Electrocutions, disease and no pay: worker exploitation in Europe's datacentres | Hacker News Reader

Electrocutions, disease and no pay: worker exploitation in Europe's datacentres

theguardian.com

22 pointsnephihaha15 comments

> 34-year-old electrical tester

> He was winding down the last 15 minutes

> A protective suit was locked away in an equipment room. The round trip would have added another 15 minutes to the job, he says, and people were waiting, so he decided not to retrieve the suit.

> zap

so an employee whose entire job is testing electrical installations violated health and safety rules and electrocuted themselves and now we should blame someone? europe does not deserve compute

A 2014 United States Supreme Court decision held that:

  Time spent donning and doffing protective gear is time spent "changing clothes," so the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 allows unions and employers to agree that workers will not be paid for that time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandifer_v._U.S._Steel_Corp.

A. How many unions agree to this? (Yes, in principle, they can, but is this common practice?)

B. This is Europe, not the United States, therefore irrelevant to the original article.

That feeble capitalist excuse won't fly in Europe. Health and Safety legislation in most (all?) of Europe requires workers to take effective safety measures for their own and others safety; it's part of the job.

I've never heard of a US employer that made someone clock out to don protective gear.

Obvious question: Are workers reliably better off at non-datacenter job sites in Europe? My suspicion is "no" - but nobody much cares about the actual workers.

The answer is generally yes. Europe does have respectable health and safety in most workplaces thanks to decades of campaigning and trade unionism. Far from perfect, but better than many parts of the world. Besides which, in recent times, many dangerous jobs e.g. mining and heavy industry have either been shut down or exported elsewhere.

Does that make it okay to get electrocuted at a data center?

Not to justify what is happening at data centers, but just enter "worker electrocuted" in the web search (be it Google or others) and read the news. There are hundreds if not thousands articles about that.

But on the Hacker News the news about accidents related Google clicks best. Everyone harvest clicks on news related to Google company.

No, but it would suggest a couple things to people who actually care about the workers:

- DC's are just a crime scene du jour. As always, the real problem is governments failing to enforce rules about worker health & safety, payroll fraud, etc.

- The folks getting excited about worker exploitation at DC's are not fresh converts to any worker-protection cause, just potential allies du jour.

This is The Guardian fermenting anti-data center sentiment, rather than doing interesting investigative journalism about worker conditions in Europe, even something as basic as comparing worker experiences, risks, injuries across industries or countries, etc.

Those comparisons could for example contextualize and frame whether the conditions they report on are abnormally high, unusually low, or average.

I hate to be that pedant, but I think you mean "fomenting". Unless there are microorganisms involved, in which case I'd love to hear the details.

How many times has this happened? Reading the article it seems like a handful of times over the last ten years in the entire European continent. No matter what you do you'll never get the accident rate to zero, and that seems pretty low.

As a general rule, the "total package" of conditions vs compensation is always better when you're near the new hotness type of project or whatever money fire external capital is pouring into.

So I'm inclined to assume that datacenter builds are the same risk for more money than the same job somewhere else.

https://archive.is/lPFsa

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