After learning that President Richard Nixon signed the Occupation Health and Safety Act (OSHA) into law in 1971, I. W. Abel, the head of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, called the measure a “giant step forward.”1 He even compared it to the Wagner Act, the landmark legislation enacted in 1935 at the height of the New Deal that recognized the rights of workers to organize unions and engage in collective bargaining. Abel believed that OSHA had the potential not only to expand the rights of workers, but also to require employers to reduce the risks of illness and injury on the job regardless of the cost of doing so. On paper, the law provided Department of Labor health and safety inspectors with the power to show up unannounced at factories, construction sites, and offices and levy fines against employers who failed to comply with statutes and requirements. OSHA, wrote the presidential historian H. W. Brands, summing up the possible game-changing impact of the law, “put . . . the federal government’s nose into the offices of nearly every employer in the country.”2
OSHA never lived up to its promises. It never became a vigorous regulatory presence in the nation’s workshop and office spaces. Within a decade of the law’s passage, safety measures would be scraped as soon as profits waned. Money to run the program and fines for violations were so low that employers rarely took a severe financial hit when they did not follow the law’s provisions. From the start, OSHA’s funding was tenuous and it remained vulnerable to political attacks from business interests and eventually from the larger populous, who in growing numbers in the 1980s, lost faith in regulation and began to press for anti-statist solutions to the nation’s mounting economic problems.
With clear prose and sharp analysis, Charles Noble’s 1986 book, Liberalism at Work: The Rise and Fall of OSHA, points to the reasons why Abel and Brands’s predictions that OSHA would change the balance of power between employers and employees did not come to pass. Amazingly, this account remains one of the very few comprehensive and thorough full-length studies of the history of OSHA. For this reason alone, the book is worth reading and worth making space for next to other books on American policy making and United States government and politics in the postwar era. But the book also displays an ideological fierceness rarely generated in academic books today. It is, indeed, something of a document itself, a period piece. Reading Noble offers a chance to re-experience, both through argument and language, the New Left’s faith in ordinary citizens and its suspicion of authority, especially liberal authority—the same liberal Democratic authority that stonewalled for years on Civil Rights and ramped up the war in Vietnam. “I argue,” Noble writes early on in the book, “that liberalism is at once overly statist and insufficiently radical to solve the problems it confronts.” He fully expected conservative and business pushback to progressive changes in health and safety laws, but liberalism, he adds, was not much better because, in his words, it “build[s] from a set of political and institutional assumptions that frustrate reform.”3 Noble’s brand of New Left-infused scholarship flourished in history and political science departments in the 1970s and 1980s. Still, Noble’s book does not feel dated. Indeed, his analysis seems pressing and relevant today, when some, including Senator Bernie Sanders, seem to be calling for a return to liberal, New Deal style, state-sponsored solutions to the nation’s economic woes and growing levels of inequality. Noble would, perhaps, welcome these calls for greater regulation and more oversight, but he would surely say that they were not enough, that they were essentially Band Aids covering up real problems and real solutions and drawing attention away from the real issues: corporate capitalism, monopoly power, and little meaningful popular participation in political or economic processes.
Noble organizes his account of OHSA’s promises and disappointments chronologically. After an introductory section where he lays out the theory and politics behind his critical approach to liberal state-sponsored reform, he moves on to explore the pre-OSHA history of workplace health and safety laws and practices in the United States. He then examines the political origins of OSHA and the passage of the measure in Congress in 1971 and Republican President Nixon’s support for the bill. In part, as Noble notes, Nixon loaded the plan with compromises and loopholes, and only then backed it for calculated political reasons (the only kind he ever had). He was trying to curry favor with white blue-collar workers and pull them out of the long-standing Democratic electoral coalition. From there, Noble highlights the efforts of organized labor to add muscle to OSHA in the legislature, in the corridors of the Department of Labor, and on the shop floor, though he remains critical of the fierce moderation of many leaders of organized labor and their top-down approach to matters. Noble’s account ends in the Reagan years, when a Florida-based builder and pro-business leader was appointed to head OSHA and support for all but the cheapest workplace safety plans had eroded in business and political circles and even within the trade union movement. Fearful of job losses in the face of economic retrenchment, plant closures, and global competition, some labor leaders backed off their call for an aggressive OSHA presence on the shop floor. All of these forces led, contends Noble, to “the restoration of private control” over workplace health and safety policies and enforcement.4
As Noble points out, there is plenty of blame to go around for OSHA’s failure to protect workers on the job and shift the balance of power between labor and business across the country. From the very start, he maintains, OSHA never got the funding it needed, so it never assembled the inspectorate required to make it a vigorous regulatory presence. With its funding tied to presidential support and yearly budget negotiations in Congress, the agency remained vulnerable to shifting political winds and well-coordinated attacks from business interests, which were gaining momentum in the 1970s as inflation and rising competitiveness cut in profit margins. But Noble sees a bigger story here, a story of the failure of liberal ideals built on a social bargain that places decent wages for working-class families and steady profits for the country’s largest companies ahead of a truly activist government committed to achieving an equal outcome for everyone, everywhere. Liberalism of this sort promised change, it promised reform, and it promised to ameliorate the worse effects of capitalism, but it intentionally didn’t strike at the persistent exploitation and inequality at the root of the system. Again and again, Noble argues—and shows—that OSHA could not succeed without the on-going and full participation of working people. But that’s not what the law encouraged. It settled for top-down solutions. The maintenance of workplace safety also depended, he maintains, on a more robust state, one committed to intervening directly into the workplace decisions of plant supervisors and corporate heads. In other words, it had to challenge the notion of business’s complete monopoly over decision making.
According to Noble, liberal reformers designed OSHA to mitigate dangerous working conditions and impede employers’ ability to risk the safety of their workers to maintain profitability. But the architects of OSHA failed; really, they never had a chance because government agencies weren’t given the needed leverage and enforcement funding to challenge the dominance of business interests, particularly in matters affecting the organization of jobs and the allocation of resources on the job. Only workers organized at the factory level could have provided the health and safety agency with sufficient counterbalance. But the government didn’t bolster workplace organizing or unions. The unions themselves, Noble insists, chose insider power and institutional stability rather than energizing the grassroots or directly challenging management’s near monopoly over work and business decisions. Ultimately the bigger story here is that reforms favored by established trade union and liberal reformers, according to Noble, were doomed to failure unless the private power of capitalists to control so much of work life and the larger society was recognized and addressed.
In the end, then, Noble put forth a radical critique of OSHA and of the larger, postwar New Deal order of reform and regulation. But beyond that, Noble’s book encourages us to think past OSHA and the workplace and boardroom politics surrounding it and to examine our ideas about government, regulations, and the power of business. What is the role of government in everyday life? What would it cost to truly protect people on the job and organize an economy on behalf of all of its citizens? Whose lives matter? These are the essential questions of democracy and they are always worth asking.
BRYANT SIMON is Professor of History at Temple University.
Notes
1. I. W. Abel to President Lloyd, May 7, 1971, Frame 650, UFCW Papers, Reel 280, Frames 653, Folder, “UFCW Action Photos,” State Historical Society, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin.
2. H. W. Brands, Reagan: The Life (New York: Doubleday, 2015), 178.
3. Noble, 16-17.
4. Noble, 193.