About the Brief

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The mission of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is to ensure safe and healthy conditions for workers. OSHA estimates that work-related deaths and injuries have fallen by more than 65 percent since the agency’s creation in 1970. Still, in 2014, more than 4,800 American workers were killed on the job, and nearly 3 million suffered work-related injuries and illnesses.

Previous research suggests that OSHA inspections can reduce the risks workers face. But for inspections to work as intended, OSHA needs employers to respond promptly when workplace inspections reveal unsafe conditions. Of the roughly 24,000 OSHA citations issued with penalties in 2013, more than 20 percent were ultimately referred to the national office for debt collection after employers failed to resolve the citation.

In 2014, U.S. Department of Labor's (DOL) Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) contracted with Mathematica Policy Research and ideas to examine whether insights from behavioral science can be used to improve outcomes in DOL programs. In this study, the research team partnered with OSHA to pilot test whether a limited set of changes to the citation process could lead more employers to respond to OSHA after receiving a health and safety citation and reduce the number of employers referred to debt collection. Researchers used a nationwide randomized controlled trial in two phases to test the effect of the changes, and results indicate statistically significant improvements. The brief describes the intervention context, presents the intervention design, discusses key findings and identifies lessons learned from this study.

In the pilot process the researchers tested, OSHA staff (1) gave employers a new handout at the end of each inspection that described how to resolve citations; (2) used a new cover letter for citations; and (3) provided employers with timely reminders about the citation, including a postcard and follow-up phone call. Staff also had access to Spanish-language versions of all materials, which had never before been provided consistently on a national scale.

Researchers conducted two phases of testing. In the first phase, staff at randomly selected OSHA area offices implemented all of the changes described above; in the second phase, they implemented all of the new procedures except the reminder phone call to test whether a less time-consuming version of the changes would yield similar benefits. The changes tested significantly raised the number of employers who responded to OSHA in each phase and caused referrals to debt collection to decline substantially in the second phase.

Key Takeaways

• Changes to OSHA’s citation process informed by behavioral science increased employers’ rate of response to citations by 3.9 percentage points in Phase 1 and 5.4 percentage points in Phase 2.
• In Phase 2, employers under the new process were 4.4 percentage points less likely to be referred to the national office for debt collection.

Citation

Chojnacki, G., Deutsch, J., Amin, S., Perez-Johnson, I., Darling, M., Lefkowitz, J. (2017). Mathematica. Pilot OSHA Citation Process Increases Employer Responsiveness. Chief Evaluation Office, U.S. Department of Labor.

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The Department of Labor’s (DOL) Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) sponsors independent evaluations and research, primarily conducted by external, third-party contractors in accordance with the Department of Labor Evaluation Policy and CEO’s research development process.