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by secretsatan 1389 days ago
Was going to say this, human life was cheaper. It's quite worrying to see now a trend trying to praise this attitude as fearless workers, where as the ones we have now are all wimps, views usually espoused by people who have never, and will never work a job that could be dangerous
4 comments

> by people who have never, and will never work a job that could be dangerous

It may be even worse. Quite often people that suffers from dangerous jobs will also support the situation as they fear the uncertainty of what change may mean. That a worker in a dangerous environment is willing to accept it to get food on the table does not mean that it is the right work environment.

But, of course, the main proposers of unsafe working environments is the people that gets the profit but does not share the risk.

Some people (mostly men) actually enjoy dangerous situations. Especially if there is a purpose for the danger. Look at all the people doing extreme sports. The military, police, and fire fighters are the main jobs left for people like that. There used to be a lot more.
Apropos of building suspension bridges, different people apprehend the danger of situations differently. I recognized this when I read that Alex Honnold doesn't like to be on ledges. When I climb, I love ledges and given about 12 inches of ledge I would host a party. But I never could climb without a belay the way Honnold does. I could never jam my fist into a crack in granite and just hang from it. ETA I don't have Honnold's talent.

Also I think when people are in a hard-core feed-my-family situation, they dig deep into their resolve, follow the safety rules, and avoid looking down.

Yeah classic corporate doublespeak. Workers that accept unsafe conditions are "brave", workers that don't unionize are "loyal", etc.
> views usually espoused by people who have never, and will never work a job that could be dangerous

Have you ever been on a construction site, shipyard, pit mine, etc.?

They're stuck in the mud doing "everybody stand back" shit that isn't technically against the rules with a port-a-power because it's the least worst option and your ilk has the gall to come along and lecture that a 5-gal bucket isn't for standing on. It should come as no surprise that there's push-back.

More generally, the people who are actually subject to workplace injury are the ones complaining and they are not complaining about safety. They are complaining about you and your misguided attempts to "help" them. They are complaining that people like you saddle them with asinine policy that lacks nuance thereby making their jobs more difficult and less fulfilling than they were previously albeit marginally safer. Such policy routinely optimizes for reducing some trivially measurable source of danger while completely ignoring the fundamental dangers of the job. Policies like "no more box cutters", "no more step stools, step ladders for everything", "PPE all the time, even when everything is off and people are eating lunch" routinely come down the pipe from corporate HR or OH&S but you ask these types for a second truck crane or whatever to save everyone's back or a plasma cutter so gas cylinders don't need to be carted around as much and they act like you just threw a puppy into a wood chipper. No wonder these policies and their purveyors are held in low regard by the people on the ground.

Unfortunately, the people getting screwed are not necessarily the best versed in the ins and outs of organizational policy, management theory and whatnot so their complaints are not very well articulated. This brings us right back to the titular complaint of the article...

> they are not complaining about safety. They are complaining about [not having extra equipment]

This is a strange dichotomy. Of course they are complaining about corner cutting on both safety and tools.

I'm sure many workers with dangerous jobs hate rules that only seem to make their work more difficult, especially if this seems to affect their income. Many of them presumably support Trump and others who want to dismantle these regulations, but this is unlikely to improve their situation. There's no reason why corporate HR would then suddenly decide to pay them more or prioritize a second truck crane.

Perhaps the workers themselves ought to be more involved in the processes for deciding new safety regulations, but the intuitions and common sense people have w.r.t. risk and safety can be quite inaccurate.

This has never not been true, capitalists or politicians have always been happy to send someone else to be injured or die to make themselves rich. The article in the OP is shockingly ignorant of how regulations come to be, which makes sense as the author is just another hopeful capitalist willing to throw us all in the fire if he can make a buck.
It's amazing how vapid their thinking can be when they do nothing but chase their goddamn money.