Dean A, McCallum J, Venkataramani AS, Michaels D.
Abstract
All US nursing homes are required to report workplace injury and illness data to the Occupational Safety And Health Administration (OSHA). Nevertheless, the compliance rate for US nursing homes during the period 2016–21 was only 40 percent. We examined whether unionization increases the probability that nursing homes will comply with that requirement. Using a difference-in-differences design and proprietary data on union status from the Service Employees International Union for all forty-eight continental US states from the period 2016–21, we found that two years after unionization, nursing homes were 31.1 percentage points more likely than nonunion nursing homes to report workplace injury and illness data to OSHA. Data on injuries occurring in specific workplaces play a central role in injury prevention. Further unionization could help improve workplace safety in nursing homes, a sector with one of the highest occupational injury and illness rates in the US.