Do regulatory inspections make workers safer?

OBJECTIVES This research examines whether regulatory inspections make workers safe. METHODS The project examined a large-scale sample of longitudinal secondary data from the state of Oregon, United States on OSHA inspections, with and without penalties and worker accidents. Our data include regulatory inspections and worker injury records for 15,047 firms, and 543,672 observations at one year follow-up, covering a period from 1991 until 2014. We adopted logit regression models with firm fixed effects to explore the effects of regulatory penalties on the likelihood of worker accidents. RESULTS The results indicate: (a) that inspections with penalties reduce the odds of worker injuries and illnesses, although the effect of inspections without penalties is less consistent and; (b) that the amount of the sanction itself has a relatively small effect on injuries in the 5 and 10 years after an inspection. CONCLUSION Occupational safety and health regulation is pervasive, yet poor safety persists, and the costs of poor safety are often externalized to society. Firms complain that occupational safety and health regulatory policy creates an undue economic burden and is less than fully effective at protecting workers. This study has implications for occupational safety and health regulators to recalibrate regulatory enforcement policy and for firms who do not provide a safe workplace.