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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: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday May 14 2020, @04:52PM (2 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 14 2020, @04:52PM (#994303) Journal

    Most auto mechanics can probably tell you about lowly 12V DC melting steel tools. All it takes is a large enough battery to keep the current flowing for more than a couple milliseconds.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Acabatag on Thursday May 14 2020, @08:26PM

    by Acabatag (2885) on Thursday May 14 2020, @08:26PM (#994373)

    At a medical device company I worked at I had a big barrel of partially depleted 9 volt batteries. You can plug them terminal to terminal and make a very long high voltage battery. With quite a bit of current behind the potential.

    It's amazing how many of us live through our adventures safely.

  • (Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday May 15 2020, @01:00AM

    by coolgopher (1157) on Friday May 15 2020, @01:00AM (#994455)

    Your average car battery puts out more amps than my welder.
    And I have friends who do chainmaille ring-welding using small 12V UPS batteries, quite successfully. In fact, rings going up in smoke was the bigger problem there too.

    Don't mess with the amps. You're not going to win.