Who are the Regulators of Occupational Safety and Health Standards in Advanced Industrial Economies?

Abstract

This paper provides an insight for how occupational safety and health (OSH) standards are regulated by the State, and social partners, in five advanced market economies. It argues that historically, within the field of OSH regulation, the role of the State as regulator of OSH standards changes but yet key in regulation. Depending on which type of market economy in focus, the social partners or just the employer actively partake in various ways as co-regulators of OSH standards. With a historical and comparative approach, regulatory patterns of coordinated market economies (CMEs) and a liberalised market economy (LME) are analysed, to show that the former is corporatist and allows more active participation of the social partners in regulation, while the latter is pluralist, hence in the later system, employers play much more dominant role than employees as co-regulators. In conclusion it is argued that i) the role of the State in CMEs is merely complementary to the fulfilment of OSH goals, but the role of the State in the LME is quite central to the realisation of envisaged OSH goals; and ii) employees in the CMEs of Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, and Sweden, due to their more powerful roles as co-regulators, tend to enjoy higher OSH protection standards than employees in the LME system of the US.