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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28516 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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OSHA Effectiveness: MMTYWTK

In the thread about unions @vorpal_potato linked an excellent Roots of Progress piece on the history of worker’s compensation law. That got me thinking about the history of workplace safety since then, chiefly the top down reform since no-fault compensation: OSHA.

Did OSHA make workers safer?

Since OSHA was founded in 1970 fatal workplace incidents have decreased by 60% according to the Environmental Law Institute (admittedly somewhat confounded by manufacturing employment decreasing by 65%...).

On the other hand, the Mercatus Center has assembled a graph on workplace fatalities from 1933 to 2010 using data from the National Safety Council and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The results show that while fatalities certainly dropped after 1970, they had been falling long before and the trendline did not change following the creation of OSHA.

But prior to 1970 fatalities weren’t falling in some kind of regulatory no man’s land. In the entire period on the graph we had continuously evolving workplace safety rules emerging from the Bureau of Labor Standards founded in 1934. The BLS regularly met with organized labor to help establish new safety rules under State Labor Departments and played an important role in the passage of labor legislation like the Walsh–Healey Public Contracts Act or the Fair Labor Standards Act. And all of this doesn’t even capture all the state level workplace safety legislation that happened in the following decades (look up New York).

Without this context, Mercatus leaves you to imagine workplace safety incidents prior to 1970 were dropping entirely due to capitalist technological progress, as opposed to OSHA being another in a series of many steps of gradually increasing safety regulations.

And when you drill down into the details of specific OSHA policies, they often do show results. A few examples:

A 2012 study in Science found that OSHA's random workplace safety inspections caused a "9.4% decline in injury rates" and a "26% reduction in injury cost" for the inspected firms. The study found "no evidence that these improvements came at the expense of employment, sales, credit ratings, or firm survival."

A 2020 study in the American Economic Review found that the decision by the Obama administration to issue press releases that named and shamed facilities that violated OSHA safety and health regulations led other facilities to increase their compliance and to experience fewer workplace injuries. The study estimated that each press release had the same effect on compliance as 210 inspections.

There has especially made progress for those concerns that won’t be reflected in raw safety incidents, such as long term exposure to lead, asbestos, and other toxic chemicals “OSHA standards have virtually eliminated some occupational diseases such as “brown lung” disease in the textile industry, and accidental transmission of HIV and hepatitis in healthcare workers”.

OSHA standards have dramatically changed norms and practices. Just think about how asbestos removal is handled today — with enclosures, full-body personal protective equipment, and more — compared with decades ago. In health care, including dental offices, use of gloves and facemasks or respirators is standard practice, in large measure due to OSHA’s bloodborne pathogens standard. These practices are now viewed as necessary and appropriate to protect both workers and the public. But when these standards were issued, there was huge employer opposition, with claims that the rules were unnecessary, infeasible, and would put employers out of business and cost jobs.

  • Peg Seminario, Safety and Health Director, AFL-CIO

What are the economic benefits vs costs of OSHA?

I have no idea why, but I can’t seem to find any present day studies on the compliance costs of OSHA. A number of very out-of-date studies from the 1990s find costs between $10 and $40 billion. Studies on their benefits seem totally clouded by your base assumptions - CATO assumes extremely small benefits because they attribute almost none of the post-1970 drop to OSHA; OSHA itself assumes high benefits because it takes credit for the whole drop. For long term exposure we would also want some way to calculate healthcare costs from ex: respiratory problems. In general I wasn’t able to find a ton useful here but maybe it doesn't matter that much either way; it’s okay if OSHA costs more than it brings in, in terms of dollars and cents, if it plays a large role in reducing human suffering.

Why has OSHA declined in stature?

This piece has a decent quick write up on what works well and not so well about OSHA. Broadly summarized, OSHA has some really well-tailored standards it’s created since the 90s, mixed with a bunch of woefully out-of-date standards from the 60s. The actual inspection trainings are insufficient, and obsolete standards means that sometimes unimportant things are flagged while serious safety hazards are ignored. Why does OSHA use so many out of date standards? It sounds like the same bipartisan dysfunction that’s slowed every agency down since the 70s:

The process for setting standards that protect workers has slowed to a crawl, because Congress, the executive branch, and the courts have weighed it down with added analytic and procedural requirements. The time-consuming hurdles that OSHA must overcome to revise its out-of-date standards means that it has less time to address new hazards that have been recognized since 1970, including the risk of workplace violence to health care and social service workers and musculoskeletal disorders arising from patient handling. It now takes OSHA, on average, more than seven years to complete a new standard. Since 1970, OSHA has issued only 37 major health and 55 major safety standards.

  • Randy Rabinowitz, Director, Occupational Safety & Health Law Project

OSHA can regulate only after a complex process of finding “significant risk” and economic “feasibility,” and then is constrained to set standards at “the lowest feasible level.” As a result, some health standards have been costly compared to their effects. The longer process tended to make it less likely that any rulemaking could be begun and completed within the term of any OSHA director.

  • John Mendeloff, Health and Safety in the Workplace Director, Rand Center

In its 46-year history the agency has issued standards for 30 toxic substances. The standard-setting process has gotten harder and longer, as layers of procedural and analytical requirements have been added and industry and political opposition has intensified. Early on, it took OSHA one to three years to issue new standards for major hazards. The most recent standards — silica and confined space entry in construction — took about 20 years. As a result for most hazards, standards are out of date or non-existent. OSHA can’t address even long-recognized problems, let alone the emerging hazards that put workers in danger.

  • Peg Seminario, Safety and Health Director, AFL-CIO

Also, everyone from Mercatus to the AFL-CIO agrees that OSHA’s present day fines are actually too small to encourage much behavior change from companies, at least relative to things like worker’s comp and lawsuits.

Would More Funding Help?

Mercatus Center and CATO claim (without a source) that Quebec funds its equivalent workplace safety agency four times more per staff and gets similar results. I glanced at a few other countries: in France and Britain they both spend less than us; the UK gets much better results and France gets much worse, so make of that what you will! I just divided budgets by staff whereas the Quebec comparison is supposedly measuring “dollars spent on workplace prevention”, which I don’t know how to check for other agencies, but I could easily believe their numbers are better than ours because we waste a ton on administration or paperwork.

Still, whether we do it by spending our funds more effectively or by raising funds, there does seem to be a strong argument that OSHA needs more staff - the UK has about double our inspectors for a country about a fifth of the size, for instance.

OSHA’s biggest problem and deficiency is that it simply does not have the resources that are needed to meet its responsibilities. OSHA’s current budget is $552 million. As a comparison, the EPA budget is $8.1 billion. Federal OSHA and the state OSHA plans are responsible for overseeing the safety and health of 140 million workers at more than 8 million workplaces. But currently there are fewer than 2,000 OSHA inspectors (about 900 with federal OSHA). Federal OSHA is able to inspect workplaces under its jurisdiction on average only once every 147 years.

  • Peg Seminario, Safety and Health Director, AFL-CIO

tl;dr

  • Workplace fatalities have fallen by 60% since the passage of OSHA. The rate of workplace fatalities did not fall any faster after OSHA, but it’s hard to disentangle the pre-1970 trendline from the safety regulation and legislation in decades prior, and there’s no reason to assume the trendline would have continued if our standards didn’t continue evolving as well.

  • OSHA definitely coincided with significant changes in worker pathogen exposure.

  • OSHA could be improved by:

  1. Simplifying the procedural rules around creating new standards so they take <10 years.

  2. Hiring more inspectors so they’re stretched less thin, and training those inspectors better

  3. Probably increasing OSHA’s ability to levy greater financial fines.

On the other hand, I have a strong prior that US agencies are going to do less, be less efficient, and generally have a much worse paperwork:results ratio compared to other countries. Giving them more money can’t fix that no matter what it’s earmarked for- OSHA safety inspectors will compensate for the added staffing and increased fines by focusing on doing the least productive parts of their jobs and possibly working fewer hours.

I imagine this is true, but less out of a love of paperwork on the part of OSHA and more because that's what our legislators mandate. In my experience bureaucrats hate bureaucracy more than anyone else. If you read the employee survey reports some of them release on how to improve the agency, there will always be people complaining that they can't do any real work because they have too many procedures to follow and compliance activities to report, too many levels of authority decisions need to move through, the OIG is always breathing right down their neck, etc.

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