Improving work environments through regulation

Our Summary

The article assesses the strength of the legal and legislative framework governing occupational health and safety (OHS) by examining its actual impact on working conditions and on recorded incident and accident figures within companies.

The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) regularly publishes the outcomes of its directives and field observations, compares countries, and highlights areas for improvement.

This European framework — which also includes Norway — aims to ensure a shared regulatory logic across the entire European Union. However, the intuitive link between regulatory constraints and safety and health outcomes is not so easy to establish. This is because occupational health and safety management (OHSM), the aspect most often studied in academic research, depends heavily on how each country interprets the directives — during the mandatory parliamentary transposition process — and how national authorities and, ultimately, employers implement them. This includes how laws are understood, how companies organize themselves to comply, the nature of oversight by authorities, inspection practices, and more.

The authors offer a literature review on the subject. This is not the first one; several are already known, some limited to issues of compliance and inspections, others sector-specific (fishing, construction).
However, no review to date has had such a broad scope, and that is precisely the aim of this one — to emphasize the distinctively European perspective, shaped by stronger social rights than those found on other continents. These rights grant workers greater protection in terms of workplace safety and working conditions. 
Earlier analyses had shown that Nordic countries, along with the UK and Ireland, generally had better occupational health and safety (OHS) systems, while the Baltic states and smaller southern European countries tended to lag behind.

The method used for this literature review was based on the collection of empirical studies conducted in Europe, focusing on each country’s legislative and inspection frameworks and how they are applied in practice. The initial screening identified 16,284 references, which were narrowed down to 339 studies, and ultimately to 56 that met all the quality and scope criteria.

About half of these 56 studies come from Northern Europe.

The 56 studies were grouped into seven categories:

• Compliance of working conditions with the regulatory framework, occupational safety management systems, union participation, management of psychosocial risks, and quality of working life (20 studies);
• General conditions for compliance, training, allocated resources, leadership commitment, safety culture and climate, and gender equality in working conditions (11 studies);
• Content and frequency of inspections, and the nature of inspection outcomes — punitive sanctions versus advisory and continuous improvement approaches (10 studies);
• Roles and responsibilities in occupational health and safety – often poorly defined (5 studies);
• Role of management, managerial commitment to health and safety, and supporting bodies and functions related to OHS (5 studies), as well as the design of standards and certification (3 studies);
• Contextual factors (2 studies focused on economic conditions, periods of recession, etc.).

The review highlights four key themes

A Difficult Path from Law to Practice

Interpreting and applying the law in context often remains a challenge. Inspections help reinforce compliance, but their nature and outcomes vary across countries. A higher number of inspections does not appear to correlate with a lower number of accidents. Rather, it is context-sensitive inspections — those that take a broad view of working conditions and are followed by support for employers in changing those conditions based on observed findings — that show the strongest correlation with accident reduction. On the other hand, while certifications are useful in many areas, they do not seem effective in improving workplace climate or addressing psychosocial issues.

The Importance of National and Sectoral Contexts

European directives are always reinterpreted within national and sectoral contexts, resulting in varying impacts across countries. For example, Spain and the United Kingdom assign compliance responsibilities to different actors. Labor market dynamics also help explain differences across sectors: Norway’s oil and gas industry is subject to stricter regulations than the construction sector. Other variations may relate to how gender inequalities or the working conditions of older workers are addressed. More broadly, many of the differences observed on the ground are linked to the differing economic resources available across sectors and countries.

The Importance of Structural Conditions

The way organizations are structured and how actual working conditions are implemented can either support or hinder occupational health and safety. A general pattern observed is that increased demand pressure for products and services tends to reduce compliance. Another recurring finding links company size to the quality of health and safety policies: the larger the company, the better its OHS policies. In fact, company size appears to be the strongest predictor of risk awareness, effective risk management, and adherence to safety regulations. In larger firms, the social climate, safety culture, and managerial commitment also play a crucial positive role.
Other important factors include working hours, shift patterns, and the nature of employment contracts (temporary vs. permanent). Overall, employers who have embedded preventive routines into their practices achieve better OHS outcomes. Where certification processes are in place, they help reinforce these routines and accelerate compliance.
Lastly, the use of subcontractors by large companies — especially when risk statistics from subcontractors are integrated into the principal company's own safety reporting — tends to benefit these smaller external firms. They learn from the lead company and are pressured to align with and improve their health and safety practices.
In all cases, management plays a key role in achieving positive outcomes, particularly when managers are trained to actively address occupational health and safety issues.

The Importance of Social Conditions

A positive social climate and a culture of transparency and communication within the company are, unsurprisingly, key factors in occupational health and safety outcomes. It is often observed that trade unions place greater trust in regulations and tend to prioritize safety more than managers do — although this varies, with sector-specific subcultures influencing the degree of difference.
However, gender issues and inequalities are still largely addressed through the narrow lens of harassment, without fundamentally challenging the persistent disparities in pay and career advancement, which continue to disadvantage women in the workforce.
 

Discussion

It is noted that these numerous studies on the subject offer limited longitudinal perspectives (i.e., studies of changes over time) and often remain local in scope.

As a result, the methods used in the reviewed articles tend to have low evidential value and are exposed to multiple sources of bias. Randomized protocols with true blinded control groups are rarely employed. These biases affect the analysis of the complex cause-and-effect relationships typical of modern work environments.

As previously observed, there is no linear relationship between the legislative framework and actual occupational health and safety practices. The combination of strong demand, good work organization, and a positive safety culture can prove effective for occupational health and safety.

The analysis identifies four major regulatory factors:

• A broad societal factor that varies from one country to another.

• A quality of inspections factor, which requires sufficient resources and the ability to strike a good balance between control and penalties on one hand, and support and guidance on the other — particularly in understanding regulations. Larger organizations tend to have an advantage in all these respects.
• An internal organizational factor, involving the safety routines implemented daily by management, which assumes managers have adequate competence — a point often found lacking in the studies.
• An external factor, consisting of demand pressure.

It is concluded that regulations are essential and indispensable to counterbalance external pressures and to create incentives for employers to prioritize occupational health and safety and to establish optimized internal organization regarding working conditions.
When internal and external pressures are well combined and managed, occupational health and safety becomes a priority, and overall compliance increases rapidly.