UC Berkeley

Recent policy initiatives in occupational safety and health have emphasized strategies that provide workers with information about workplace exposures. It is not clear, however, what effect this new information has had or will have on worker self-help initiatives. This paper analyzes individual and collective worker responses to information on job hazards using five sources of data on workers and industries in the United States. Levels of expressed dissatisfaction, discharges for cause, and strike frequencies are found to be significantly higher in hazardous jobs than in safe jobs. Individual quit strategies are not consistently found to be associated with higher hazard levels. These findings have potentially important implications for the design of future information-oriented health and safety policies.