Does Safety Pay? A Critical Account of the Health and Safety Executive Document: `The Costs of Accidents'

Abstract

A central question in health and safety is the relationship between good practice and the financial performance of capitalist enterprises. Two alternative views have been presented on this issue: in one, good health and safety management is seen as contributing to sound enterprise finan cial performance; in the other, an inherent contradiction is seen to exist between expenditure on health and safety and the desire on the part of the employers to secure satisfactory financial performance. This article seeks to re-examine the validity of these two views through a discussion of a research report, The Costs of Accidents at Work from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the main body responsible for enforcing occupational health and safety law in Britain. The paper is divided into three parts: the first discusses arguments that the pursuit of safety and profit involve incompatible goals and analyses the differences between this literature and the HSE document; the second critically examines the methodology of the HSE study; and the final section uses a case study approach to illustrate the difficulties in the approach to organisational decision making which underlies the HSE study.