RAND California Study Indicates What Makes an I2P2 Standard Work
A RAND Corporation study conducted by John Mendeloff and others for the California Commission on Health and Safety and Workers’ Compensation provided an evaluation of the effectiveness of California’s I2P2 standard. The preliminary draft of the report can be found at https://www.dir.ca.gov/chswc/Reports/2012/IIPPEvaluation.pdf While the report did not find significant results in better fatality data in California under the current program, it did point positively to changes in the program that could make an I2P2 standard more effective. From the report, at xvi –
If we assume that that the safety effects of the IIPP in California have probably been real but not very large, what are the policy implications for California and for other jurisdictions considering similar policies? The answer depends, in part, on the reasons for those results.
It is plausible that higher penalties for failure to have a written IIPP document would have reduced the number of those violations somewhat. Requirements for some form of employee participation in the implementation of the IIPP would probably have helped as well. More important we believe, based on interviews with Cal-OSHA leaders, was that inspectors did not regularly probe to find out whether employers actually had implemented the more specific subsections of the IIPP. Variability among inspectors played a role here. However, a more important factor was that, despite Cal-OSHA’s support for the IIPP standard, its enforcement process often failed to look beyond paper compliance with its provisions.
The traditional OSHA enforcement program is focused on detecting and abating hazard-specific standards—unguarded machines, slippery floors, etc. A quite different enforcement program would be to rely solely on the implementation of a safety program. OSHA or Cal-OSHA would examine whether the employer had carried out each of the requirements of the IIPP program, but would not focus on hazard-specific standards.
Although possibly quite effective, this second approach carries a number of risks. It assumes that the process can assure that major hazards are eliminated. But it may be difficult to assess the quality of the process with a great deal of confidence. Employers may be able to create the image of compliance without the substance. In addition, it is difficult to know, for example, just how effective a particular trainer or training program is. And even if the process is carried out properly, it is not fail-safe. To the extent that hazard-specific standards convey useful information to employers and workers about what precautions to take, that contribution would be undermined by a shift away from relying on those standards.
However, there may be another approach that achieves some of the benefits of both strategies described above without the drawbacks. Under this approach, Cal-OSHA would still inspect to identify hazard-specific violations. However, when it did so, the inspector would ask managers “How did your IIPP allow this hazard to appear in your workplace or allow this injury to occur?” In other words, he or she would try to relate the hazards to the program that the employer is required to implement. Detection of hazards would lead not only to the removal of hazards, but also to the strengthening of safety programs.
In no small measure, this middle approach is the one used by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in Great Britain. In that case, the reference is to the employer’s mandatory “risk assessment,” rather than to an IIPP, but the principle is the same.
It seems plausible that discussing the relevance of the IIPP to injuries and violations would require inspectors to spend more time on-site. Thus these inspections would need to be more effective in order to compensate for the prospect that fewer will be conducted. The new approach might provide more long-lasting benefits. Currently, analyses of the effects of enforcement typically find effects only in the year or two following an inspection with a penalty. The motivational effects of a serious violation fade over time and compliance decays. In contrast, it is plausible, but hardly guaranteed, that efforts to support the practices required by a firm’s safety and health program could have more enduring effects.