Mercatus Center OSHA Report Rehashes Discredited Free Market Nostrums

This post was written by Member Scholar Thomas O. McGarity and Senior Policy Analyst Matt Shudtz. The Mercatus Center has recently published a report on OSHA that simply rehashes the same old discredited arguments that industry apologists in academia and think tanks have been making for thirty years. Not surprisingly, they reach the conclusion that voluntary compliance programs and worker education efforts are better uses of OSHA's limited resources than rulemaking and enforcement. The report contains no original research, and (with one exception) it relies exclusively on studies finding little or no correlation between OSHA activity and reductions in worker injures. At the same time, the report ignores much of the evidence tending to show OSHA regulations and enforcement are effective. The simple (and frustrating) fact of the matter is that it is almost impossible to design a study using available occupational injury statistics to measure with much confidence the extent to which enforcement of OSHA standards is or is not associated with a reduction in workplace injuries or deaths. It is therefore not surprising that the studies reach mixed results. The Mercatus report ignored some reports showing a positive correlation and belittled a recent study showing a highly positive correlation. By law, the agency has reviewed a number of standards issued over the last forty years. The cotton dust standard virtually eliminated byssinosis, at a cost to industry far less than expected. The standards controlling exposure to ethylene oxide resulted in reduced risk to employees and lower-cost sterilizers available to employers, even as industrial production of the chemical increased. OSHA's inspections have also been proven effective, with studies (among others, here, here, and here) indicating that injuries and standards violations decrease following the inspections - by as much as 50 percent.