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Comment by another-one-off | Hacker News Reader

It wouldn't all be unions, there are other factors. Not least of which being the autonomous trucks will produce more tonnes more quickly, with less costs and better safety performance.

The OH&S benefits alone would have justified the project in the long term, and not parking the truck up justifies it in the short term - even without any existential threat from the unions.

As an aside, was there any threat of union activity? I haven't followed WA industrial relations in the last 5 years, but I though the operators have been too busy wallowing in cash to worry about pay.

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The big pay has helped a lot, but unions now have much greater powers to stop a site for various reasons. Including OH&S.

I agree that there is more than one reason why Rio is doing this. But from a business perspective they are more vulnerable to production interruptions than BHP -- who aren't carrying such a heavy debt burden.

Is it a problem that unions have the power to stop the work for safety reasons? On the contrary, I believe that this is a necessity if you want to preserve the value of human life under dangerous work.

I am currently reading about the history of the North Sea subsea workers during the great petroleum expansion from 1960-2000, and the safety culture which followed from American drilling companies was just atrocious. Divers would be forced into lethal working conditions in situations where it was completely out of proportion to the importance of the work. 16-hour shifts under water, aggressive decompression tables which frequently led to both acute diving sickness and long-term delibitating injury, in addition to frequent accidents. (An "accident" under water usually means death). One time they sent down a guy who had been picked up from a pub three hours prior, who started the dive by puking in front of the whole crew. He died.

So tl;dr, giving unions the power to temporarily stop the work for safety concerns is vital if you want to make sure that the workers mostly get home safely.

I'm not saying that it's good or bad. I'm saying that from the POV of production, a stoppage is a stoppage, regardless of what caused it.

If you improve safety by removing humans from dangerous situations, you reduce interruptions to operations. For a company at the scale of Rio, that's millions of dollars per day.

No question that it's a good idea to get people out of harms' way. But on principle, I think that the "ethics-neutral" view of "a stoppage is a stoppage" has caused a lot of injury and death over the years. You can say that this view isn't good or bad, but if it is applied to human workers the result will definitely be bad.

What causes injury and death is defective safety systems and poor safety culture. This is true of any dangerous enterprise, whether operated for profit or not.

You'll see defective safety systems and poor safety culture a lot more often in unregulated, for-profit businesses than in union- or government-regulated businesses. I don't think you'd need a scientific study to verify this claim. I mean, the whole point of regulation is usually to improve safety.

You might enjoy "Gangster Capitalism: The United States and the Global Rise of Organized Crime":

http://www.amazon.com/Gangster-Capitalism-United-Globalizati...

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