Comment by pjscott
2 years ago
One standard remedy for situations like this is to mandate that, if an employee gets silicosis for any reason, their employer must pay them some large sum of money. Regardless of whose fault it was. If cutting corners saves money, then corners will inevitably be cut - but if it’s made to be more expensive than being careful, suddenly it makes good business sense to get serious about workplace safety.
Construction companies pay out dividends, go bankrupt, and get re-founded by the owner's wife/cousin/son/etc every year or two here. Also they're more likely to be subcontractors than employees.
That's what mandatory liability insurance is for: it takes the occasional risk of a huge liability payout and turns it into a regular line-item on the monthly budget. One that can be bigger or smaller depending on what the insurer's safety inspectors think of their workplace safety practices.
This is unworkable. You can't penalize a company because their employees did not follow the safety guidelines they promised they would or are legally obliged to follow. Especially when a large number of workers are self employed. You can send them bankrupt with a penalty, but then have to support the disabled worker with social security and health care.
>This is unworkable. You can't penalize a company because their employees did not follow the safety guidelines they promised they would or are legally obliged to follow.
If companies can't be penalized for that, then they'll pull a walmart and "forbid" their workers from taking shortcuts and then set quotas that are impossible to complete without said shortcuts.
If workers don't follow safety guidelines once, there's a simple solution: warning/firing them. If workers don't follow safety guidelines constantly, then the company is complicit in it.
> This is unworkable. You can't penalize a company because their employees did not follow the safety guidelines they promised they would or are legally obliged to follow.
One of life's more specific amusements is describing a system that's been in widespread successful use since for over a century – and then having someone confidently say that it's unworkable. It's called "no-fault worker's compensation", and you can read more about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_compensation
Australia already has these laws on the books! They just, apparently, didn't set a high enough price on silicosis.
> Especially when a large number of workers are self employed. You can send them bankrupt with a penalty, but then have to support the disabled worker with social security and health care.
Rules vary by state and I haven't looked them all up, but New South Wales has a remedy for this: self-employed workers in fields like construction are also required to provide worker's comp for themselves – and to make sure the money is actually there when needed, they're required to carry insurance.