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