Dyson settles forced labour suit in landmark UK case | Hacker News Reader

Dyson settles forced labour suit in landmark UK case

bbc.com

93 pointscmsefton87 comments

James Dyson advocated for Brexit on the basis of supporting British industry, and shortly afterwards migrated the company HQ to Singapore.

And to prove it is possible to have a profitable vacuum cleaner manufacturing business that makes its machines in the UK - long live Henry!

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jul/24/how-hen...

And unlike Dyson they are almost indestructible!

Great article. Especially loved this

> “I love you,” Jess said above his cot one evening before lights out. “I love Henry,” came the reply.

We have a pre-schooler and am happy to confirm that our Henry is a favourite member of the family.

Just as important he's sufficiently strong to withstand our boy's curiosity :)

Our Henry is the moral enemy of both our dogs. They don't like vacuum cleaners anyway, but when it can look at them, it's even worse.

Few years back (before covid) I splashed out on a fancy Dyson. Worst vacuum cleaner ever. I'm sporting a Vax now, quite good, even runs VMS.

What's VMS?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS

The Vax runs this?!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX is also an arch, as well as a hoover ;)

Ha! Very good and unlike say Windows it doesn't suck.

Miele vacuums are better performers than Dyson, and cheaper too.

Never understood the hype with Dyson. I suspect that like many successful hardware businesses, their story is mainly of brand strength, not of actual product quality.

If you pick up a Dyson vacuum you'll notice that it just feels flimsy in the hand. I think they're aggressively cost-engineered- the material you save by designing molded parts to be minimally thick has got to be like tens of cents to a couple dollars over the whole machine...

The brand is built on Dyson being a super genius inventor. He might be ingenious but he's applied to devices where it's not really needed and with unpalatable trade-offs.

In the UK at least his actions (offshoring, Brexit and tax) have probably significantly devalued the brand with a key part of his core demographic.

Dyson is Juicero of vacuum cleaners. So much "tech" for something so simple. A $100 Home Depot shop vacuum works as good if not better.

I've been using one of these and it is very good.

I had a part-time job as cleaner when I was younger. We used Henry hoovers. They were used and sometimes abused 5 days a week... during the almost 3 years I was there, I think I only saw hoses and the floor head breaking.

So after going through a few hoovers at home from different brands, I bought a Henry for £100 3 years ago. The nose/hose detached after a few months. Not ideal, but I've fixed that in minutes with a bit of superglue. No other issues since then, no indications that it's about to fail.

I don't know if quality is still exactly the same as before, and they're certainly a bit heavier and noisier than some alternatives, but if you want something that lasts, get a Henry, not a Dyson.

I'm nearly certain he believed/believes in the Britannia Unchained folks type nonsense. Brexit, then ECHR exit, deregulate like crazy and exploit everyone and their mum. So long as GDP goes up.

Not sure how enforced self-sanctions make GDP go up.

That's where the exploitation comes in. You cut every cost so that the cost is lower to make up for it. Cut taxes, employee salaries, social welfare, pension, environmental protections, legal protections, net profits go up.

After all more valueadd, and increased production is more important than the actual human beings this valueadd was originally intended to benefit.

I don't think "Britannia Unchained" manages to achieve the level of nonsense.

Oh, it's even 'better' than that. To quote from an article in the Guardian:

It’s a short book but if you read it you’ll see that a decent editor could have got it down to one sentence. “When we seek to protect the vulnerable we limit the freedom of the rich and the privileged – and that is a disgrace.”

It’s a wretched read – a series of assertions and hunches freed from the chains of argument or evidence, with the intellectual rigour of a YouTube conspiracy rant. The prose occasionally soars to the level of clickbait, as in its most famous sentence: “The British are among the worst idlers in the world.” Most of its authors are now cabinet ministers in a government that no one would call exactly Stakhanovite.

To be fair they're ex cabinet ministers. The current shambles are Labour and that book was written by Tories. But you're correct that they weren't exactly Pick of the Bunch Tories, Liz Truss in particular has the unenviable distinction of having been Prime Minister for such a short period that a lettuce famously outlasted her.

He was just sore because the EU put limits on the energy consumption of vacuums.

Ironically they're lower powered than my Made-in-Germany Bosch.

Why do employers deny their employees toilet breaks? Do they actually believe it makes the employees more productive, or are they just cruel people?

Why not both? I've met my share of idiots measuring productivity wrong, and there needs to be a chain of idiots all the way up to let this escalate to a lawsuit (chains of idiots I've also seen). But I've also seen cruelty on occasion, and you need to have no empathy with your workers to have made this call in the first place.

What was that recent Microsoft quote, something about "we believe with Copilot one developer can produce 1m lines of code per month"?

I could produce way more than 1m lines of code in far less than a month, and wouldn't even need Copilot.

I'm actually a bit terrified of the amount of code being cranked out. We worked on some code generators yesterday (not vibe-coded with AI, but yes, AI assistance was used heavily throughout) that generated thousands and thousands of lines of code. So we looked really really productive yesterday...

My sub-contracting/consulting career started 20 years ago writing code generators for SharePoint. Using the WSDL to generate DTOs and Service/Repository classes for them to power brochureware websites for a large luxury rentals firm. When we got a new customer that wanted a similar setup but they used WordPress, I then modified that generator to work off Custom Post Types. It could output to C# and to PHP.

The customer never used the tools, my bosses never used the tools, they were for me to work more efficiently.

So can I, and so can any man, but will they be useful lines?

In the case of James Dyson it's almost certainly pure malice. Horrible man.

people who lack imagination. Its much easier to believe that people are out to get you as opposed to facing your own failed decisions.

Employers are not always very smart. It took humanity half a millennium to realise slavery is inefficient and ditch it. Go figure.

Slavery is unfortunately still a thing in too many parts of the world.

Including the US.

And 68% of American adults don't even know it [0]. Not to mention all the foreign slavery in the supply chain, or all the slavery we've directly enabled by 'toppling dictators' who wouldn't give us their shit.

0 - https://www.merkley.senate.gov/is-slavery-still-legal-in-the...

Is that why slavery was banned?

Slavery wasn't inefficient and was highly profitable for slaveholders.

Not contradicting the second part, but I want to emphasise that they are different things. Slavery (and capitalism) can be extremely inefficient and simultaneously wildly profitable.

Surely it's meaningless to compare the efficiency of slavery vs other systems, since your set of resources is completely different.

You could if you look at e.g. the crop yield (ceteris paribus). I don't know why you would, because what sane conclusion could you draw from it?

You could compare systems to identify which one produces the greatest profit from the least costs, which the main thing an entrepreneur cares about.

Except the slaveholders entire life revolved around managing slaves and worrying about slave revolts.

No. If you actually read the history, many slaveholder delegates management works to slaves

So not much has changed really?

Yep pretty much no difference between 1800s chattle slavery, and having to work in an office.

Not as profitable for robot owners today

Try 7 or 8 millennia. The Atlantic slave trade was just a rounding error in all the slaves that have ever been.

It's a demonstration of power. Which is exactly why it needs fighting against, because these people (i.e. Dyson) must not have power.

But why only demonstrate power over 12 people and not the alleged 1200+ that work there?

Tell me when Justice condemns a corrupt billionaire to piss himself.

Not actually Dyson, one of their parts suppliers.

The significance of this ruling is that a British company can be held liable for its suppliers' treatment of workers in anther country.

To add, what I wrote in parent is very brief and superficial. There is at least one comment here with more detail about when they can be liable, and why Dyson was liable in this case.

Coincidentally in Eastern Germany they (or so I heard) had a "keys to the toilet" trope, meaning that whoever managed to obtain any kind of position (being entrusted with controlling access to a vital facility) could and often would then go and take advantage of it by expecting bribes-in-kind from people.

There are countries where white collar office workers are banned from having drinks, including even a bottle of water at their desks.

You'd be amazed what is legal or at least normalized/tolerated when regulations are weak.

Like someone mentioned already, it's a demonstration of power. But it goes well beyond that: it's about domination, discipline, constant monitoring, the reduction of individual agency, humiliation (you need permission for a basic human need) etc. The labour process theory says that that management systems are not only about coordinating work but about securing control over workers, that the drive for efficiency is also a drive for managerial control, including monopolising judgement and pacing work from above [0]

In many cases it's an intentional dehumanisation of the workers - they're seen as assets or numbers, as a type of machines that should be worked to their maximum physical and mental capacity and that are not owed any dignity [x], as if work is nothing more than mechanics. Foucault (in his "Discipline and Punish") speak about how disciplinary power produces "docile bodies" by making bodies more useful and easier to control, breaking functions and movements into optimised segments. [1] This is consistent with how the capitalist workplace normally operates, where employers want to control workers' time and actions, not just the finished product. We could see the toilet restriction just as an extreme, contemporary expression of the same thing. [2] For example, dodgy Amazon does that by making bathroom use hard and uses strict worker monitoring mainly as control/discipline thing, a sort of integrated control architecture (crazy pace + surveillance + comparison + dystopian ranking and whatnot) [3][6]

For all his faults, Heidegger's point (especially in his writing on technology) is relevant here, as he claims that modern systems tend to treat everything as a resource to be ordered, measured, and used. He says that things and people get turned into "standing-reserve" (basically stock to be managed) [4]

Many employers believe that loo breaks should happen in a workers' own time [5], which is both ridiculous and an shirking of responsibility towards society from businesses (which has always been the case).

What is certain is that this is certainly not as a serious productivity argument, despite what predatory companies like Amazon claim [z], because this kind of treatment can have (and often does, like the article shared above shows as well) severe consequences for health, dignity, and productivity. [7]

The fact that regulatory bodies like OSHA in the US, and especially in the EU, recognise the abuse pattern shows it's not just anecdote or rhetoric (like the Economist and similar papers often suggest), or that it applies to countries that aren't as developed as we like to think we are in the US and the UK, but a real issue that's rather common.

Also relevant: https://www.un.org/en/observances/toilet-day

[0] https://academic.oup.com/cpe/article/43/1/61/7684997

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/

[2] https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/38/1/56/14546...?

[3] https://cued.uic.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/219/2023/10/Pa...

[4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/

[5] https://www.tuc.org.uk/research-analysis/reports/give-us-loo...

[6] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2023/09/they-treat-us-worse-than-an...

[7] https://sif.org.uk/why-workplace-toilet-access-matters/

[x] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/nov/19/thousands-uk-w...

It could be that they are complete psychopaths with no respect for human life, or it could be that a minority of employees abuse toilet breaks but labour protection laws make them unfireable.

A combo of management control and a very tiny number of people who abuse any freedom given to them, then blame you for not telling them they couldn’t do it, and then blame you for singling them out.

As an anecdote - we had no sick leave policy at a previous job. It was just tell us when you’re sick and you won’t be in. One guy joins and starts calling in on Mondays, or Fridays of bank holiday weekends. He eventually got caught saying he had been on a trip on one of those weekends and was called up on it. He told everyone it was bulshit because he was being singled out and targeted unfairly. Then we got a sick leave policy that applied to everyone.

Unsurprisingly, this guy was also the reason we needed permission to WFH, had formal expense limits when travelling, and core working hours during the day. He ruined it for 30 other people because he took advantage of every flex we had.

He didn't ruin it for everybody. Management decided to punish the collective rather than deal with an employee who is acting in bad faith.

In a lot of places, you can't fire people unless they've violated written policy.

He did ruin it for everyone.

Management called him up on the sick days. he responds by saying that there's no policy for sick days, and to show him in the handbook where it says he has a limited number of sick days, or that he needs to notify someone. They can't, because we don't have one. When he's told this isn't acceptable, he pushes back saying that he's being singled out.

You're in America, right? At–will employment? The manager could have simply terminated that employee, citing no reason?

Nope.

That sounds like the real problem was the lack of an employee handbook. They're not strictly required by law, but 30 employees is well above the level where you should really expect to have one in place.

The "just wing it and hope no-one takes the piss" approach is fine if you've only got a handful of employees, but is increasingly risky beyond that - it was probably only a matter of time before that organisation got into a difficult HR situation one way or another.

It's not even going to have been much of a time-saving, since all the legally-mandated bits (eg. equal opportunities, grievance procedures, anti-harassment, modern slavery, and consultation process) will still have been needed at that size, just without a central place to track and manage it all.

> That sounds like the real problem was the lack of an employee handbook.

That's my point - we didn't have one because we didn't need one. 30 people is still small enough that you can be on first name terms with every single person in the company and know what everyone is doing day-to-day. Anecdotally, I'd say one in every 30 people I've worked with in my career are like this - so that's probably the point you do need one.

Poor performers get put on PIPs, right? Did that person's poor performance "ruin it for everyone" and put the rest of the working plebs (the entire company or department or whatever) on PIPs? No, of course not. The poor performer gets singled out, which is just fine.

So instead of punishing everyone for some lying asshole's poor judgment, I propose management puts that lazy jerk on their own SDIP (sick day improvement plan).

EDIT: As an alternative, sure, update the handbook's sick policy while that liar is working for you. Since there's now precedent for handbook updating, should be an easy thing to revert it back to the normal, "no sick day policy" after they leave (by whatever means).

> The poor performer gets singled out, which is just fine.

he's not a poor performer, he's just an asshole. And you can't fire someone for being an asshole

> So instead of punishing everyone for some lying asshole's poor judgment, I propose management puts that lazy jerk on their own SDIP (sick day improvement plan).

You're missing the point. You can't single the person out for violating a policy that you didn't have written down. The only reason that policy is now written down is because that person violated the policy. Singling out someone for being (genuinely) ill is likely to end up with you on the wrong end of an employment tribunal who will ask you "what is your sickness policy"

In the USA, unless they have a contract, you can definitely fire someone for being an asshole.

If you have any sense whatsoever, you'll simply say "we've decided not to continue your employment" and offer them a month of paid COBRA and two weeks of pay in exchange for an agreement not to sue.

It's low trust and they want to avoid abuse of toilet breaks so they set rules on number of breaks and duration...

Some people can't give without taking. They see the world purely as zero sum. They can't win without someone else losing. So, yeah, if they feel like they're "giving" to someone by paying them minimum wage they'll try to take as much as they can in return, including that person's dignity.

I understand that there's a precedent here, but isn't normally the precedent for the opposite in contract law?

And if UK is precedent based, how come the previous precedents don't apply here?

I agree that no toilet breaks is cruel, but the problem here is knowing about the supplier using it?

There was not much about the legal bases in the article.

The U.K. Supreme Court case [1]:

> This appeal is not about the merits of the workers’ claims, but rather whether England or Malaysia is the appropriate forum (ie. the proper place) in which the claims can and/or should be determined. The first and second Appellants, Dyson Technology Limited and Dyson Limited, are English companies. The Respondents commenced proceedings against the English companies in England. However, the English companies sought a stay of proceedings on the grounds that England was not the appropriate forum to determine the claims. The third Appellant, Dyson Manufacturing Sdn Bhd, a Malaysian company, was joined to the proceedings on the basis that it is a necessary and proper party to the claims. The Respondents have also indicated their intent to join the Malaysian employer, ATA/J, to proceedings.

The BBC article didn’t say, but this is presumably a civil (not criminal) case and, should the plaintiffs have prevailed, would have resulted in a financial award. The settlement basically gets to the same outcome, just faster.

I’m not certain that allowing the plaintiffs to sue the parent company directly is really that big of a logical leap. The court should be an accessible venue for dispute settlement in general. Supposedly the plaintiffs would have had a chance to argue that the parent company had insufficient oversight of labor practices at their suppliers. We didn’t get a ruling on that.

[1] “Limbu and others (Respondents) v Dyson Technology Limited and others (Appellants)” https://supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-2025-0019

Can it really be a landmark case if they settled? Settlements don't make case law.

Why is Dyson being sued for actions taken by their suppliers? This is setting a bizarre precedent.

Is it? Can we be a just society if we allow any company to close their eyes to bad things in their supply chain? Should we not just call this "failure of due diligence"?

Otherwise none of our environmental and worker protection laws make any sense. Anyone can just do the unethical thing and move everything to a country that does not care about the rights we have set over here. Do our values not apply to any human? Including to those that happen to live outside our rough geographical area?

Why not push it all the way to the consumer? Why shouldn't you be liable if you buy a wrench, but actually the worker who made it was mistreated? That would make people think twice before buying products of unknown provenance and supporting slavery.

In the UK, if a homeowner (customer) pays a company to clear domestic rubbish, and the company illegally fly-tips it, it's the homeowner who gets chased. The law requires them to check that the company is legit.

I considered this too, but I think it's unreasonable in the end, since there seems to be a fundamental difference/motive between an individual consumer and an entity trying to generate profit. A consumer should be able to trust that the product they're buying was manufactured in an ethical manner.

The customer is sometimes liable for a purchases. If a person go and buy a known stolen item, pay money to known criminal activity/terrorists, then they may end up being punished for it.

The relevant question is what knowledge the buyer had, which the Court of Appeal did consider. Dyson UK companies and personnel was aware of the crime being done by the supplier.

The general legal question is not if a customer can be held liable for purchases. They can. It is how much due diligence is expected before someone should be held liable.

> Anyone can just do the unethical thing and move everything to a country that does not care about the rights we have set over here

Well, instead of using North Sea oil in the UK we buy it from Norway, who got it from the North Sea. We have hilariously high energy prices because of green energy policies, so we import more and more things from other countries that have workable energy policies.

So - yeah.

There were two reasons the Court of Appeal hearing held that the complaint could be heard in UK courts:

1. They relate to alleged harm caused by decisions and policies made centrally by Dyson UK companies and personnel

2. There was substantial risk that they would not be able to access justice in the Malaysian courts

Both seem reasonable. The UK personnel may have engaged in an activity they knew were illegal. Foreign citizen can generally sue in another country, if they must establish that the court has jurisdiction over the matter -- which they seem to have done.

If anything, it should make the anti-slavery mandates of manufacturers, particularly fashion, sit up straight.

The fashion industry does feel like such a big, endless duality of incredibly wealthy people doing little difficult work and having loads of awards and shows and fun events, and factories full of people in faraway countries barely subsisting.

No, it's bizarre that this isn't normal.

The law is an expression of our desire that our industry doesn't exploit forced labour. The fact that this mostly only counts when the forced labour takes place in our own country is a weird historical detail, long outdated by globalisation.

Either you think that forced labour in Malaysia is OK in which case this seems bizarre, or you think it's not OK in which case we need a way for the law to discourage forced labour in Malaysia. The only way it can do that is through the supply chain.

"Either you think that forced labour in Malaysia is OK in which case this seems bizarre"

It would be an interesting poll to see what the populace actually things about this statement...

I think revealed preferences are more useful than a poll would be.

"Do you think forced labour in Malaysia is OK" - nobody answers yes to this.

"Are you willing to make sacrifices, such as imposing liability on local business, in order to discourage forced labour in Malaysia?" - this is the question.

This pattern applies to a lot of stuff. All politicians claim to have a solution to the housing crisis. But most "solutions" are suspiciously absent of downsides. If nothing you propose involves sacrificing anything or creating any losers I conclude you don't actually care about the housing crisis.

You can use this on your managers too. "What are we gonna do about the tech debt?" If the answer doesn't involve delaying features then you should interpret it as "nothing".

If you can't globalise without maintaining standards then don't globalise. If you do, that's your liability.

Otherwise it's "just slavery with extra steps"

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