OSHA Regulation: Worker Participation, Plant Compliance and Productivity

The first part of the thesis examines the factors that affect worker participation in OSHA enforcement activities. There are two types of participation: (a) initiating a complaint inspection and (b) accompanying the OSHA inspector during the walk around phase of an inspection. Empirical results indicate that participation decisions depends positively and significantly on plant characteristics such as union status, big plant size, big firm size and industry injury rates. Previous programmed inspections in the local areas (county) and also at the plant substantially reduces worker complaint and walk-around. Finally, worker participation is negatively influenced by unfavorable economic factors like the unemployment rate and demographic factors like the percentage of minority population in the county where the plant is located.;The second part estimates the impact of OSHA's health and safety inspections on plant compliance for all US private manufacturing plants that were inspected by OSHA between 1972 and 2003.It empirically tests whether compliance rates or improvements in compliance following inspections differ on basis of plant unionization or worker participation rate. There are two types of worker participation: (a) initiating a complaint inspection and (b) accompanying the OSHA inspector during the walk around phase of an inspection. Two major findings from this study are: (1) workplaces with high complaint and high walk around are most hazardous and have lowest cumulative reduction in violations from repeated inspections and (2) unionized plants in general are doing slightly better in terms of compliance than non-unionized plants. This study is important from the perspective of OSHA policy implementation. This study tests if workers are expressing valid concerns about hazardous working conditions when they participate more in enforcement activities. OSHA can use this information to target workplaces which have a high incidence of complaints and walk around because these workplaces are not only hazardous to start with; they also have a long span of continuing noncompliance.;Finally, we also analyze the impact of Occupational Safety and Health (OSHA) regulation on investment, labor productivity and total factor productivity. We combine productivity and investment data from the Census Longitudinal Research database (LRD) with Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspection data from OSHA IMIS data base. Our results show that plants that have more enforcement activities have 2 lower labor productivity and total factor productivity. On the other we found significantly positive impact of regulation on investment. Inspections with penalty tend to have more positive impact on investment as compared to inspections without penalties. Similarly, inspections with penalties tend to have more negative impact on output, labor productivity and total factor productivity. We also compared the impact of OSHA regulation on productivity and investment by categorizing plants, based on their degree of worker participation and union status. Results show that plants that have higher complaints or higher walk around and plants that are unionized, in general have lower productivity, but the effect of OSHA inspection on productivity in case of a high complaint or high walk around or unionized plant is less than the impact on productivity of a low complaint low walk around and a non-unionized plant. The main reason for this differential impact is that, for High Complaint/High Walk around/Union plants the displacement effect (the number of hours diverted from production to handling other regulatory activities, like training) is already low and hence the impact of additional OSHA inspection is lower.