Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. If you actually read the history, many slaveholder delegates management works to slaves
So not much has changed really?
Yep pretty much no difference between 1800s chattle slavery, and having to work in an office.
Dyson settles forced labour suit in landmark UK case
51–60 of 89 posts
Re: Dyson settles forced labour suit in landmark UK case
#52James Dyson advocated for Brexit on the basis of supporting British industry, and shortly afterwards migrated the company HQ to Singapore.
And to prove it is possible to have a profitable vacuum cleaner manufacturing business that makes its machines in the UK - long live Henry! https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jul/24/how-hen... And unlike Dyson they are almost indestructible!
I've been using one of these and it is very good.
Re: Dyson settles forced labour suit in landmark UK case
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it? Can we be a just society if we allow any company to close their eyes to bad things in their supply chain? Should we not just call this "failure of due diligence"? Otherwise none of our environmental and worker protection laws make any sense. Anyone can just do the unethical thing and move everything to a country that does not care about the rights we have set over here. Do our values not apply to any human? In…
Why not push it all the way to the consumer? Why shouldn't you be liable if you buy a wrench, but actually the worker who made it was mistreated? That would make people think twice before buying products of unknown provenance and supporting slavery.
I considered this too, but I think it's unreasonable in the end, since there seems to be a fundamental difference/motive between an individual consumer and an entity trying to generate profit. A consumer should be able to trust that the product they're buying was manufactured in an ethical manner.
Re: Dyson settles forced labour suit in landmark UK case
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not both? I've met my share of idiots measuring productivity wrong, and there needs to be a chain of idiots all the way up to let this escalate to a lawsuit (chains of idiots I've also seen). But I've also seen cruelty on occasion, and you need to have no empathy with your workers to have made this call in the first place.
What was that recent Microsoft quote, something about "we believe with Copilot one developer can produce 1m lines of code per month"?
I could produce way more than 1m lines of code in far less than a month, and wouldn't even need Copilot.
I'm actually a bit terrified of the amount of code being cranked out. We worked on some code generators yesterday (not vibe-coded with AI, but yes, AI assistance was used heavily throughout) that generated thousands and thousands of lines of code. So we looked really really productive yesterday...
Re: Dyson settles forced labour suit in landmark UK case
#55Why is Dyson being sued for actions taken by their suppliers? This is setting a bizarre precedent.
No, it's bizarre that this isn't normal. The law is an expression of our desire that our industry doesn't exploit forced labour. The fact that this mostly only counts when the forced labour takes place in our own country is a weird historical detail, long outdated by globalisation. Either you think that forced labour in Malaysia is OK in which case this seems bizarre, or you think it's not OK in which case we need a…
"Either you think that forced labour in Malaysia is OK in which case this seems bizarre"
It would be an interesting poll to see what the populace actually things about this statement...
Re: Dyson settles forced labour suit in landmark UK case
#56Why do employers deny their employees toilet breaks? Do they actually believe it makes the employees more productive, or are they just cruel people?
A combo of management control and a very tiny number of people who abuse any freedom given to them, then blame you for not telling them they couldn’t do it, and then blame you for singling them out.
As an anecdote - we had no sick leave policy at a previous job. It was just tell us when you’re sick and you won’t be in. One guy joins and starts calling in on Mondays, or Fridays of bank holiday weekends. He eventually got caught saying he had been on a trip on one of those weekends and was called up on it. He told everyone it was bulshit because he was being singled out and targeted unfairly. Then we got a sick leave policy that applied to everyone.
Unsurprisingly, this guy was also the reason we needed permission to WFH, had formal expense limits when travelling, and core working hours during the day. He ruined it for 30 other people because he took advantage of every flex we had.
Re: Dyson settles forced labour suit in landmark UK case
#57I understand that there's a precedent here, but isn't normally the precedent for the opposite in contract law? And if UK is precedent based, how come the previous precedents don't apply here? I agree that no toilet breaks is cruel, but the problem here is knowing about the supplier using it? There was not much about the legal bases in the article.
The U.K. Supreme Court case [1]:
> This appeal is not about the merits of the workers’ claims, but rather whether England or Malaysia is the appropriate forum (ie. the proper place) in which the claims can and/or should be determined. The first and second Appellants, Dyson Technology Limited and Dyson Limited, are English companies. The Respondents commenced proceedings against the English companies in England. However, the English companies sought a stay of proceedings on the grounds that England was not the appropriate forum to determine the claims. The third Appellant, Dyson Manufacturing Sdn Bhd, a Malaysian company, was joined to the proceedings on the basis that it is a necessary and proper party to the claims. The Respondents have also indicated their intent to join the Malaysian employer, ATA/J, to proceedings.
The BBC article didn’t say, but this is presumably a civil (not criminal) case and, should the plaintiffs have prevailed, would have resulted in a financial award. The settlement basically gets to the same outcome, just faster.
I’m not certain that allowing the plaintiffs to sue the parent company directly is really that big of a logical leap. The court should be an accessible venue for dispute settlement in general. Supposedly the plaintiffs would have had a chance to argue that the parent company had insufficient oversight of labor practices at their suppliers. We didn’t get a ruling on that.
[1] “Limbu and others (Respondents) v Dyson Technology Limited and others (Appellants)” https://supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-2025-0019
Re: Dyson settles forced labour suit in landmark UK case
#58Why do employers deny their employees toilet breaks? Do they actually believe it makes the employees more productive, or are they just cruel people?
A combo of management control and a very tiny number of people who abuse any freedom given to them, then blame you for not telling them they couldn’t do it, and then blame you for singling them out. As an anecdote - we had no sick leave policy at a previous job. It was just tell us when you’re sick and you won’t be in. One guy joins and starts calling in on Mondays, or Fridays of bank holiday weekends. He eventually…
He didn't ruin it for everybody. Management decided to punish the collective rather than deal with an employee who is acting in bad faith.
Re: Dyson settles forced labour suit in landmark UK case
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was that recent Microsoft quote, something about "we believe with Copilot one developer can produce 1m lines of code per month"?
I could produce way more than 1m lines of code in far less than a month, and wouldn't even need Copilot. I'm actually a bit terrified of the amount of code being cranked out. We worked on some code generators yesterday (not vibe-coded with AI, but yes, AI assistance was used heavily throughout) that generated thousands and thousands of lines of code. So we looked really really productive yesterday...
My sub-contracting/consulting career started 20 years ago writing code generators for SharePoint. Using the WSDL to generate DTOs and Service/Repository classes for them to power brochureware websites for a large luxury rentals firm. When we got a new customer that wanted a similar setup but they used WordPress, I then modified that generator to work off Custom Post Types. It could output to C# and to PHP.
The customer never used the tools, my bosses never used the tools, they were for me to work more efficiently.
Re: Dyson settles forced labour suit in landmark UK case
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
A combo of management control and a very tiny number of people who abuse any freedom given to them, then blame you for not telling them they couldn’t do it, and then blame you for singling them out. As an anecdote - we had no sick leave policy at a previous job. It was just tell us when you’re sick and you won’t be in. One guy joins and starts calling in on Mondays, or Fridays of bank holiday weekends. He eventually…
He didn't ruin it for everybody. Management decided to punish the collective rather than deal with an employee who is acting in bad faith.
In a lot of places, you can't fire people unless they've violated written policy.