Comment by praptak
4 hours ago
"Line worker dies because CEO decided security is bad for the bottom line. Company gets a wrist slap" is a "dog bites man" story.
When CEO dies for the same reason it's "the universe randomly hands out some justice" story, which is always a good story.
It may well be (and it certainly sounds it in this case), but I wouldn't always just assume profit > cost logic. When you're dealing with heavy machinery and machines that can kill with a half second of inattention or slip, then deaths will occasionally happen regardless of how careful you try to be.
It's all just a game of numbers. If something is 99.99% safe then that sounds great, but that means a failure rate of 1 per 10,000 which means you're going to see large numbers of those fails. This is why even in a society of perfect drivers you'd likely still see thousands of people killed in crashes each year. There's enough entropy, and a large enough sample, that deaths will always remain relatively high.
A relative of mine has managed building sites in the UK for decades. Nobody has ever died or had a life-changing injury. The site in the story has had multiple incidents just this year.
What's the difference?
The fines for safety failures leading to deaths in the UK are frequently six figures and sometimes seven. So management takes safety seriously and accident rates are very low.
It is about the money.
The fatality rate in the UK is 2.4 per 100k workers. [1] In the US it's exactly 4x at 9.6 per 100k workers. [2] That's a large difference, but obviously it's not like a something vs nothing type scenario.
And the difference is probably caused by worker quality than anything else. In the US a significant chunk of construction workers are in the country illegally, and tend to be relatively unskilled but willing to work hard, rarely/never complain, and work for very low wages. The article mentions that 475 workers were detained by ICE for this company in a single raid.
Obviously companies should be held liable for hiring people in the country illegally, but it comes down to plausible deniability. The applicant puts forth some fake documentation, including experience/qualifications alongside citizenship proof, and even if the employer knows it's most likely fake, they now have plausible deniability of the 'gosh I just had no idea' type.
Though I have to acknowledge I am ostensibly contradicting myself here as this is easy to see as a profit > cost type thing, but it's also not easy to overcome if one wants to take a politically correct approach to things. I can all but guarantee that the machinery operator in this case produced certifications and proof of competence, and was being managed by somebody comparably qualified, according to their papers. So it's a somewhat more nuanced situation than it might seem.
[1] - https://www.constructionnews.co.uk/health-and-safety/constru...
[2] - https://www.constructiondive.com/news/construction-fatalitie...
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