Workplace Risk, Establishment Size and Union Density

The health and safety risk faced by individual employees can be treated as an unobservable latent variable which manifests itself at workplace level through reported counts of work‐related injuries and illnesses over a given interval. This paper presents results from count data regressions using data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey. The findings strongly support the view that employees in larger establishments have a lower probability of being injured or falling ill. In addition, establishments with a higher proportion of unionized employees, and with health and safety committees, were associated with higher numbers of reported injuries and illnesses.