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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.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday May 14 2020, @10:51AM (3 children)
insurance.
if you can afford to insure against worker death or injury, you won't care as much about worker safety.
Once you kill or maim a few, insurance companies will either jack up the premiums or refuse to insure you.
THEN you will care about worker safety. Just a numbers game - eventually, enough die that you have to do something (even if it is just fitting suicide prevention nets [cbsnews.com])
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday May 14 2020, @11:51AM (1 child)
I don't think you can buy insurance against wrongful death suits. Could be wrong, but it's not something I've ever seen advertised.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday May 14 2020, @04:49PM
You can definitely buy insurance against being sued, and that does include wrongful death suits. This can even prove useful if, for instance, somebody were to sue a diner for wrongful death because their triple patty melt was so good Grandpa Joe got fat and died of diabetic shock.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @02:13PM
In other words: The business world is rules by sociopaths.