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Comment by dimino | Hacker News Reader

Just for the sake of debate, can someone offer an argument explaining why it should be a company's responsibility to take care of a worker who gets injured, assuming the worker is fully aware of the risk?

Edit: Unfortunately this comment has gotten me chat limited, so I won't be able to participate in this conversation any longer. If you'd like to explore this further, I'll gladly converse via email. Just to be clear, I'm not a monster and think labor laws are great and awesome. I thought it would be interesting to try and suss out what moral underpinnings belie how we feel, rather than just chalk it up to "boo corporations".

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Because the worker, having far less power than the company, is not in a position to give consent to work dangerously for the pay. We, as a society, instead of just banning the ability for the work to be done, instead create a regulation which balances the situation to one which we feel consent can reasonably be given for the work done, as long as the company offers certain concessions.

As a society, we've decided that it's the company's responsibility to provide a reasonably safe workplace. This is a lesson that was learned from the blood of thousands who died or were injured before safety standards were created and enforced. This is why in the US, we have OSHA. Standards for what comprises a "safe workplace" will, of course, vary depending on the workplace. An office processing paperwork has different standards than a metal stamping plant.

By making it the employer's reponsibility to follow OSHA standards under force of law, the employer has "skin in the game." They can be sued, or shut down if they don't comply, or face criminal penalties for, e.g., removing machine guarding.

If they have no responsibility, then they have no reason to make things safe: just need to pay enough that there's a steady stream of people to replace the ones who die/are injured. People in bad circumstances will take on risk regardless: the babies have to eat.

Simple: it's the company's responsibility to mitigate as much of that risk as is possible. That woman is selling her time to the company, it's the responsibility of the company to ensure she has the safest and most comfortable working conditions possible. When she is injured, even if she is "aware of the risk", the company is to blame.

Why is the company to blame? They mitigated risk enough to convince her to work there, no one was lied to or misled.

How do you know that no one was lied to or misled? The article was scant on details.

Putting a high cost on accidents means that companies will take safety very seriously.

It's unacceptable to "mitigate risk enough" because laborers are motivated by the fact that they have needs and dependents' needs that have to be met. That is their motivation for working anywhere.

They have no other recourse but to engage in the time <-> compensation transaction.

Because of this, people lose their agency to act a truly free agent in that transaction.

Companies have the privilege of total knowledge of their facilities and processes. They also know there is a teeming pool of people that will take shit jobs because food and shelter is a necessity.

There is an asymmetry in that relation that allows some pretty evil things to happen as history has shown.

We've decided that pulling the "it was truly informed consent" card is a dishonest way to describe that transaction, because desperate people will be injured and killed so an employer can save a buck.

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