Assessment of Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970: A case analysis of retrospective work injury data

The goal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) of 1970 presumably is to halt or reverse the unfavorable trend in the work injury frequency experienced in the United States over the 1960s. To achieve this goal, the policy makers of OSHA have imposed upon all private and public large organizations in the United States the requirement of providing their employees with a workplace free from recognized hazards. These policy makers have further authorized a standards enforcement program to implement this mandate. In effect OSHA has become the most significant legislation affecting personnel safety management in all sectors, primarily because of the huge costs incurred for standards compliance. The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between the size of the safety impact and the size of OSHA's enforcement program. Because California is one of the few states that can provide the proper injury and inspection data required for a comprehensive evaluative study, it is actually the effectiveness of California's OSHA program (Cal-OSHA) that was studied here. Cal-OSHA is considered by most people comparable to the Federal program on occupational safety. The research strategy was to measure the strength of the association between the number of safety inspections conducted in a given county and the amount of decrease in work injury for the same county. The correlational technique used was cross-lagged panel correlation (CLPC) which essentially measures the difference between two "cross-lagged" correlations (Rs) such as R(,x1y2) and R(,x2y1), where X and Y are variables and 1 and 2 are two points in time. To insure the validity of the correlational model used, relevant information was sought through both an informal interview with several local OSHA officials in California and a survey of public documents available presumably only to the interviewees. In addition, a time series study using the interrupted time series technique was conducted to supplement the findings obtained from the correlational analysis. The findings from CLPC implied that there was no significant relationship between the amount of decrease in work injury and the level of safety inspection employed in any work population considered, except perhaps in the construction industry. This was indicated by the Z values computed for the various cross-lagged differentials observed, of which all except one were not significantly greater than zero at the 10 percent level. Supportive of these findings were the results obtained from the time series. The time series revealed that for most counties and industries in California there was a noticeable decrease in work injury during the pre-OSHA period considered (1961-1969) and an equally noticeable injury increase since 1972. Since the above findings tended to refute the hypothesis that OSHA's enforcement program is effective in reducing work injuries, several possible future actions for a more viable OSHA system were proposed in the concluding chapter. These proposed strategies were further suggested to be applied within a sound bureaucracy. The bureaucratic model proposed in the present study was that of Donald Schon's public learning system, which in theory is quite contrary to the center-periphery model currently adopted by the OSHA bureaucracy. Schon's model is seemingly more survival-prone because of its apparent lack of a single fixed center limiting the energy and resources required for the diffusion of innovation involved.