What things kill people in this industry today? And why cannot these causes of workplace fatalities be reduced further?
I don’t know the first one, but I am pretty sure the answer to the second one is “because that would make things more expensive”. (Fundamentally, the same reason why all code isn’t unit-tested.) The punishments for workplace fatalities are set externally, the company does the cost-benefit analysis and acts accordingly.
So maybe the solution could be “increase the penalties for workplace injuries/fatalities by a few orders of magnitude, and see how the market reacts”, but maybe at some moment weird things would start happening. Like, if the penalty for workplace fatality is paid to survivors, some workers would choose to sacrifice their life for early retirement of their families. Or new types of crimes would appear, for example assassinations of your competitor’s workers so that it looks like a workplace fatality, and then because of astronomic penalties your competitor goes out of business. More likely, the employers would find some legal loophole, like forcing the workers to technically become self-employed subcontractors, in which case the worker would become legally responsible for his own death, not his de facto employer.
I don’t know the first one, but I am pretty sure the answer to the second one is “because that would make things more expensive”. (Fundamentally, the same reason why all code isn’t unit-tested.) The punishments for workplace fatalities are set externally, the company does the cost-benefit analysis and acts accordingly.
So maybe the solution could be “increase the penalties for workplace injuries/fatalities by a few orders of magnitude, and see how the market reacts”, but maybe at some moment weird things would start happening. Like, if the penalty for workplace fatality is paid to survivors, some workers would choose to sacrifice their life for early retirement of their families. Or new types of crimes would appear, for example assassinations of your competitor’s workers so that it looks like a workplace fatality, and then because of astronomic penalties your competitor goes out of business. More likely, the employers would find some legal loophole, like forcing the workers to technically become self-employed subcontractors, in which case the worker would become legally responsible for his own death, not his de facto employer.