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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: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday May 14 2020, @12:31PM (4 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday May 14 2020, @12:31PM (#994205) Journal

    Actually, it costs less than $55 on average because you're not always caught.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 14 2020, @02:59PM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday May 14 2020, @02:59PM (#994263)

    Far less.

    Speeding fines are in the low hundreds, but I only seem to get fined for speeding once every 10 years for the last 30 years, despite driving a consistent 15 over the limit every day. I view it as road tax, I'd much rather drive 15 over (with most of the other traffic that is also driving 10-20 over), than be in that 2% who "can't afford the speeding ticket" and so drive strictly within the limits. It's not about getting there faster, it's just less stressful to move with traffic, and the average fine for doing so works out to something less than a penny per mile.

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    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday May 14 2020, @03:42PM (1 child)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 14 2020, @03:42PM (#994275) Journal

      FWIW, in California you can get fined for driving too much slower than the average speed of traffic. It's called "The General Speed Law", and basically means it's illegal to drive at an unsafe speed...including unsafe for others.

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      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 14 2020, @05:29PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday May 14 2020, @05:29PM (#994312)

        Florida is too full of rigid thinkers to ever have a law that clearly requires you to break another law...

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @01:44AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @01:44AM (#994471)

    Back to the GP's point a little bit, many corporate fines and related expenses can be written off on their taxes. How many of the fines and lawyer fees that normal people pay can be written off like that too?