Technology and a Safe Workplace

While policy analysts have put forth several rationales for federal occupational safety and health regulation, the American workplace has steadily become much safer, diminishing any such rationale. This has been aided by the macroeconomic effects of technology on increasing productivity and real income per capita, changes that have implications for the nature of work and worker safety. Also, we can observe effects of technology in specific industries and the fact that technology advances the viability of resolving safety issues by private, voluntary means. In 1960, the United States government spent very little on regulating the health and safety of American workers. Today, four decades later, regulatory efforts have expanded exponentially, with a whole new bureaucracy, notably the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), created to enforce workplace practices. In the related area of worker standards and benefits, government spending also has risen sharply in real terms. These efforts, however, appear to have had little impact on worker safety. In this study, two major themes are developed. First, by any measure, occupational safety and health were improving rapidly in the era before the major increase in government regulation. Economic growth that reflected technological change and capital formation was reducing the very problem that regulation was designed to solve. Second, while the trend toward greater safety has continued, it reflects in large part shifts in the nature of work rather than regulatory success. Technologically-induced structural change has solved many of the problems envisioned at the time of OSHA's creation in 1970.