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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 Friday May 15 2020, @05:03AM
An interesting thing I've noticed with European's who come to work in America (me being one).
We all get a sharp learning curve in health insurance, retirement savings, taxes and finance. You could say that's a good thing but what a colossal waste of effort. Take out tax at the source, get centralized healthcare and some basic retirement deal like a normal country.
That frees up a ton of stress. In the US it's such a riddle changing jobs and investing in stocks/bonds/REITs/whatever - plus you can lose your job any time for any reason in many states. Instantly up in smoke because someone in power say so. The whole thing is about yielding to authority not freedom. Unless you're a millionaire, you have no power - and that includes thousandaires with guns. Sure wave it around today getting a rage-on but tomorrow back in your hole.