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How factories were made safe

rootsofprogress.org

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Re: How factories were made safe

#51

Post by woodruffw »

pram wrote: post #48
rtkwe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s kind of crazy how fast American politics went off the rails. Really seems like it really kicks off with Reagan but I’m not versed enough to be sure if he’s the cause or just one of the symptoms (most likely both really in the end) but it’s always wild to see just how many of the ‘big government run amok’ agencies came out of the Nixon admin.

Nixon was planning on redistributing money through a negative income tax as well. I’d say what you’re describing really started with the ideology behind the Goldwater candidacy.

It's easy to write "just-so" explanations about American political trends, but I agree that Goldwater is really the crux to understanding exactly the mess we're in today: you can draw a direct line of thought and political lineage (one politician fostering the next) from Goldwater to Reagan to the Contract with America[1] to our most recent ex-administration.

Toss in America's (inevitable) deindustrialization and the violent, systematic oppression of worker's movements without any real pushback from the DNC, and it's hard to see how things could have ended up any differently.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_with_America

Re: How factories were made safe

#52

Post by lostlogin »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #31
Jtsummers wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see the same misconception with environmental regulations, it makes for some interesting (though frustrating) discussions though.

You see the same misconceptions in the other direction as well. It's like some people think a work stoppage from cleaning up a dead worker or hazardous material spill don't result in lost productivity that workplaces would rather not incur.

But it’s been shown again and again that the cheaper option will be taken and if the fix is more expensive than the pause to clean, guess which happens.

Amazon seems to have (or had?) this issue with climate control in their warehouses. Was the fix done because of the need to protect workers and keep them working, or the PR disaster that they caused?

Re: How factories were made safe

#53

Post by rtkwe »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #31
Jtsummers wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see the same misconception with environmental regulations, it makes for some interesting (though frustrating) discussions though.

You see the same misconceptions in the other direction as well. It's like some people think a work stoppage from cleaning up a dead worker or hazardous material spill don't result in lost productivity that workplaces would rather not incur.

Well that assumes they actually stop work beyond the exact area to address the death/spill. Very few places run just one line after all you can keep running everywhere else. This also ignores the fact that we have contemporary and decades examples of factories continuing to operate as they continue to injure workers because even a death doesn't actually cause them to lose much without meaningful worker protections.

Re: How factories were made safe

#54

Post by lostlogin »

sanxiyn wrote: post #36
clipradiowallet wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't pay for these products though, which removes most of your options to seek monetary damages for . The same argument applies to nearly all [free] software - whether it's Chromium or curl.

I do pay for iPhone and Safari comes preinstalled on iPhone. Maybe either Apple should be liable for Safari or Safari should not be preinstalled on iPhone. You can't have it both ways.

Argh, it would allow another stupid round of “But the browser is built into the OS”.

Re: How factories were made safe

#55

Post by tpmx »

Thus, accidents were typically attributed to worker “carelessness.” Even if partly true, this was a dead end in terms of understanding the causes and how to fix them. It would not survive a modern root-cause or “five whys” analysis. In modern parlance, “systems thinking” was lacking.

This way of thinking still appears to be common in US road/street design.

Re: How factories were made safe

#56

Post by toss1 »

>>a simple and effective change to the law set in motion an entire apparatus of management and engineering decisions that resulted in the creation of a new safety culture. It’s a case study of a classic attitude from economics: just put a price on the harm—_internalize the externality_—and let the market do the rest.

There it is — internalize the externality — when someone is profiting via externalizing costs or harms, they are essentially stealing from others (either the commons or the specific people on whom the harm falls).

Ensuring that external costs are borne by those who create them is simply requiring that people creating business are actually ADDING value to society, and not simply extracting or stealing value by creating greater external harm than their products/services create.

Re: How factories were made safe

#57

Post by gruez »

sanxiyn wrote: post #42
gruez wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. They crash all the time. You're suggesting that we hold airplane makers responsible for any and all crashes.

I didn't? I opined web browser "manufacturers" should be liable, like airplane manufacturers. That seems certain to me. Whether automatic liability makes sense, as argued in OP about workplace safety, is less certain, but probably yes. Many zero days are triggered by just clicking a link. For such cases, it is hard to argue one is operating it wrong.

Computers can't be compared to airplanes because computers operate in an adversarial environment whereas airplanes don't. A computer crashing because of a specially crafted malicious request isn't really comparable to a plane dropping out of the sky. Consider another product that operate in an adversarial environment: locks. Should lock manufacturers be liable if their locks were pickable?

Re: How factories were made safe

#58

Post by throw0101a »

rtkwe wrote: post #40
adventured wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm endlessly amused that the Richard Nixon years gave us OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Act, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and NIOSH - National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health), the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act (proposed by the Nixon Administration, passed by Ford), the 1969 Nationa…

It’s kind of crazy how fast American politics went off the rails. Really seems like it really kicks off with Reagan but I’m not versed enough to be sure if he’s the cause or just one of the symptoms (most likely both really in the end) but it’s always wild to see just how many of the ‘big government run amok’ agencies came out of the Nixon admin.

> Really seems like it really kicks off with Reagan but I’m not versed enough to be sure if he’s the cause or just one of the symptoms

It was a concerted effort that started in the 1970s, and when Reagan got in things kicked off:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_Geniuses:_The_Unmaking_of...

Given that Democrats controlled Congress during the 1980s, they were complicit, but most of the ideas originally came from right-wing think tanks funded by oligarchs like the Koch brothers:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(book)

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/26/koch-brother...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Ko...

Re: How factories were made safe

#59

Post by noselasd »

wyager wrote: post #47
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #24

The audacity of that tangent at the end. "Natural and inevitable"? People fought and died for your 40 hour work week. You know May Day? The Labor Day for the rest of the world? Commemorates the Haymarket Massacre, which was fighting for the 8 hour work day.

It is an essentially inevitable result of technological development. If the 40 hour workweek people had protested 30 years earlier, nothing would have happened, and if they hadn’t protested at all it probably would have been achieved with less effort a few years down the line. You need occasional shocks to remove entrenched procedural traditions like work schedules, but the magnitude of the shock required decreases a…

There are plenty of countries where this is not achieved, and it's unlikely to change without some kind of pressure, either from the workers or from the government

Re: How factories were made safe

#60

Post by andjd »

dredmorbius wrote: post #32

Roots of Progress explores a fascinating and critically vital question, but does so under ideological blinders and using manifestly obvious rhetorical techniques (strawman arguments, blame-the-victim, historical revisionism) which hugely impair the entire project. Tremendous potential. Miserable accomplishment.

This particular article is actually pretty informative ... until the dialog at the end. And in it, he's approving of a _strict liability_ scheme. I doubt most other pro-business ideologues would approve of a law that 'simplifies' legal disputes by mandating that the business always lose the case.

(In fact, there's currently an effort to overturn New York's Scaffolding Law, and the arguments fall in line with that detailed in the article -- victims are being negligent or careless, so why should contractors pay?)

The article is not without flaws ... Workers comp was a compromise that created strict liability, but also limited the compensation workers could receive for on-the-job injuries, so it can be argued that it was actually a windfall for owners at the expense of workers.

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