The law, the researcher, and occupational health

The primary role of law in society is to protect people, ensure a common good, settle disagreements, and persuade people to do the right thing. In the field of occupational health and safety (OHS), employees should be guaranteed a safe place to work by law, protecting them from occupational hazards, accidents, and disease. However, it is estimated that 2.3 million workers die annually for reasons attributed to work, mainly due to work-related diseases. As important as this number appears, it is likely to be a considerable underestimate of the true number of deaths due to shortcomings in the available data. This gap inevitably brings into question the effectiveness of OHS legislation, the process in which it is formulated, and the extent to which it is enforced. The development of regulations and associated challenges described in the review fall within the realm of public policy analysis that seeks to explain how decision-makers, elected politicians, interest groups, lobbyists, experts, and political institutions produce public actions intended to have a large-scale impact.