Here in Alaska and elsewhere union agreements often have sections in them that extend or at least reinforce job safety and health protections for workers. In addition, these agreements frequently outline structured ways that labor and management can address potential safety and health issues so that they are mitigated before they kill or injure a worker. Consequently, it is logical to assume that, all other factors being equal, a union workplace is likely to be safer than a nonunion work setting, but is there any hard evidence of this. It turns out that there is.
One of the classic pieces of research in this regard is a ten-year statistical analysis of fatalities in trench work. The research was published in the prestigious Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.* It provides well-documented evidence that union members work more safely than non-union workers.
The data were gathered by researchers whose main focus was on the impact of a new OSHA trenching regulation that became effective in January, 1990. OSHA regulatory efforts are often attacked as ineffective, and researchers hoped to shed light on this subject by investigating fatalities in the five-year periods before and after adoption of the new standard.
The adoption of the new standard resulted in a 50 percent reduction in trench-related fatalities in both union and non-union companies. In the five years before the new standard, the fatality rate was 13.5 per million workers per year, but that dropped to 6.8 per million per year for the five years after adoption. The decline was consistent across all construction companies, regardless of size. So, OSHA regulations provide for a safer work place, but the researchers also discovered that union workplaces are safer.
Between 1985 and 1995, 522 workers were killed in trench-related mishaps. Of these, 60 died working for union firms while 462 died in non-union employment. Non-union companies employed about four times more workers than union firms, however, the actual fatality rates were 5.71 per million employees for union firms and 11.80 per million for non-union. In other words, a non-union worker was more than twice as likely to die in trenching incident than a union worker.
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* Suruda A, Whitaker B, Bloswick D, Philips P, Sesek R, Impact of the OSHA Trench and Evacuation Standard on Fatal Injury in the Construction Industry, Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 2002; 44:902-905.
