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Comment by elil17 | Hacker News Reader

This article misses two key points:

- The worker's family can still sue Amazon

- Most OSHA fines aren't for accidents, there for "failure to abate" - this means, if Amazon didn't implement safeguards to stop a similar accident from happening again, they could be fined $15,000 per day.

I do think OSHA fines are to low, but it makes sense to fine for failure to abate rather than accidents, especially when you think about smaller businesses - you don't want to take money away from a company before it has a chance to use that money to fix the issue.

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If you only fine for failure to abate, then there's no reason to be proactive about safety.

Um yeah there is?

Even the most ruthless cartoon capitalist knows that it’s bad to lose workers and then have to pay $ to train new ones. You at least have to stop the line for the day while the 1 guy who got hurt gets a replacement scheduled. It’s better if your factory operates smoothly. Not to mention hits to morale across the board.

Heh, if you believe your most ruthless cartoon capitalist would stop the line for a whole day just because a worker bee died, you haven't met actual ruthless capitalists.

They stop the line because they can’t just materialize a worker out of thin air, not because they feel sad.

What exactly do you imagine happens?

"Hey, you, take care of this line as well as yours. Keep them running, I have a phone call to make to my buddy at the police office, I'll be back any time."

If the factory is inefficient (bad capitalists) then sure, this can happen. I'm sure bad capitalists exist all over the place then get darwined out of the marketplace. No need to argue for or against the strawmen here.

If the capitalist is ruthless and the factory is efficient and every worker is necessary, then obviously this can't just happen.

I mean do you think the ruthless capitalist is just paying a whole extra worker, even though N-1 workers can do the same job?

I'm not sure it's me who's doing the strawman. In many situations (in the real world), machines are expensive, they don't like stopping, and workers are relatively cheap. You can either meticulously plan your factory so that every worker always has something productive to do and pay for expensive safety equipment that also slows down the machines, OR you can just pack your factory with enough workers and make them work overtime, making sure the machines are always working.

Guess what a true capitalist would do?

> You can either meticulously plan your factory so that every worker always has something productive to do and pay for expensive safety equipment that also slows down the machines, OR you can just pack your factory with enough workers and make them work overtime

A true capitalist probably wouldn't pick either side of this false dichotomy. There's a balance to things because they are forced to live in the real world. And there's no such thing in the world as making everything perfectly safe (not just in a factory setting, but everywhere in life).

Here's the comment I responded to: "If you only fine for failure to abate, then there's no reason to be proactive about safety."

I'm pointing out - 'actually, even someone interested only in money should still find an equilibrium with safety'

I suggest looking in the history of the industrial revolution and child workers.

Your average ruthless capitalist sees people as disposable assets that can be easily replaced.

Your comment is pretentious because it implies I haven’t studied the history of industry, which I have.

I was answering to the prompt, because the parent comment said “then there's no reason to be proactive about safety.”

I pointed out some logical reasons. And it’s not based on feelings like how capitalists “see” people.

Yup, all people are fungible. That's definitely the Amazon way.

Amazon in my area hires like this (and this is not paraphrasing, but actual quote):

> Want a job? Can pass a background check? No interview: apply today, start tomorrow.

I realize it's partly orthogonal to the concept of training, but also applicable. Cogs in the machine, indeed.

>then there's no reason to be proactive about safety.

As the parent poster said, Amazon is still subject to civil/criminal lawsuits. The $7000 fine is the penalty that OSHA can impose, but isn't all the penalties that Amazon can face.

Also, the standard that was being violated was "22.8(1)(1)(sec2)" which apparently is

"Employer did not provide a workplace free from a recognized, correctable and serious hazard where a specific standard did not exist."

Given how vague this is, it seems reasonable to let the employer fix the issue before enforcing a penalty.

Unless there are punitive damages from the lawsuit, then that's not a penalty for Amazon. They are just paying what they owe for killing a guy. They might conclude it's worth cutting corners and killing someone every now and then, "cost of doing business".

Fines/penalties exist to ensure that the company (which is required to maximize profit) doesn't ever view a human life that way.

That is one way of looking at fines. Another way is that fines can penalize without anyone being harmed first. Once someone has been harmed, the generic legal mechanism can take care of it.

This feel wrong. Amazon should get sued to the point where their business gets permently damaged. Similar to what happened to McDonalds.

Well I do agree fines should be higher (both for failure to abate and for accidents). But I just think that failure to abate should still be higher

IMO, corporate fines like this should be structured in terms of percentages of gross annual revenue + total Market Cap + total gross assets. And start at integer percentages above 0%.

Make them start at a number that the board will actually notice and want to actively avoid.

So, if you're a trillion-dollar company, then the fines start at 1% of a trillion dollars, and goes up from there.

The fine was issued by the state of Indiana. That's stated in the article and you can confirm by looking up further sources.

OSHA is federal and under the US Dept of Labor.

The state-level IOSHA is a part of the Indiana Dept of Labor.

I have no idea why the article keeps mentioning OSHA. It clearly is not to show the disparity between state and federal enforcement. Maybe just to confuse comments on HN . . .

I think that this is really confusing because IOSHA should only have authority over state and local government, not private workplaces.

Indiana's OSHA is one of the state plans that has authority over most private workplaces.

https://www.osha.gov/stateplans/

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