Occupational health and safety in the real "new economy"

The so-called New Economy of the 1990s failed to deliver its promise of clean work and huge leaps in productivity; what really happened was an intensification of economic pressures on marginal workers. The effects on employment include: increasing income disparities, fewer jobs that lead to viable career tracks, less secure employment, longer working hours, and higher risk of uncompensated unemployment. Workers who are either newly entering the workforce or who do not have the training or skills to trade up in employment are under pressure from falling middle- and lower-income wage scales and increasing income disparities. Their opportunities are increasingly limited, whether by seeking better-paying jobs with other employers or moving up the now-shortened ladder at one employer. They face a declining choice of employment opportunities and well-paying jobs that tend to be concentrated in residual dangerous work in manufacturing or service sub-sectors that are often small or economically marginal. These forces appear to be pushing workers into accepting jobs in the diminishing but still substantial number of jobs that remain that are dirty and dangerous, as illustrated by the extreme example of McWane Pipe. Those who are forced into these dangerous jobs will once again most likely be the poorly prepared, the new-entry, the recent immigrant, and the illiterate worker. National occupational injury statistics may conceal the experience of these marginal industries by aggregating them into much bigger economic sectors. To understand this phenomenon, we need studies that examine the social choices and tradeoffs involving employment from the point of view of the worker and develop a means of monitoring these tradeoffs.