Occupational safety and health has been a major focus of academic analyses of regulation and governance. In part, this reflects the troubling but intellectually fascinating trade-offs involved between important economic goals such as employment and growth, on the one hand, and the health and lives of workers, on the other. These important considerations aside, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been “ground zero” for arguments about the problems of securing effective and efficient regulation in the United States.
Some of the controversies about OSHA were purely political and related to the acute anxiety that many American business executives, such as Bryce Harlow, felt about the growth in the regulatory power of federal government. Reflecting the creation not only of OSHA but also the Environmental Protection Agency, Harlow warned that American business was being “rolled up and thrown in the toilet” by this expansion of federal regulatory power. The field also attracted much academic attention. Starting with Lennart Lundqvist, a series of studies (not all cited by Gregory Huber) compared the development of occupational safety and health policy in the United States with its counterparts in other countries such as Sweden and the United Kingdom (The Hare and the Tortoise: Clean Air Policies in the United States and Sweden, 1980). These concluded that OSHA produced more conflict and fewer results, prompting attempts to explain why regulation was particularly problematic. Later Eugene Bardach and Robert Kagan used OSHA to develop a more general explanation of regulatory unreasonableness (Going by the Book: The Problem of Regulatory Unreasonableness, 1982). In short, rather like agricultural policy, occupational safety and health has prompted work that attempts to explain much more than how OSHA works—or fails.
Huber continues this tradition of using OSHA to make a more general theoretical argument. He argues that OSHA coped with the political problems it endured—and inflicted on itself—in its early years by adopting a strategy of “strategic neutrality.” By this, he means that OSHA moved to implement the Occupational Safety and Health Act as impartially as possible, allocating inspections without regard to local political pressures or circumstances and, instead, relying on analyses of risk, the incidence of violations, and other obviously defensible criteria. This was not a merely a Weberian bureaucracy dutifully following the rules, however. OSHA adopted this approach deliberately because it allowed the agency to maintain its mission in the face of adverse political pressures. Huber supports his argument with careful and thorough quantitative analysis of data on the frequency and nature of OSHA inspections and risk factors. These analyses enable him to establish, for example, that inspections are more common in the Midwest than in the Sun Belt, not because of political considerations but because Midwestern industries are riskier.
The thoroughness of the authors' empirical analyses commands respect. Huber mines a mountain of data to evaluate systematically each and every argument that has been advanced that OSHA is biased in its allocation of its resources for inspections. The book is thus a model of the systematic and careful use of data to evaluate the conduct of an agency. It is most valuable, therefore, for those interested in the detailed analysis of lower-level officials than in the topic of occupational safety and health policy. This comment accords with Huber's own explanation of what drove his research—an interest in discretion in the use of the coercive power of the state. He does not address what we might call the overt policymaking role of OSHA—the development and promulgation of the standards that its inspectors enforce. This gap means that he is necessarily silent on the role of recent Republican administrations in reining in the adoption of new regulations either because of ideology or pressure from business interests. Leaving the political creation of standards out of the study necessarily limits how much he can say about the judgments and decisions made by OSHA's leaders and those to whom they report. One of the critiques of OSHA is that perhaps because of the intensity of the attacks upon it, the development of new standards has lagged far behind the introduction of new hazards into the workplace. If this is true, contrary to his argument, OSHA has overall failed to develop strategies that would combine political survival and policy effectiveness.
Huber also seems to eschew many opportunities to engage with theoretical arguments about the nature of regulation. These arguments might have led him to say more about the motivation and behavior of street-level bureaucrats, or to engage with Ronald Brickman and colleagues, David Vogel, Lundqvist, Steven Kelman, and Graham Wilson on whether achieving effective but sensible regulation in areas like occupational safety has been more difficult for the United States than for other advanced democracies (respectively, Controlling Chemicals: the Politics of Regulation in Europe and the United States, 1985; National Styles of Regulation: Environmental Policy in Great Britain and the United States, 1986; The Hare and the Tortoise: Clean Air Policies in the United States and Sweden, 1980; Regulating America, Regulating Sweden, 1981; and The Politics of Safety and Health: Occupational Safety and Health in Britain and the United States, 1985).
Huber himself notes that in the mid-1990s, almost a quarter of a century after its creation, OSHA was still struggling to overcome a legacy of mindless enforcement of unimportant rules. It would have been interesting to hear his explanation for the difficulty that OSHA had in establishing a defensible regulatory strategy. The quality of his empirical analysis of OSHA's implementation strategies is truly impressive. Perhaps in the future, he can be tempted to address some of the wider questions that previous studies of the agency have raised.
