center of the negotiating arenas of health democracy.