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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @11:33PM
I've worked with live circuits a few times. But, the only times I've been in real danger were when I touched things that weren't supposed to be live or I wasn't even expecting to come into contact with something that carries electricity.
Working with hot wires works out as long as you've done an adequate job of insulating yourself. And in many cases, it's not even getting shocked that's fatal, it's the fall after having been shocked. Years ago an electrician working on a neighboring building got hit with a significant voltage and was thrown off the ladder. It was the injuries from the fall that were fatal, not the shock.