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The empirical literature on union effects on occupational safety and health within firms struggles with two primary obstacles to credibly estimating the effect of unionization on workplace safety. First, unionized employees may be more likely to report occupational risks to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), inducing greater rates of inspection and citation of unionized firms for violations than occurs in otherwise similar nonunion firms. This is a kind of measurement error in commonly-used workplace safety outcomes that is positively correlated with unionization. It would lead to a spurious negative association between unionization and safety. Second, less safe industries and less safe firms within industry may be more likely to unionize than more safe ones. This selection bias also would generate a negative association between unionization and safety. The paper presents how the researcher addresses both of these obstacles to deliver evidence about the effect of unionization on workplace safety.

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Research Gaps

• In conclusion, our evidence on the effect of union certification on occupational fatality rates is consistent with two interpretations. First, there is little effect. Second, our measure of the outcome is very noisy and the estimated effect suffers from attenuation bias. Future work will develop evidence to try to disentangle these stories. (page 12)

Citation

Sojourner, A. (2014). Effects of Unionization on Workplace Safety: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from OSHA’s Enforcement Data. Chief Evaluation Office, U.S. Department of Labor.

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This study was part of the Department of Labor Scholars Program, and was produced outside of CEO’s standard research development process.