INJURY, DEATH, AND THE DEREGULATION FETISH - THE POLITICS OF OCCUPATIONAL-SAFETY REGULATION IN UK MANUFACTURING-INDUSTRIES

The author examines some of the more recent developments in the social and political environments within which the ''deregulation fetish'' i s crucial, but of which it remains only one element. This fetish, as p art of a broader assault on the legitimacy of the external regulation of business activity, will not go away; its effects are already being felt in the context of the regulation of occupational safety in the Un ited Kingdom. After outlining recent trends in recorded injuries in U. K. workplaces, with particular reference to manufacturing industries, the author charts the nature and effects of the social and political c ontexts of the work of U.K. safety regulators in the 1980s. While That cher governments withdrew from any direct deregulatory assault on occu pational safety, what transpired was a gradual but continual undermini ng of the ability of these agencies to fulfill their mandated function s. The nature and effects of a new politics of deregulation are examin ed and this new politics is related to U.K. governmental opposition to European Union influence in domestic social policy, which stands in a symbiotic relationship with the reemergence of a sustained deregulato ry discourse in the United Kingdom.