Occupational licensing and injuries and death in construction: an analysis of electricians and plumbers.
Authors
Kleiner-MM; Park-KW
Source
Silver Spring, MD: The Center to Protect Workers' Rights, 2010 Sep; :1-38
Abstract
Despite the growth of occupational licensing as an important labor market institution there has been little empirical work on the influence of occupational regulation on workplace injuries and deaths. Our analysis focuses on two major construction occupations, electricians and plumbers, in the U.S. The industry and occupations we study have a relatively large number of deaths and injuries in comparison to other industries, and have also recently experienced an upsurge in occupational regulation. Specifically, we examine how the implementation or changes in occupational requirements, apprenticeships and higher-quality training programs by state government through occupational licensing's influence both on the occurrence and severity of injuries and deaths using proprietary data from the Survey of Occupational Injury and Illness (SOII) data and the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) from 1992 to 2007. We find little influence of occupational licensing on the measures of death and injuries in the data we examine from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Keywords
Construction; Construction-materials; Construction-workers; Construction-equipment; Electrical-workers; Electricity; Plumbers; Plumbing; Injuries; Injury-prevention; Training; Professional-workers; Regulations; Standards; Mortality-rates; Quality-standards; Information-retrieval-systems; Statistical-analysis
Contact
Building and Construction Trades Department,AFL-CIO, CPWR, Suite 1000, 8484 Georgia Ave., Silver Spring, MD 20910
Funding Type
Construction; Cooperative Agreement
Identifying No.
Cooperative-Agreement-Number-U54-OH-008307
Priority Area
Construction
Source Name
Occupational Licensing and Injuries and Death in Construction: An Analysis of Electricians and Plumbers
Performing Organization
Center to Protect Workers' Rights
