While that sucks, and the fine was very much warranted (and should have been more IMO) I don't see a huge difference between a 16 year old losing her legs and an 18 year old losing her legs. Both are unacceptable when caused by negligence by the company employing them.
Well, sure, but in that comparison, all you care about is the fact that someone lost their legs. The part you seem to be skipping out on has to do with how and why it happened.
Proper training would help. Proper worker safety investment would help. Hiring workers of appropriate age would help.
Remember the context of this thread: Someone looks out at the world around him, is distressed by what he sees, and prescribes a dysfunctional solution that coincides with self-gratification. Did you not read the
topic post↑, wherein the solution is that addicts magically "grow up and be responsible"? Have we forgotten the title, asking whether ineffective government is an outcome of how we define freedom? Inasmuch as, "Sometimes it's best to have a little less 'freedom' for the sake of society", we've now had over a year to consider definitions of freedom.
Like I said↑, four billion dollars would be a lot of eggs.
And oh, the freedom! Did you hear about the egg producers getting busted for price fixing? We've seen price-fixing settlements in eggs, beef, education, and pharma, and in addition to settling for its role in opioid distribution, CVS now faces class-action price-fixing complaints from both hospitals and other pharmacies. Additionally, the last year has heard increasing noise about wage theft, with Uber paying out nearly three hundred million dollars, and Lyft nearly forty million, to settle a wage-theft suit
in one state. That's three hundred twenty-eight million dollars that should have been in workers' hands. Consider five and a half million dollars, distributed to one hundred forty-eight workers, a little over thirty-seven thousand dollars each, representing three years of wage theft by
one assisted living employer in southern California. Estimates suggest fifty billion dollars improperly withheld from workers, nationwide. That's a lot of rent, Bill. And a lot of eggs, too.
It's one thing if the best someone can come up with is to go holler at the homeless, but wage theft, price fixing, unsafe labor, and child labor. Even if workers could get every penny back, it is impossible to undo the damage. And consider, even as people fret about inflation, the implication that a 2017 wage-theft study in the ten most populous states found that workers lost at least eight billion, but analysis subsequent years found that nationwide only about three and a quarter billion were recovered. Recovering stolen wages is difficult; in Texas, for instance, more than a third of wage-theft judgments are never paid.
So, sure, maybe it's all nearly the same, if you choose to look at it according the most minimal and superficial perspective you can manage, but compared to the larger question, it's one thing if someone wants to go holler at the homeless, but if we should consider freedom as impediment or disruption to effective governance, it is absolutely necessary to consider how our society inflicts poverty and suffering.
It's not
just negligence, and you know that. This stuff doesn't happen without certain acts of will. Think of it this way:
People still complain that "illegal immigrants" are "stealing" jobs by working for lower wages. Flip-side, it is domestic employers who hire that way. Looking forward: What are we going to say when the grown-ups start complaining that child labor is taking all the jobs? Especially the migrant
child labor?
This part comes back to a
basic↑ question↑ about how we define success in business. This, too, is part of "freedom".
If you start a business, and it is successful, except there remains a question of what that means. Manipulating numbers to raise real estate values, increasing rent at extraordinary rates; hiring children to long hours and dangerous jobs; wage theft; overprescribing addictive drugs: Are these the behaviors of successful businesses?
If it requires that much disrupted education, worker hazard, and wage theft, all while inflicting addiction, poverty, and homelessness, in order for our larger society to succeed, then what is success?
The difference between the amputee being sixteen or eighteen is an important point in a matter of accounting for the diverse freedoms business entities and their ownership expect along the way to finding success.
If, as our neighbor says, "Sometimes it's best to have a little less 'freedom' for the sake of society", it is not an unreasonable question to consider which freedoms.