Trading jobs for health: Ionizing radiation,occupational ethics,and the welfare argument

Blue-collar workers throughout the world generally face higher levels of pollution than the public and are unable to control many health risks that employers impose on them. Economists tend to justify these risky workplaces on the grounds of the compensating wage differential (CWD). The CWD, or hazard-pay premium, is the alleged increment in wages, all things being equal, that workers in hazardous environments receive. According to this theory, employees trade safety for money on the job market, even though they realize some of them will bear the health consequences of their employment in a risky occupational environment. To determine whether the CWD or hazard-pay premium succeeds in justifying alleged environmental injustices in the workplace, this essay (1) surveys the general theory behind the “compensating wage differential”; (2) presents and evaluates the “welfare argument” for the CWD; (3) offers several reasons for rejecting the CWD, as a proposed rationale for allowing apparent environmental injustice in the workplace; and (4) applies the welfare argument to an empirical case, that of US nuclear workers. The essay concludes that this argument fails to provide a justification for the apparent environmental injustice faced by the 600,000 US workers who have labored in government nuclear-weapons plants and laboratories. Shrader-Frechette is O’Neill Professor of Philosophy and Concurrent Professor of Biological Sciences. She teaches ethics, philosophy of science, quantitative risk assessment, and environmental science. The latest of her 280 articles and 14 books is her 2002 volume from Oxford University Press, Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy. Shrader-Frechette is grateful to the National Science Foundation, Ethics and Values Program, for research support for this article through grant SES-98-10611. All opinions are those of the author, not the NSF.