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camps and the meat products industry, 100 per cent of the workers knew that their jobs were dangerous. That
workers know the dangers makes sense. Many hazards, such as visible safety risks, can be readily monitored.
Moreover, some dimly understood health risks are often linked to noxious exposures and dust levels that work-
ers can monitor. Also, symptoms sometimes flag the onset of some more serious ailment. Byssinosis, for exam-
ple, a disease that workers exposed to cotton dust often get, proceeds in stages.
Even when workers are not well informed, they do not necessarily assume that risks are zero. According to
a large body of research, people systematically overestimate small risks and underestimate large ones. If work-
ers overestimate the probability of an injury that occurs infrequently – for example, exposure to a highly publi-
cized potential carcinogen, such as secondhand smoke – then employers will have too great an incentive to re-
duce this hazard. The opposite is also true: when workers underestimate the likelihood of more frequent kinds
of injuries, such as falling and motor vehicle accidents on the job, employers may invest too little in preventing
those injuries.
The bottom line is that market forces have a powerful influence on job safety. The $120 billion in annual
wage premiums referred to earlier is in addition to the value of workers' compensation. Workers on moderately
risky blue-collar jobs, whose annual risk of getting killed is 1 in 10,000, earn a premium of $300 to $500 per
year. The imputed compensation per "statistical death" (10,000 times $300 to $500) is therefore $3 million to
$5 million. Even workers who are not strongly averse to risk and who have voluntarily chosen extremely risky
jobs, such as coal miners and firemen, receive compensation on the order of $600,000 per statistical death.
These wage premiums are the amount that workers insist on being paid for taking risks. In other words, the
wage premiums are the amount that workers would willingly forgo to avoid the risk. Employers will eliminate
hazards only when it costs less to do so than what they will save in the form of lower wage premiums. For ex-
ample, if eliminating a risk costs the employer $10,000 but allows him to pay $11,000 less in wages, he will do
so. Costlier reductions in risk are not worthwhile to employees (since they would rather take the risk and get the
higher pay) and are not voluntarily undertaken by employers.
Other evidence that the safety market works comes from the decrease in the riskiness of jobs throughout
the century. One would predict that as workers become wealthier they will be less desperate to earn money and
will therefore demand more safety. The historical data show that that is what employees have done, and that
employers have responded by providing more safety. As per capita disposable income per year rose from
$1,085
(in 1970 prices) in 1933 to $3,376 in 1970, death rates on the job dropped from 37 per 100,000 workers to 18.
Despite this strong evidence that the market for safety works, not all workers are fully informed about the
risks they face. They are particularly uninformed about little-understood health hazards that have not yet been
called to their attention. But even where workers' information is imperfect, additional market forces are at work.
Survey results indicate that of all workers who quit manufacturing jobs, over one-third do so when they dis-
cover that the hazards are greater than they initially believed. Losing employees costs money. Companies must
train replacements, and production suffers while they do so. Companies, therefore, have an incentive to provide
a safe work environment, or at least to inform prospective workers of the dangers. Although the net effect of
these market processes does not always ensure the optimal amount of safety, the incentives for safety are sub-
stantial.
Beginning with the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, the federal government has
attempted to augment these safety incentives, primarily by specifying technological standards for workplace
design. These government attempts to influence safety decisions formerly made by companies generated sub-
stantial controversy. In some cases, these regulations have imposed huge costs. A particularly extreme example
is the 1987 OSHA formaldehyde standard, which imposed costs of $72 billion for each life that the regulation is
expected to save. Because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that OSHA regulations cannot be subject to a for-
mal cost-benefit test, there is no legal prohibition against regulatory excesses. However, OSHA sometimes
takes account of costs while designing regulations.
Increases in safety from OSHA's activities have fallen short of expectations. According to some econo-
mists' estimates OSHA's regulations have reduced workplace injuries by at most 2 to 4 per cent. Why such a
modest impact on risks? One reason is that the financial incentives for safety imposed by OSHA are compara-
tively small. Although total penalties assessed by OSHA have increased dramatically since 1986, they have av-
eraged less than $10 million per year for most years of the agency's operation. The $120 billion wage premium
that workers "charge" for risk is over 1,200 times as large.
The workers' compensation system that has been in place in the United States throughout most of this cen-
tury also gives companies strong incentives to make workplaces safe. Premiums for workers' compensation,
which employers pay, exceed $50 billion annually. Particularly for large firms, these premiums are strongly
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