Worker Safety and Health : The Swedish Difference

In this book, Steven Kelman of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government compares the behavior of two government agencies with similar missions: the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the United States and the Arbetarskyddsverket or Worker Protection Board in Sweden. As James Q. Wilson notes in a preface, Kelman emerges with a paradox: in "[t]he United States, that pre-eminent commercial republic," OSHA shows "a disposition to resolve all policy differences to the disadvantage of business and to place the enforcement of those policies in the hands of inspectors with a deep suspicion of business leaders." By contrast, in Sweden, "often described as the apotheosis of social democracy," the Worker Protection Board shows "a willingness to accommodate business views, an inclination to make policy behind closed doors, and a readiness to accept business assurances of compliance with those policies that, if they occurred in this country, would bring forth immediate charges of collusive behavior and irresistible demands for congressional investigations." Surprisingly, the differences between regulation in the two countries were not, for the most part, differences in the strictness of standards. Kelman found that OSHA and ASV both tended to adopt highly protective health and safety standards. OSHA, however, took a "far more punitive" line on compliance than did ASV, and American businesses in turn resisted far more vigorously than did their Swedish counterparts. Moreover, OSHA was bound by elaborate rules of procedure, and lawyers and courts were heavily involved in its controversies, whereas ih Sweden, the regulators and the regulated had informal and mostly cooperative dealings. Kelman examines rules promulgated in both countries between 1970 and 1976 on noise, construction safety, carcinogens, asbestos, and vinyl chloride. The noise case illustrates his thesis: the two agencies put forth not dissimilar proposals, but OSHA's rulemaking dragged on for years of contention, while ASV's proposal was met with a one-paragraph endorsement from the leading business group. For asbestos and vinyl chloride, OSHA's strict standard-setting actually influenced ASV's, because the Swedish agency was reluctant to seem more lenient than its U.S. counterpart. In most cases, however, the Swedish agency moved earlier and faster to regulate. In a series of interviews, Kelman surveyed the opinions of U.S. and Swedish administrators, job safety inspectors, and industry spokesmen. Standards are strict in both countries, Kelman argues, because officials share what he calls the professional ideology of the safety and health profession. For example, they tend to favor as much protection as possible for workers with little regard to cost, and they tend to choose engineering controls (muffling the noise of machinery) over personal protection (giving workers earplugs) . More unexpectedly, Kelman claims that the safety experts who work for industry hold much the same values as the regulators, whether or not their employers do so. In Sweden the leading business group, influenced by its safety professionals, often supports regulation even when its member firms do not. Most U.S. trade associations think it is their job to represent their member firms' views faithfully, the author says. While organized business may be more inclined toward compromise in Sweden than it is here, the same is true of regulators. The OSHA inspectors Kelman interviewed were more zealous in their mission and more sus-