The state, class and occupational health and safety: locating the capitalist state's role in the regulation of OHS in NSW

Covered in Coal: Examining Workplace Injury, Illness, and Fatality in the Film Blood on the Mountain

“…A critical contribution of Blood on the Mountain to understanding OHS is that it explores how occupational injuries, illnesses, and disasters are socially produced through the relationships among individuals and groups and influenced by the interrelationships among industry, the state, and labor. 13 Doing so, the documentary offers an uncommon representation of workplace injury, illness, and disaster as the importance of political economic power and the relationship between core control and periphery exploitation are thrust to the fore.…”

Explaining occupational injury rates between migrant and native workers in Taiwan, 1998–2011

“…It is argued that injury is a major but poorly recognized problem in the workplace (Bohle and Quinlan, 2000). The political economy perspective suggests that injury is influenced by broad economic and political relations; that is, OHS regulation may make no progress without a comprehensive integration of capitalist economic, political and social relations (Carson, 1989;Heino, 2013). Moreover, the deregulatory tendency towards the direction of weakening the government's role in setting and enforcing standards is considered problematic (Nichols and Tucker, 2000).…”

Capitalism, regulation theory and Australian labour law: Towards a new theoretical model

“…Due to a combination of inter-related features, including the exhaustion of productivity growth in lead sectors, the resistance of workers to intensified exploitation, the internationalisation of production and the erosion of US hegemony (Braverman 1974: 31–35; Aglietta 1979: 119–122; De Vroey 1984: 55–63; Lipietz 1992: 14–23), Fordism began to lose coherence from the early-1970s onwards, and this was reflected in high inflation, growing unemployment and stumbling productivity growth. This period extended into the 1980s, and was characterised by ‘institutional searching’ to escape the growing crisis and restore stable accumulation (Heino 2013: 160).…”

“…These models, whilst derived from regulationist ideal-typical frameworks, have been sensitised to the Australian context and thus display a unique institutional materiality and distinctive trajectories of crisis. The models identified are antipodean Fordism (1945 to mid-1970s) and liberal-productivism (mid-1980s to the present), separated by a period of crisis characterised by ‘institutional searching’ to navigate an escape therefrom (Heino 2013: 160). Each model possesses an order of labour law appropriate to it, depending upon the differential articulation of the contradictions of capitalist social relations, the integration of organised labour, the valency of market forces and the diffusion of the commodity form.…”

“…The author was unable to find any examples of explicitly legal study from a regulationist perspective. In Australia, this shortcoming is doubled, given that the PRA has, barring a few significant exceptions (Broomhill, 2008;Lloyd, 2002Lloyd, , 2008Heino, 2013), made little headway in Australian political economy scholarship.…”