Hacker News Reader

Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

The story has a link to the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health’s 2019 Dirty Dozen list of the most dangerous employers in the United States. Facebook is on that list, which surprised me at first, but then I guess it made sense:

● Facebook contracts with outside companies for low-paid moderators who remove objectionable content from its global social network

● “Every day, every minute… heads being cut off” Moderators review hundreds of posts during a shift – including hate speech, pornography, and images of suicides, murders and beheadings

● A former employee says: “I don’t think it’s possible to do the job and not come out of it with some acute stress disorder or PTSD.”

I know nothing at all about this org:

http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dir...

View on HN

The Verge had a long read on life of Facebook moderators that is worth a read if you have the time. https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...

I read it a while ago and wish I hadn’t. It was quite disturbing. Read at your own risk.

I read it too. Made me think how ethical it is to continue using Facebook (and its other major product, Instagram).

That's an activist group, not a scientific group. Which is fine, but it means that "most dangerous" means "most politically interesting", not most likely to cause harm or death by some particular statistical measure.

That list is totally farcical.

There are all sorts of companies (most of them small because you can't do this kind of thing at scale without being sued) that put their employees in actually dangerous situations. There are nursing homes and hospitals that make the untrained janitor clean up bodily fluids (more than just your normal crap on the bathroom wall). There are construction operations where all sorts of safety corners are cut in the name of time. Industrial facilities where the maintenance and repair staff put themselves in danger in order to minimize downtime. Examples like that abound. And then there's all the wage theft (that I'm ignoring because we're talking physical danger here).

I'm not saying Amazon et al don't run their employees as hard as they can get away with but if you're gonna pick a dozen companies that are the worst the ones that are at least in the gray area of complying with the law shouldn't make the list.

Edit "totally" is probably too strong of a word by the general point I'm making stands.

Do any of the down-voters care to explain why they disagree? I'm genuinely curious as to why this is such an unacceptable opinion around here.

I agree that the actual list is not purely based on risk of serious injuries. It’s a list to cover the scope of OSHA issues which means it’s less arbitrary than you might think.

Anyway, it has some interesting info. “903 Latinx workers died on the job in 2017 representing a 15 percent increase since 2012, and 17 percent of all U.S. fatalities from workplace trauma.”

I think that supports the above point. The dozen companies on the list only account for a few of that 903.

As the linked document mentions, there are very few OSHA inspectors. You’re very unlikely to have any sort of real OSHA enforcement at a small business in the US.

At a large employer, they often at least recognize and attempt to follow safety regulations. At a small business it is not at all uncommon for management to not care or even be aware that regulations exist.

Looking back at my years at a warehouse run by a small business, I didn’t realize how dangerous the things were that I was doing at the time, but pretty much every task I had involved an OSHA violation. It was just the way things worked, and it wasn’t any different than any other nearby businesses.

Replying to myself just to add -- I'm not saying that large companies aren't significant offenders. They employ a lot of people and certainly have the means to implement compliance mechanisms, so they should do better.

I'm simply pointing out that smaller businesses get away with much more (many operating without any compliance mechanisms whatsoever), and are able to continue to do so with almost zero scrutiny.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com