Viscusi's Risk by Choice: Regulating Health and Safety in the Workplace

would only impose large costs and red tape on employers. Did they listen to us? You can bet they didn't. Those do-gooders filled the pages of the Federal Register. They required employers to buy new toilet seats and replace 29 inch handrails with 30 inch handrails. As we predicted, they held the government up to ridicule, wasted billions of dollars, and didn't improve worker safety by one whit. When all that was painfully clear to everyone, many, many years later, we got them to let the market do most of the job." Telling the story with relish, although in less colloquial English, Viscusi scores those economically ignorant (politically savvy) do-gooders who won most of the battles when he was Deputy Director of the Council on Wage and Price Stability. Of course, the last act, giving a greater role to market forces, has yet to be written, but this book is intended to be a boost to the process. The inadequacies of OSHA * Viscusi is at his best in describing the current and past operations of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the nature of its regulations, and the reason one should not have expected much of an improvement in worker safety. The chapters are crammed with facts, summaries of the relevant literature, and insightful observations. Viscusi argues that the increase in worker injury rates in the 1960s that stirred attention and led to the creation of OSHA was "a statistical artifact; job hazards actually were continuing to diminish throughout this period, as were other risk levels." The inadequacies of OSHA inspection are detailed, along with the lack of focus on serious problems and the areas where OSHA could do the most good. The level of fines has been so low that the economic incentive for improving safety is virtually zero. Viscusi summarizes analyses of how workers perceive and react to occupational hazards. Unions are seen as affecting health and safety by reflecting the average preference of workers, rather than the preferences of those workers who self-selected into the most dangerous jobs. This phenomenon might be used to explain why organized labor invested so much effort in having OSHA created and why the unions support its efforts so strongly-they are limiting competition by workers who are less risk averse and by the nonunion companies who would employ them. The differences in risk aversion are estimated to be large: The average worker (in a job of average, relatively low risk) puts a much higher premium on safety than does a worker who is employed in one of the most