University of Pittsburgh professor John Mendeloff is named the first director of the Center for Health and Safety in Workplace. This is a two-year appointment to help generate new cross-disciplinary research and consider enforcement issues in the area of workplace safety.
Welcome to the Center for Health and Safety in the Workplace
The mission of the RAND Center for Health and Safety in the Workplace is to conduct research and analysis that helps improve worker health and safety and reduce the economic costs of workplace accidents and illnesses. The Center provides rigorous, objective analysis and a neutral venue in which to convene stakeholders from government, industry, and labor.
With funding from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Center has just launched three studies described immediately below. Other new and ongoing studies are described under the "Projects" section of this web site.
All projects »Projects sponsored by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
Evaluation of the Certified Safety Committee Program
The Pennsylvania Certified Safety Committee Program provides a 5% discount on workers' compensation premiums for firms that develop certified safety committees. RAND's evaluation of this program will answer the questions:
- What is the impact of participation in the program?
- To what degree did firms actually change their behavior as a result of the program?
- What explains the low take-up rate of the program?
- What are the options for making the program more effective?
Comprehensive Safety and Health Program Project
During the 1990s, OSHA began work on a standard that would require all firms above a certain size to implement a comprehensive safety and health program. Three states, including California, have adopted a similar standard. In some states, firms can receive discounts from their workers' compensation premiums if they certify that they have implemented a specified safety program. RAND will:
- Review the information collected by OSHA and assess any evidence regarding the likely effectiveness of this requirement
- Evaluate the impacts of the adoption of the safety program standard in California and any other state that has taken similar steps
- Examine data in Pennsylvania that comes from self-insured firms.
Impact of Safety Standards on Injuries
We are still only beginning to understand the role of different safety standards on the prevention of injuries. There have been some studies that looked at the impact of specific new standards, but only one study that attempted to look at the impact of multiple standards (Mendeloff & Gray, 2005). That study found that citations for person protection equipment were followed by statistically significant drops in several different kinds of injuries—including eye injuries and toxic exposures—while machine guarding citations were not. With workers' compensation data from PA, RAND will replicate and extend this study. Since the PA injury data includes information about the causes of injuries, RAND will be able to link citation effects to particular types of injuries.
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