r D TRADE unionist friend of ours, complaining about a i the naivete of health professionals and academics working in occupational safety and health, pointed out that the OSH Act was just like the minimum wage: in relatively good times, it provided a fairly miserable floor for the unorganized, but enabled unionized workers to fight for decent conditions. It was the power of organized and well-informed workers that could make employers ". . . furnish . . . a place of employment . . free from recognized hazards . . . ."-as the General Duty Clause requires. At bottom, academic policy analysts know this. OSHA has never had the number of inspectors required to police the 5 million and more workplaces in the United States; and budgetary constraints make it unlikely that even under an administration friendly to labor would staffing be adequate to accomplish the ends set forth in the OSH Act. In response, conservatives suggest deregulation, reliance on voluntary compliance, and assorted spurious approaches, such as an injury tax. The key underlying factor determining the efficacy of occupational safety and health regulatory systems, however, is the strength of the labor movement, both locally and nationally (i). In I 975 Wegman, Boden and Levenstein argued that worker surveillance of hazards was essential to improving health and safety conditions (z). And training, they stressed, was absolutely essential to such a surveillance effort. Three years later Boden and Wegman called for a massive effort to train "safety stewards," a proposal patterned after Swedish efforts to empower worker representatives to clean up the work environment (3). Academic health advocates friendly to trade unions, who became key policy makers in the Carter Administration, brought some understanding of the limits of government bureaucracy and the importance of worker organizations to their work with OSHA. The new leadership of OSHA