The name is absent

12

The bottom line in respect of the political economy of right-to-work legislation is that the
battle over union security will continue to be fought in the states “one state at a time,
again and again” (Baird, 1998, p. 491). A further look at the equilibrium outcomes would
be helpful.

(iv) The Case of Workplace Safety Reform and Workers’ Compensation

Some of the most interesting work on the political economy of regulation has
documented the course of state-level safety regulation in mining and manufacturing, and
the related reform of workers’ compensation, introduced well in advance of the New Deal
legislation.⁸ This literature identifies the circumstances where employers favored
legislation to raise rivals’ costs, but more generally pays close attention to the bargaining
process between employers and workers.⁹ We examine safety regulation and workers’
compensation in turn.

Workplace Safety Legislation. The pioneering study is Fishback’s (2005) analysis of the
role of large firms in influencing safety regulations in coal mines and factories, 1869-
1930. He characterizes their strategies as either defensive (either opposing regulation
outright or limiting the breadth of regulation) or predatory/subversive (raising rivals’
costs). His focus is primarily on safety regulations rather than workers’ compensation
per se. (Fishback and Kantor (1994; 1996a,b; 2000) focus exclusively on workers
compensation which, as we shall see, is depicted as a ‘win-win’ situation for large firms,
unions, and political reform groups, if not the insurance industry.) The strategies of large
employers (establishments with 500 or more employees) are inferred to differ as between
branches. It is expected that a strategy of raising rivals’ costs will be associated with
earlier adoption of state laws, wider regulation, and with more resources devoted to
policing the regulations; and conversely for defensive strategies.

For manufacturing, he considers the determinants of the introduction of labor
administrations (with and without coercive power) and factory inspectorates (to enforce
the regulations). For coal mining, he considers the determinants of the introduction of
coal mine safety laws, a regulation index based on a count of the number of mine

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