The article attempts to show how sociological approaches to public policy can be useful to understand the political specificity of the field of occupational health in France, although they remain rare on that question. They help us to understand how this field is structured through established compromises between interested parties including administrations, employers and employees' representatives, and how these compromises contribute to the relative public invisibility of occupational diseases. They also make it possible to see how these compromises are weakened by a series of contemporary evolutions: diversification of the employees' political and decision-making representation, increasing importance of the victims and of litigation arising from conflicts over these issues. Finally, they help us to describe the way this field resists these changes.