Making Them Pay

Abstract

This article looks at occupational safety and health (OSH) regulatory models by deconstructing the two prevailing business practices that shape the OSH right of workers. The two practices are: the introspective, and the extrospective OSH. The article further presents the legal, social, and economic factors driving the OSH standards adopted by enterprises, thereby exposing an increasingly challenging problem facing the two models. This challenge is the trans-territorial OSH problem - a scenario where occupational dangers caused by a given employer are transported to workers in other occupational environments—outside the employer’s scope of legal liability. Three key methods are used for analyses: doctrinal approach, interdisciplinary approach, and comparative approach. The doctrinal analysis includes a descriptive overview of OSH so as to show how the right to OSH eludes some workers due to the trans-territorial OSH problem. It covers the overall approaches used, to deconstruct legal, institutional, and economic factors that shape OSH regulation. The interdisciplinary elements of the analysis concern: an analysis of OSH law; an analysis of the economic and social factors that drive corporate behaviors, including corporate views of OSH regulation; and the use of environmental factors to demonstrate the trans-territorial challenge. Drawing insights from the literature, the comparative method used concerns: an analysis of the OSH pratices of some large enterprises in the United States, and the EU OSH perspective—particularly the OSH model practiced by enterprises in France. It is shown that while the American OSH model is introspective in character, the EU model is extrospective.