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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday May 14 2020, @09:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the follow-the-money dept.

Older, larger companies benefit from not investing in worker safety, study finds:

When it's cheaper to pay nominal fines for violating workplace regulations than to provide safe workplaces, that indicates current safety regulations are not enough to protect workers, researchers say.

Oregon State University Public Health and Human Sciences associate professor Anthony Veltri was one of several authors on the study, an international collaboration between Mark Pagell, Mary Parkinson, Michalis Louis and Brian Fynes of University College Dublin in Ireland; John Gray of the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio; and Frank Wiengarten of Universitat Ramon Llull in Spain.

"Organizations that do not provide a safe workplace gain an economic advantage over those that do," said Veltri, who studies occupational safety and health. "The goal of improving the longevity of a business conflicts with the goal of protecting the workforce."

The study, published last week in the journal Management Science, looked at both short- and long-term survival of more than 100,000 Oregon-based organizations over a 25-year period. In this study, "survival" was defined as ongoing operations, even in the face of an ownership change.

[...] Although there are businesses that provide safe workplaces and also improve their competitiveness, such businesses are not the norm, the study says. And while organizations seeking to maximize their survival are unlikely to harm workers on purpose, they are correct in calculating that the costs of preventing all harm to workers is higher than the cost of not doing so.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @10:08AM (15 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @10:08AM (#994176)

    A lot of people in the South didn't like slavery, but couldn't compete in the market without it. In modern times, there are plenty of people who want secure borders, but when push comes to shove and they need some yard work done, they're out front of the big box store, picking up day laborers and not asking about green cards. They're certainly not providing health care for them. People are not going to regulate themselves. That's what workers organize for. It's supposed to be what political parties did too, so the workers wouldn't have to pay dues just to secure their rights; but post-NAFTA the Democrats pretty much gave up on that. Thanks, Clintons.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday May 14 2020, @10:48AM (11 children)

    Wait, you actually think someone hiring day labor should be footing the day laborer's healthcare bills? Are you fucking insane?

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @12:47PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @12:47PM (#994212)

      > someone hiring day labor should be footing the day laborer's healthcare bills?

      It could work this way:
      Day Laborer gets injured on private property
      DL health care generates an emergency medical bill
      DL (via ambulance-chaser-lawyer) sues property owner
      Homeowner's insurance defends property owner--and if they lose then insurance pays

      But, if the DL is illegal, I have no idea if the lawyer will take the case. And I haven't read my homeowner's policy in detail to see if this sort of injury is covered. Note that I don't hire day labor...

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @01:25PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @01:25PM (#994230)

      All these lovely epicycle philosophical questions that Americans get to wrestle with when talking about healthcare.

      In the USA: get sick read insurance contract phone lawyer pray to Jeebus start a CrowdMe (whatever) drink bleach declare bankruptcy.

      In the UK: get sick go to hospital done.

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @03:43PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @03:43PM (#994276)

        All these lovely epicycle philosophical questions that Americans get to wrestle with when talking about healthcare.

        In the USA: get sick read insurance contract phone lawyer pray to Jeebus start a CrowdMe (whatever) drink bleach declare bankruptcy.

        In the UK: get sick go to hospital done die.

        FTFY

        • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @09:53PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @09:53PM (#994408)

          That' better than don't go to hospital because you can't afford it and die?

      • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Friday May 15 2020, @01:42AM (1 child)

        by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Friday May 15 2020, @01:42AM (#994468)

        In the UK anywhere else in the world: get sick go to hospital done.

        Fixed.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @01:25PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @01:25PM (#994611)

          That's how it works here too. You don't /actually/ need to pay those ER bills. They aren't allowed to garnish wages for medical.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 14 2020, @02:49PM (4 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday May 14 2020, @02:49PM (#994260)

      If the employer doesn't foot the bill, it basically falls on the taxpayers. Take your pick.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @02:58PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @02:58PM (#994262)

        You can tell something is a good idea by how much TMB hates it.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Friday May 15 2020, @01:44AM (2 children)

        by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Friday May 15 2020, @01:44AM (#994470)

        If the employer doesn't foot the bill, it basically falls on the taxpayers. Take your pick.

        We did* and it turns out expecting employers to pay for healthcare gets you shit healthcare that costs too much or no healthcare at all.

         

         

        * "We" being the rest of the world.

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 15 2020, @03:17AM (1 child)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday May 15 2020, @03:17AM (#994505)

          There are a lot of things that are better handled by the politically elected government than struggling, and not so struggling, businesses.

          It's a shame that U.S.ians implicitly trust business owners - as far as I can see most of them are cut from the same cloth as most politicians.

          --
          🌻🌻 [google.com]
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @05:03AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @05:03AM (#994533)

            An interesting thing I've noticed with European's who come to work in America (me being one).

            We all get a sharp learning curve in health insurance, retirement savings, taxes and finance. You could say that's a good thing but what a colossal waste of effort. Take out tax at the source, get centralized healthcare and some basic retirement deal like a normal country.

            That frees up a ton of stress. In the US it's such a riddle changing jobs and investing in stocks/bonds/REITs/whatever - plus you can lose your job any time for any reason in many states. Instantly up in smoke because someone in power say so. The whole thing is about yielding to authority not freedom. Unless you're a millionaire, you have no power - and that includes thousandaires with guns. Sure wave it around today getting a rage-on but tomorrow back in your hole.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday May 14 2020, @04:37PM (2 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday May 14 2020, @04:37PM (#994292)

    A lot of people in the South didn't like slavery, but couldn't compete in the market without it.

    The people who really really really didn't like slavery were, of course, the slaves, who were definitely not competing in anything resembling a free market. Towards the end of slavery, some masters sometimes hired out their slaves and sometimes allowed the slaves to keep some of the wages, but the master had the legal power to take everything belonging to the slave at any time too.

    The other people harmed by slavery were poorer white people who couldn't afford to buy a slave, because the vast majority of the jobs they could do were getting done by slaves, and it's basically impossible for a wage laborer to compete with a slave because how do you price yourself lower than $0 / hr? There's substantial evidence that racism was quite deliberately pushed by the plantation owners to keep poor white folks from getting to know the slaves and realizing that they had more in common with the slaves than with the plantation owners. This strategy was so successful that when the plantation owners decided to go to war to protect their right to own slaves (and no, it wasn't about anything else, they said so loudly and clear to anyone who would listen right up until they lost the war), many poor white people willingly helped them out.

    That's what workers organize for. It's supposed to be what political parties did too, so the workers wouldn't have to pay dues just to secure their rights;

    There has never been a major political party that backed labor rights of any kind without a powerful union movement and a political threat of a left-wing third party. The Democrats became the party of labor in the 1930's (before that, they were by and large the party of racism, an element of the Democratic Party that remained influential until the 1960's) due to the very real threat of them losing votes to Eugene Debs and his Socialist Party, and remained loyal to labor because unions were a major source of big bucks campaign funds until the 1980's. They weren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.

    And as for union dues, that's peanuts to the price US labor had to pay for their rights prior to the 1930's: Company management routinely hired people to beat up or even murdered union members and sympathetic politicians, or worked with government authorities to jail or even execute them, and at the very least fired and blacklisted any union member in an attempt to make joining a union punishable by having you and your family starve to death.

    And while US workers have largely but definitely not completely fought off the worst of those kinds of abuses, they're still standard practice in many countries the US trades heavily with (yes, including the company-backed murdering of union organizers), and those countries' governments are prevented from granting the same protections and rights US workers enjoy by international trade organizations like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO, and the constant threat of a CIA-backed coup. The news reports will describe governments who fail to toe the line as "operating contrary to US interests", even though it is definitely in the competitive interests of the American working class for foreign workers get the same kinds of minimum wages and overtime and organizing rights that they have.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Friday May 15 2020, @01:50AM (1 child)

      by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Friday May 15 2020, @01:50AM (#994472)

      Thank you.

      It's hard to argue that America are not the good guys on this site sometimes, because so many people here have no knowledge of US history, or just ignore the bits they don't like.

      You could argue that America exported it's slavery to Central America after the Civil War, and the slaves grew bananas in stead of cotton.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday May 15 2020, @03:11AM

        by Thexalon (636) on Friday May 15 2020, @03:11AM (#994503)

        You could argue that America exported it's slavery to Central America after the Civil War, and the slaves grew bananas in stead of cotton.

        That would be a tough argument, given that much of what USAians tend to call Latin America had slavery for most of their history post-European contact. The US absolutely acted to preserve slavery though, and were the reason there were effectively slaves growing sugar as late as the 1960's.

        --
        The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.