It was certainly "both". It preserved jobs. It increased safety. Whether or not you agree that the marginal safety improvement was worth the marginal "efficiency and economy" lost.
Reread my last sentence? It is entirely orthogonal to my point. I don't think a citation is needed because think it should be obvious that gatekeeping operations involving flammable liquids to people paid to do it (with some modicum of safety training) is at least marginally an increase in safety. Again, it doesn't matter how much you think it increased safety nor if you agree that it's maybe subtle/slight shift in safety was "warranted", it can still be for safety reasons that the regulations were adopted.
You claim it increased safety. You repeat this claim in your last sentence, qualifying it with "marginal." It seems central to your point, not orthogonal.
> I think it should be obvious that [Oregon mandatory gas attendants law] ... is at least marginally an increase in safety.
I don't agree that it's obvious and doesn't need substantiation. Note that I am not disagreeing with your claim, just asking for substantiation.
I included relevant information to why I felt it "obvious": incentives (wages), training. That's the entire extent of what I feel relevant to discuss with regards to my wider argument. It's not my job or intent to defend how much increased safety it applies, or to save you from googling whatever supporting information you are actually looking for. I'm only arguing that Oregon given information they had at the time believed it to be in part a safety measure. Again, the correctness of that belief (especially at the time) is "obvious", and the actual "magnitude" of safety gained is irrelevant to any claim I am making and starts to move the debate out of context.
There were a lot of gas station explosions in early internal combustion engine history. It's a massive testament to technology and design (both car and pump adaptations over the decades) that these aren't so regularly occurring as they once were. But all the compensating technologies and designs don't necessarily mean that the original lessons weren't valid or that gas itself, an incredibly flammable substance, is ever truly "safe".
How is that relevant? The benchmark for Oregon in 1951 was the safety past prior to 1951. Oregon wasn't building regulations based on future data they couldn't possibly have.
The benchmark for the experiment is the control group. The control group is comprised of states without this law, over the relevant time period (when the law was in effect).
The context is "regulations are written in blood", not a multi-decade scientific experiment. Oregon doesn't know or care about the "control group" in defining its own laws. How well the "control group" fared following the passing of the law is irrelevant to the spirit behind the law and why the law was passed (the "blood" of the past).
(You can easily Google to find out that of course there have been gas station explosions since 1951 in "the control group". Would some portion of them have been prevented by similar laws to Oregon's? Who knows; Oregon probably doesn't know, it was never Oregon's intent to run their regulations as a science experiment. It was Oregon's intent to deal with issues they saw in the past safety record of gas stations as they saw fit.)
Gasoline is a dangerous and volatile substance. There are numerous incidents of people being harmed by incorrect use - not just the operator but also bystanders - and millions of dollars in facility damage occurring due to insufficient training. There is a reason why Oregon requires Class C UST Operators and above have training regarding emergencies. We should require more training, not less.
Industrial substances need high standards. Within this calendar year we have been reminded of this repeatedly: train fires and derailment, the OceanGate submarine, the recent train bridge collapse carrying hazardous materials.
It's important that we treat this substance with respect. Licensed operators should be the only ones handling it routinely. But of course, there's no surprise that Big Oil would like to socialize the risks and privatize the profits, speaking nothing of the job losses this will cause.
Big Oil interests are in increasing customer demand, while socializing the costs of uncertified, untrained, and unlicensed UST operators posing as self-service customers. Dangerous substances require training.
