Other safety pays arguments

There are at least two qualifications to this whole approach which need to be stressed at the outset. First, most of these arguments do 

The second qualification or objection which must be mounted to any blanket argument that safety pays is that the law itself recognises that there may be situations in which safety does not pay that is, where it would be impracticable from a financial point of view to expect employers to guarantee the safety of their employees. The point is that most OHS law requires employers to provide a safe workplace or to observe the relevant regulations only so far as is reasonably practicable . The meaning of this phrase will be discussed in Chapter 7, but for present purposes it is enough to 

These two qualifications should be borne firmly in mind in what follows. 

The first version of the safety pays argument to be considered here concerns the total cost of accidents. The argument is that the cost of compensation claims is really only a small part of the total cost incurred by employers as a result of workplace injuries. A study conducted in Queensland revealed that the total cost of injury to employers was at least seven times the compensation costs (Mangan 

Finally, the health and safety manager of one multinational with processing plants in various Third World countries where safety regulation is almost non-existent explained that the company nevertheless maintained the highest safety standards in these plants, in part because of the years of training which must be provided for plant operators and the costs involved in training replacement operators. 

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The economic rationalist approach assumes that compensation pressures provide incentives for employers to improve their occupational health and safety performance and that employers respond accordingly. But this, as we have seen, is a problematic assumption. This chapter looks at how employers in fact respond to these pressures. In Chapter 4 we examine the limited reach of the compensation system and the way in which many types of employment and many health and safety risks are in principle beyond its influence. Chapter 5 looks at the broader safety pays approach and explores the argument that other economic considerations, for example productivity, can serve to focus employer attention on health and safety. 

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