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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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 15 2020, @03:21AM (3 children)
I got a B.S. in Electrical Engineering (with Honors - whatever that means) - they never even showed me 3 phase... I took the EIT exam and had to learn it for that.
My first job was upstairs from a print house with a huge press that ran on 480 3 phase. Some genius wired our central air compressor to 2 legs of that 480, it ran but not well. No great surprise that a 25000 BTU (properly wired) wall unit "made more cold" than the supposed 5 ton central unit wired as it was.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday May 15 2020, @03:56AM (2 children)
Hmmmm. Are you aware that, you can rewire most motors, and switch them from 240V to 480V, and vice versa? When I pull a new motor out of the box, the wires inside the "peckerhead" have all been stripped back 3/8" and left that way. For 480 3ph use, I take wires 4 and 7, wire nut them together, wires 5 and 8 together, wires 6 and 9 together. Wires 1, 2, and 3 each get wire nutted to L1, L2, and L3. Energize momentarily to check rotation - if the motor runs backward, you reverse any two of L1, L2, or L3.
It's been a long time since I wired for 240, I can't remember which wires are connected for 240 service, but the diagram is printed on a sheet packed with the motor.
I don't know what conversion would be like for an air conditioner - it may not be possible. Well - yes, it's possible. In many cases, we bring 480 3phase inside the electrical cabinet, wire up all the 480V components, and two of the hot legs also go to a transformer to make 240V and/or 120V and/or DC voltage.
So, you would have to get into the cabinet, and see what was done, before concluding that it was right or wrong.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 15 2020, @12:45PM (1 child)
So, there's a long backstory that amounts to: we didn't really want to know what was going on inside that compressor, but we did get permission from the landlord to install a 2 ton wall unit (total cost including professional labor $1200) that made more difference in the overall temp upstairs than the 5 ton rated unit was doing.
We did open the panel on the 5 ton unit enough to see 2 legs of the 3 phase service going in there, not enough to determine what they had attempted to do with them exactly. It was labeled as a standard split phase 240 unit, maybe they thought they were doing something "correct" but it certainly didn't work well. It was a long time ago, I say the 3 phase was 480V but actually I think we decided it was something more exotic in the high 300s...
Sad story about motors that get delivered in A/C units. I had one of those 2 ton units in my house, and it died about 4 years after I moved in (unit was about 12 years old, according to the label) so I bought a new replacement and had it installed in the same opening. About 13 months later (literally a few days after warranty expired) the new unit died, I called a repairman who extracted the factory motor and installed a new one. The factory motor was clearly labeled "check and fill lubrication every 6 months" while the outside of the A/C unit was labeled "no user serviceable parts, do not open" - and even if you knew they had put in the oiled motor there was no way to get in to service it. It was a standard size and the repairman put in a no lubrication required motor to replace it which lasted at least the next 6 years until central A/C was installed in the house - but... thanks a lot A/C factory for putting in a motor you know is going to burn out shortly after the warranty expired. If we all had cell-phone video cameras back then I would have posted the proof on the internet.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday May 15 2020, @04:15PM
I can empathize with the stupid labels. "No user serviceable parts" tells me that I've just GOT TO open the panel up, to inspect stuff. Been burnt a couple times with that kind of foolishness.