Screw this. OSHA and other safety violations should, by default, pierce the corporate veil. Particularly ones where those that help others in need get injured.
I don’t know why this is, only that it is. And it’s unclear how to change it. You could lobby for new laws, but those tend to be lobbied by the very companies that would stand to lose from those new laws.
The delusion of recompense for damages incurred is a placation of known risk. By that, I mean, if you think you can sue your employer for doing you dirty, then you feel safe to work there.
But it almost never works in the favor of the harmed unless it's a violation of a protected class and that's not really harmful.
What's harmful is dying or losing limbs or the ability to work and employers don't pay much for cases like that.
Get groped by your boss and you'll get millions tho.
There were thousands of workers, tens swapped out daily (which is why there are fewer deaths than you would expect). If you weren't a top performer because you were the lowest on the near-manual boring machine with mud/water and stone dumping on you from above, you were replaced. This was built during the Great Depression where there were crowds appearing at the gates everyday looking for the opportunity to work. My great-grandfather, grandfather and granduncle all worked it as Foreman, Carpenter, and Shift Supervisor, respectively. These were at different times in the project.
My extended family all know a different version where there certainly are bodies. I think they are more credible dead, than the official numbers for a highly controversial project back then. Peck wasn't an outlier, but it had the problem of accounting for the people lost. The Hoover project did not.
Negligence is separate from known and unavoidable risk.
> By that, I mean, if you think you can sue your employer for doing you dirty, then you feel safe to work there.
Maybe I just assume they're following relevant safety laws?
> But it almost never works in the favor of the harmed unless it's a violation of a protected class and that's not really harmful.
A settlement is separate from criminal charges. Settlements happen all the time. The state even provides it's own injury compensation plan.
> Get groped by your boss and you'll get millions tho.
The point of that is to prevent the company from blithely creating more victims in the same way it did the first. That's what _true_ wealth actually is.
Correct. In terms of cost-effectiveness in preventing crime, 30 days in jail for an executive is much more useful than 3 years for a shoplifter. Courts should routinely be handing out short sentences, rather than fines, to suits.
I favour this penalty especially for crimes related to worker unions.
[1] https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/vgh-baden-wuerttember...
Anyone who’s enough of a sociopath to intentionally park like a jerk knows the right things to say to appear repentant.
I wonder what Germans think of this waste of time / money / effort.
It’s weird to me how right wing Americans seem primed to catastrophise about Marxist big brothers when they hear about any vaguely effective or equitable example of public policy.
German here, yep, exactly that.
Who loses their license for a parking infringement and doesn’t go through the motions of getting it back.
Like anyone thinks: yeah, fair enough, I’m such an irredeemable reprobate I think I’ll just walk from now on.
Only people with organic brain damage are failing that.
I live in a regional Australian city.
And I've never heard anyone use freedom of movement to argue against prisons, so I think we can all agree that limiting someone's movement can be an appropriate response to certain violations of law.
My sense is it would be significantly worse than it is now.
They will only do the business so long as it is profitable. If the fines are high enough that they internalize the negative consequences of the business's behavior, you should get a good outcome. For example, there should be a very large fine if a waymo hits and kills someone. It should not be an infinitely large fine or result in jail time for waymo executives. To operate self-driving cars, they should have to put enough money in escrow to prove they can pay the fine.
You don't want an infinite punishment and you don't want no punishment. You want to align the incentives. Fines are probably the best way to do that for rational actors
The way this is done is by certification and testing. Mercedes Benz for example? They got their driving assistant certified under SAE Level 3 [1]. Do that and you'll get a pass because you followed the legal guidelines - but if you don't and use an uncertified system, it means jail time.
Autonomous cars aren't some random webshop or bananaware (ripens at the customer's), autonomous cars are two ton heavy ballistic weapons capable of mass murder (as a bunch of terror attacks show) and should be treated as such - test before going on the road, not afterwards after you used the general public as guinea pigs.
[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Autonomes-Fahren-Mercedes-wird-Lev...
Plus, as this story shows, if the fines are large enough they just phone up their friends to have the fines quashed.
Naming culpable individuals inside corporations and regularly holding them accountable is the only way to make this stop.
How can you say that after not only this instance but also all the other instances that showed how ineffective they are?
That also has the huge assumption that companies are rational actors. They're not. They're merely profit machines that'll do anything to achieve their goal.
It simply does not work.