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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: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 14 2020, @01:00PM (5 children)
Sounds like a structural problem to me - not that it's likely to get fixed, but...
If the company was truly on the hook for not only the immediate medical costs and disability benefits for their own workers, but also future lost income, pain, suffering, etc. you bet they'd be keeping their workers safe, because it's simply cheaper to do so - particularly for the young ones with millions in future earning potential.
The problem is that workers for companies have less legal protection than your average slip and fall victim does against your average retail outlet, or insured individual. Our injury protection landscape is highly skewed and frankly nonsensical, with awards for similar injuries ranging from millions in pain and suffering to f-you get your own insurance to pay. Of course big old companies have jockeyed themselves as close to the f-you position as they can possibly get.
Now, there's the other side of this coin. I have special needs kids, and one of them goes to a school with a large number of difficult children and young adults. They have a high ratio of adult helpers to kids in the room, and a sadly large percentage of those helpers are obviously trolling for an on-the-job injury and workman's comp settlement. Any time a kid gets out of hand and swings, they'll step in front of them, take the hit, then promptly report to the hospital for evaluation and treatment. Cameras everywhere from the bus to the classroom don't seem to slow it down much. I'm sure this goes on in every injury prone job out there, and there are some jobs where you just can't control all the variables.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @01:52PM (4 children)
Joe, that's how it works with auto accidents in China. If you injure someone, you are responsible for all their present and future bills for life.
Given that financial incentive... it is cheaper to kill the victim than try to help him with his injuries. Read the gruesome details:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/in-china-drivers-would-rather-kill-than-injure-2015-9%3famp [google.com]
Careful what you wish for.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 14 2020, @02:46PM (2 children)
When we visited Mexico in the 1980s this was how traffic accident resolution was explained to us also: a little bribe to the investigating officer and the seriously injured would simply die to simplify everyone else's future life.
Even in the U.S. it is also cheaper to kill the inconvenient members of society than it is to do anything to help them - we don't say it openly, but much of the political discourse ends in that conclusion if you just connect the dots of what's being said by the "conservatives."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @09:37PM (1 child)
By "conservatives" in double quotes, I assume that you mean politicians that sell out to lobbyists. That exists on both sides of the political spectrum, it is just that the left side treats symptoms instead of holding themselves accountable to solving the cause of the problem, so they can mask their sellout politicians more effectively. By focusing on the symptoms and not the causes, they can use the suffering caused by administering the wrong treatment as political currency against those who want to deal in real world complexities and consequences. Why do you think that they use "explainers" instead of memes? Explainers use "context" stuffed with a specifically crafted deceptive world view necessary to support the point of the explainer, whereas memes only require a person's existing world view and seconds of their attention in order to provide a novel insight. If you are not trying to deceive someone, then it is far simpler and more effective to communicate with a meme than an explainer.
Speaking of deception, it is easier to deceive someone who has not been forced to operate with limited resources in the real world. Conservatives tend to be middle class workers because they have enough money to make decisions with their money, but they do not have enough money to avoid the consequences of making bad decisions with it. It is easy to be left-wing if you have an abundant amount of money that fixes all of your mistakes, or are too poor to make choices with your money.
By creating a generation that has a prolonged childhood (Obamacare extended "child" dependents up to age 26), more left-wing liberal voters were created. But left-wing liberals are only liberal with other people's resources (including their parents), and are not interested in the kind of freedom that requires responsibility and reaching adulthood. Not by age, but by some level of secure independence. Make them responsible for earning their own income, and all of a sudden, they are less interested in subsidizing other people's poor choices. That is why it is only fruitful to argue with a left-wing liberal when they have something personal to loose within the topic of discussion. If they can only imagine living off of their parents, then you are just wasting time by arguing with them. Human consciousness prevents individuals from realizing that they are being a parasite to others. Admitting to yourself that you are a parasite causes depression and makes socialization difficult, which evolution selected against. A vote for a well spoken tyrant (such as Bernie Sanders or Fidel Castro) who promises nice things taken from other people is as close to an admission of personal failure as you will get from these people. We are witnessing an important variable in the decline of civilization. Too much success breeds laziness in future generations, which creates the decline.
There is no clearer example of killing the inconvenient members of society than the recent rules requiring that unprepared nursing homes take in people who are or might be infected with a highly infectious and lethal respiratory virus. Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine confirmed that she recently moved her 95-year-old mother out of a personal care home while less politically connected people were told that pulling loved ones out of nursing homes was against protocol. This is the most direct and repugnant example of senicide in the United States, and it is on the left-wing.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 15 2020, @03:14AM
Leaving nursing and long term care facilities is frequently discouraged by those who are paid per patient day. What you do is demand to be released AMA (Against Medical Advice) - sign a form and walk, if they try to stop you start to call the police, they will shut up and back down immediately.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday May 14 2020, @04:44PM
sudo mod me up