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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

Not to be too glib but I think here the reasoning is that letting market forces duke it out (even with fines and penalties) is considered to not be fast enough compared to the number of people whose health is being put at risk.

Like here there are a bunch of people who have lung cancer now. And there's probably a bunch more who will get it from doing all the work up until now.

And this has been in the news for a while I think. I imagine that despite all of this, there's still stuff coming up. The first case was reported back in 2015. 8 years is a pretty long time to think "hey, maybe we should do stuff so our workers won't get lung cancer". The fact that that is not incentive enough is probably a signal that there's not really much left to do, honestly.

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Criminal liability is not “let the market forces duke it out” in any meaningful sense.

Your comments puts cheaper kitchen tables above potential lifelong worker health issues.

No amount of 'criminal liability' will bring back loved ones.

Nothing will bring those people back. If that’s the only goal, then banning is also frivolous.

It’s also unclear whether there is a similar safe alternative, so banning one type of product might just shift the problem to a new toxic and dangerous material.

The only solution is to enforce safety regulations and/or come up with better ones. At one time, when I decided I’d sand a wall in my house, I ended up attaching a vacuum cleaner to my sander so that the dust wouldn’t go everywhere. Wearing the filter mask was also extremely uncomfortable, so it might be worth to design better breathing PPEs that are more human-friendly to drive acceptance up.

Criminal liability is exactly what prevents companies from shooting unruly employees. My comment doesn’t say shit about the value of kitchen tables.

It’s a judgement about the stupid location the law was applied when it could have been applied somewhere else, achieved the same short term effect, but then would have incentivized solutions to the problem.

That's exactly what it is. Criminal liability is a deterrent model with a very high bar that is usually used when other mechanisms are not scalable. The number of people determined to be criminally liable in a country like Australia for a labor offense is going to be very small and focused on the absolute worst offenders years after the offense.

Okay, then that’s just saying we “let the market forces work out not murdering your own employees”. It dilutes the statement to be meaningless.

Criminal liability is a massive government intervention which is the exact opposite of allowing market forces to decide.

It's not the opposite. The opposite would be banning the activity at multiple levels (like the war on drugs). Criminal liability is a very thin lever from the government - it obviously is hugely material to the person charged but charging would only occur in a small fraction of cases and the final judgement would likely be well below the maximum.

For instance, if I drive 10mph over the speed limit and hit somebody and kill them, I may be criminally liable. However the percentage of people in this set charged (and convicted) in such situations is not high.

in capitalism, criminal liability is still a cost.

It doesn’t help when the affected workers are easy and cheap to replace.

In non-capitalism as well. Except then the perpetrators are less likely to go to jail, as they're probably the ones in power.

Not in any meaningful sense. Criminal liability goes to officers of the company and they call the shots.

You’re likely thinking of civil infractions.

Yeah I agree that it’s way more powerful than civil infractions or the like. I meant more that the feedback loop is quite slow

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