Governing Occupational Exposure to Chemicals Using Thresholds: A Policy in Favor of Industry?

• In Event: Risk Government: Putting Industries Back in the Analysis of Science-based Regulatory Tools - II

Abstract

The use of occupational exposure limits has become widespread in recent decades in most industrialized countries to manage occupational exposures to chemicals. Social science research on this issue has so far focused mainly on analyzing the weight of industry in the expertise required to set these values and on the influence of industry-related experts in this process. Instead, this communication intends to focus on the other vectors by which industry is favored by the use of limit values to manage occupational exposures to hazardous products. The article first shows how the temporalities of industrial production are opposed to those of scientific research and the adoption of regulation, offering industries periods often around several decades during which they are able to use dangerous products without constraints. It then insists on a series of structural factors that lead manufacturers to deploy few resources to maintain their dominant position in a series of power relations. These include: inequalities in scientific resources and expertise between employers and trade unions or government representatives; the logic of scientific research which is in contradiction with the logic of establishing regulations favorable to public health interests; the transnationalization of scientific communities producing toxicological and epidemiological knowledge necessary for the development of OELs which fosters the interests of large industrial groups. The effects of these factors are increased by the use of a technoscientific tool to manage occupational health risks.

Author

• Emmanuel Henry, Université Paris-Dauphine, PSL University