Lost Opportunity: How Institutional Corruption Hampered Efforts to Protect Worker Health in America

Abstract

After a fitful but ultimately promising start in the 1970s, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been severely limited in its ability to regulate toxic chemicals in the workplace. Restrained by court rulings and bullied by powerful corporate interests, OSHA issues health standards at a glacial pace at a time when more than 80,000 chemicals are on the market in the United States. The agency and employers must find creative ways to control or eliminate the worst of these substances to reduce the human and economic burdens of work-related disease, which takes an estimated 50,000 American lives each year.