The Politics of Industrial Injury Rates in the United States

Abstract

Conventional approaches to variations in occupational injury rates in the United States rest for the most part on neoclassical and rational-choice assumptions that obscure the fact that injury rates are political phenomena. This paper develops an alternative model that explains injury rates in the context of the politics of capital relocation and state-accumulation strategies. It produces statistical evidence that the frequency of reported injury cases and the proportion of work time lost to injury are lowest in states, especially in the South, where the industrial rate of exploitation is highest, where welfare state provision is least adequate, where the choice of case physician is legally placed in the hands of the employer or the state rather than the injured worker, and where the percentage of African-Americans in the state population is high. A compensation payment variable usually associated with rational-choice arguments also appears in these explanations, but the statistical results are not obviously inconsistent with the alternative theoretical approach. If rational individual calculation plays a role in either the frequency of injury cases or the proportion of work time lost, it does so within clear class, race and state policy constraints.