I'm not campaigning for scrapping OSHA, but its benefits have been greatly exaggerated. You can look at the safety improvements since OSHA was created and say "wow this is a big deal", but similar improvements where happening before OSHA. The data doesn't clearly show OSHA as having any effect at all. I'd imagine that it does have a net effect of reducing workplace related injuries, but it isn't the source of most of the reduction.
The libertarian view is that somehow big corporations will correct unsafe working conditions, and other types of misbehavior such as polluting rivers, in response to market forces.
If you add fear of lawsuits to market forces you get what has been happening. Regulations have an effect (in some areas more than OSHA's effect, for example the EPA, while much more expensive, seems to have a larger, probably much larger effect in its area than OSHA does in its), but you can't reasonably say "there has been regulation, and there has been improvement, therefore all, or an overwhelming portion of the improvement is because of the regulation."
Particularly in OSHA's area market forces have been big. As society becomes wealthier companies can afford to have safer and more attractive workplaces and current and potential employees care more about their workplace then they did when almost everyone was desperately poor. |
