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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

This was caused by an alarming rise of silicosis cases in young “tradies” (Aussie slang for trade workers).

The government and various professional bodies tried to enforce the use of PPE when working with this material, but there has been a housing construction boom going on and a lot of corners were cut (hah!), resulting in young immigrant workers especially turning up in hospitals with lung cancer.

No matter how carefully you cut this stuff in a shop with a filtered HVAC, water sprays, and well-fitted respirators… there’s always that customer that just needs “one quick adjustment” on-site. One quick cut turns into one per day and a weird chest pain that just won’t go away.

So it’s been banned outright.

PS: Apparently engineered stone is mostly quartz (silica), whereas other bench top materials are typically other kinds of stone that don’t cause silicosis, or nowhere near at the same rate.

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I was wondering why this material is so bad, it seems to be because it is mostly silica crystals. Without the resin holding it in place such a material wouldn't be possible.

90–93%: 99.9% pure silica in grits and powder form constitutes; 7–10%: Matrix of unsaturated polyester resin with catalysts to help with ambient temperature curing, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_stone

Technically you can safely handle it, just like technically you can have lead or even asbestos in a lot of places. But some poorly paid worker ends up with ruined health in the end, so I can totally understand the ban.

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.

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.

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.

And the reason for the ban, which I think many American readers are missing. The ban was demanded by the trade unions. While the union members could probably be relied on to use PPE appropriately, they would also have to charge for it. They would lose jobs to non-union shops doing things faster and cheaper, who pass the costs onto the public when untrained workers end up in the public health system and on disability pensions.

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