Innovative Workplace Practices and Occupational Injuries and Illnesses in the United States

This article studies the consequences of organizational innovations on occupational injuries and illnesses in the American private sector over the past 20 years. High-performance workplace practices such as total quality management, job rotation and autonomous work teams can damage workplace health and safetythey can increase the intensity of work both in manufacturing and tertiary industries, and some practices can even be incompatible with the design and the assinirlation of safety rules. Using surveys on organizational changes in the USA, management literature and BLS-OSHA data, we show for 26 sectors that the adoption of high-performance practices seems correlated to a dramatic increase in occupational injuries and illnesses.