How the Swedes Do It

...After the smoke has cleared in the battle for the format of agiven regulation, implementation depends upon the face-toface contact of inspector and private sector manager...

...The bulk of our reading tends to be devoted to reinforcing our particular expertise...

...Kelman also pays too little attention to another key ingredient of enforcement—the training of inspectors...

...Reviewed by Morton Corn Professor and Director, Division of Environmental Health Engineering, Johns Hopkins It is often said that foreign travel, and particularly living for a time in another country, gives one a new perspective on practices at home...

...Consequently, 2 per cent of our gross national product is associated with legal fees, whereas in an industrial nation like Japan litigation is quite rare...

...The principals working in environmental health and safety are all in frequent contact, making the network of control from the central government agency to the field offices that actually oversee compliance vastly simpler than in the U.S...

...Regulating A merica, Regulating Sweden offers us a tantalizing glimpse of how much more efficient employeremployee cooperation can be...

...It is a remarkable investigation that will interest not only professionals but also Americans and Swedes who wonder about the procedural roots of their day to day encounters with their respective governments...

...In the latest and perhaps the nastiest such confrontation, the Court rejected the American Textile Manufacturing Institute's attempt to challenge the validity of osha's cotton dust standard...

...Regulating America, Regulating Sweden rises above our limited horizons to look at the "big picture...

...It is the author's hypothesis that the adversarial, litigious responses to government regulation in the United States stem from our historical development, from our stress on rugged individualism and the fulfilment of self-perceived needs...

...In the area of occupational health and safety this means there will probably be still greater resort to the courts than during the previous four years, when they were heavily utilized by the private sector under a President who was more sympathetic to osha's aims...

...One comes away from Kelman's stimulating book feeling that the United States has erected a terribly cumbersome superstructure of regulations and procedures in seeking to reduce occupational hazards...

...It would have been particularly helpful had he presented figures on the distribution of industry by Standard Industrial Classification and by numbers of employees per worksite...

...If there is a weakness in this book's splendid examination of social progress in two countries, and social conflict in the U.S., it is that occasionally Kelman paints with too broad a brush...

...Unfortunately, cooperation has been tried here with discouraging results...

...Many statistics corroborate Kelman's contention that our frontier spirit, our self-assertiveness creates an especially inhospitable climate in the United States for fostering cooperativeventures that do not provide an equal return to all participants...

...Even dealings between organizations assume the nature of a contest between individuals where there are conflicts of interest...

...After establishing a framework by tracing thepassage and enforcement of construction safety and noise control measures, Kelman goes on to consider broader issues of rulemaking and public policy...

...It would indeed be a welcome relief to all of us laboring in work-related health and safety if less litigious mechanisms for resolving conflicts could be developed...

...I am not convinced another system would work for us...

...He clearly knows his subject matter, and his abundantly annotated book draws upon the public record as well as interviews with those in charge in both countries...

...TheU.S...

...The Swedish system embodies deferent values that tend to produce accomodation in the formulation of health and safety rules embracing employer and government...

...That would have allowed easy determination of whether the comparisons made were based on similar raw material...

...Dunlop's painstaking search for agreement through informal discussion failed...

...The period covered is 1970-1976, and he is careful to note that these were years when a Republican administration generally hostile to osha issues held office here, while in Sweden the strongly supportive Socialist government of Olaf Palme was in power...

...has over 230 million inhabitants and strong regional cultural traditions...

...If the inspectorate is not well-prepared and professional, the government's credibility is eroded...

...In the process, it offers a stimulating view of some of the different paths Sweden has taken to improve the quality of life...

...Kelman studies the agencies concerned with work-related accidents and diseases in each nation: the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (osha), created by the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, and the Arbetarskyddsverket (ASV), or Worker Protection Board...

...Sweden numbers 8 million and is far more homogeneous, with obvious implications for reaching a consensus and enforcing laws that were brought home to me during my brief visits there...

...Nonetheless, most of us in the field in this country are specialists—physicians, engineers, industrial hygienists, nurses, chemists, etc...

...In fact, Kelman's report of his own interview survey indicates that in the United States—where, as he acknowledges, the training is inferior to Sweden's—there is widespread skepticism of Washington's ability to fairly execute a regulatory program...

...The American spirit has led to rulemaking by the Administrative Procedures Act, and to bitter face-offs between the private sector and workers that frequently are fought all the way to the Supreme Court...

...Having been involved in the administration of osha during the period under scrutiny, for example, I think he gives too short shrift to the disparities in the geographic and population sizes of the countries being compared...

...Having observed that effort to achieve a peaceful solution at close range, and having first-hand experience of the acrimony poisoning the atmosphere, I would predict a similar fate for such an approach to establishing or maintaining other standards...

...As a final critical point, I would observe that it is sometimes difficult to comfortably judgetheauthor's treatment of specific conditions or events in Sweden...

...In this sense Steven Kelman's probing analysis of work-related health and safety regulation in the United States and Sweden is like a trip abroad...

...Kelman cites former Secretary of Labor John Dunlop's 1976 attempt to end the tense skirmishing between the steel companies and their workers that had characterized the formulation of a coke-oven standard over a five year period...

...From the early stance assumed by the Reagan Administration, it seems fair to say that favor has been transferred to those bent on swinging the pendulum back to the employer, to reducing the burden of government on the entrepreneur...

...But these are minor carpings about what is really a most provocative book...

...This reader was glad for the refreshing perspective...