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Comment by offtop5 | Hacker News Reader

>union-backed study

In other words an overtly bias source.

It seems to be based on injury rate data submitted to OSHA in three categories ("Lost Time", "Light Duty", "Other"). That's fairly simplistic, so I'm not seeing where the union had opportunities to present the data in an unfair way. The comparison to WalMart, for example, seems straightforward.

I do agree that some of the charts based on surveying workers might be biased, but that's the least interesting numbers in the report.

The BBC used the term "study" as if to imply that, but the SOC did not. It's a standard analysis or report, like you'd find in a trade or policy publication.

Uh, this is exactly why unions exist. Because you sure as hell can’t trust the company to give a shit about worker safety. It’s a cost center to them.

I wouldn't trust a study like this unless it comes out of a university, or a government agency like OSHA.

The unions just lost a major fight to try and get into Amazon's warehouses, they have every interest in disparaging Amazon.

"Our findings are based on data that Amazon and other employers provided to OSHA annually from 2017 to 2020 within the General Warehouse and Storage industry (NAICS: 493110) and the last mile delivery industries (NAICS 492110 & 492210). ... All employers are legally required to submit annual injury and illness reports to OSHA for any warehouse, delivery, grocery, or wholesale trade facility with 20 or more employees annually, so these records should include every significantly-sized facility in Amazon’s US logistics network."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27371759

Sure, the company has selfish incentives like that. But the union has selfish incentives, too. Unions are not disinterested, unbiased parties.

This pattern of comment includes accusing someone of “being bias” (instead of “biased”) and implies that noticing bias is somehow a debate winning move.

Bias is a thing, having bias means you are biased towards one position or away from another. You should be biased in many ways - e.g. preferring human survival to human extinction would be a reasonable bias. Preferring the word of your friend to the word of a stranger, another.

Okay, if I send you a study from buygold.net predicting the imminent collapse of the US dollar, wouldn't you be a little skeptical ?

I wouldn’t say “they are bias” as if that was a dismissal all by itself. Or an interesting comment by itself. Everyone is biasED.

People who believe in covid and medicine have a bias towards promoting vaccines, do you think that makes them wrong?

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