“Nobody uses water,” one man in a Dodgers cap said in Spanish when Maria Cabrera approached, holding flyers about silicosis, an incurable and suffocating disease that has devastated dozens of workers across the state and killed men who have barely reached middle age.
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The disease dates back centuries, but researchers say the booming popularity of countertops made of engineered stone, which has much higher concentrations of silica than many kinds of natural stone, has driven a new epidemic of an accelerated form of the suffocating illness. As the dangerous dust builds up and scars the lungs, the disease can leave workers short of breath, weakened and ultimately suffering from lung failure.
“You can get a transplant,” Cabrera told the man in Spanish, “but it won’t last.”
In California, it has begun to debilitate young workers, largely Latino immigrants who cut and polish slabs of engineered stone. Instead of cropping up in people in their 60s or 70s after decades of exposure, it is now afflicting men in their 20s, 30s or 40s, said Dr. Jane Fazio, a pulmonary critical care physician who became alarmed by cases she saw at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center. Some California patients have died in their 30s.
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The answer here is simple- regulations with teeth.
Every saw uses water. Every worker wears a mask. Random inspections.
Inspector sees one person without a mask? $1000 fine. One machine with no water hooked up? $5000 fine. 10 people with no masks and 3 machines with no water hooked up? $25,000 fine. Make it clear that there is no fucking around here.
Job site like described in the article? Shut down until problems fixed.
I’d further add personally liability of all supervisors, managers and executives. You run such an operation and cannot prove without a doubt that you instructed for safety, provided the necessary tools and materials and did regulary inspections yourself? You pay for everyones treatment and damages.
Personal liability (piercing the corporate shield) is a really tough nut to crack. That’d also do some outsized harm- think kids college fund raided for settlement money.
That said, I’d be happy to make it a personal crime to, with knowledge of the law, instruct any worker to use a machine without safety equipment and water hookup, or to work without a mask. THAT should be a personal crime, like criminal charges. And you should have to, when hired for any such supervisory position, sign a one-piece thing that has that law laid out so you can’t claim you didn’t know the law.
In my country (Germany) as an architect or civil engineer you can be held liable, in some cases also as an employee, when deliberately or grossly negligently violating technical rules.
At the end of the day no college fund is more important than peoples lifes, but there exist liability insurance specific to certain jobs. It is similiar to doctors malpractice insurance. Expanding the concept to site supervisors seems reasonable to me.
And of course that must not except the company from liability. It should mainly take effect, when the companies liability cannot cover anymore.
Engineering and architecture are different. It’s our job to make sure the things we design bring no harm to people and we have specialized training allowing us to take that responsibility on.
Site supervisors are often tradespeople, and may not even have the authority to direct health and safety measures on their site if corporate sees otherwise. I agree, they have a responsibility to do so, but it must be started from the top with some coercion by strong regulation. Putting liability personally on supervisors just removes it from the company who likely made the decision to forego supplying water because of cost savings.
So what? That’d change real quick if site supervisors became personally liable.
Well, either that, or “corporate” would suddenly be unable to find anybody willing to do the job and go out of business. It’s a win either way!
It’s not an either-or. Put the supervisor in prison for a year; put the company execs in prison for 10. There’s plenty of criminal liability to go around!
That’s the key- deliberate or grossly negligent. If a supervisor, through deliberate choice or inexcusable gross negligence, instructs an employee to work in an unsafe manner, I have no problem making that a criminal offense that makes both the company and the supervisor liable.
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As a manager of blue collar workers that actually gives a shit about my teams this is the answer unfortunately. Many managers don’t care but will if they’re personally liable.
Set up a monitored tip line where supervisors can tell the govt that management isn’t giving them the proper PPE to protect their workers. That way if management isn’t giving them PPE, supervisors have a place to go turn to instead of being squeezed from both ends. Get an OSHA inspector out on a surprise trip and get upper management fined.
Supervisors need to care about their direct reports first and foremost, over any company demands. One of the best supervisors I’ve ever had gave me therapist recommendations when I mentioned having a tough time with mental health, and she told me she sometimes took personal days for her own mental health. Another supervisor, when I was going through an even more rough period of mental health, told me that his wife had bipolar and they put a lot of time and effort in, together, for her to feel alright.
I felt like I had those guys in my corner, and I knew that if push came to shove, they’d have my back. They may have ultimately been powerless to internal HR policies, but they reaffirmed to me that my health should be my top priority and I needed to put it first.
That’s what it means to have a workplace as a family. The leader truly cares about everyone on the team and has their back.
I think each violation should carry a heftier fine than the last, so each worker without a mask would be a 25% nominal increase.
1 without? $1000 2 without? $1000 + $1250 3 without? $1000 + $1250 + $1562.50 10 without? You’re looking at a $42,566.13 fine
You have to have escalations, otherwise violating the regulations becomes a business expense, not a punishment.
Well, in this case I’d say split the difference and make it each incident escalates where an incident #1 = “we caught you, we told you”, incident #2 = “we told you yesterday to fix your shit / don’t do it again, 2x fine” rinse repeat. Otherwise you run the risk of bankrupting a small business that had all 10 of their workers in violation, and maybe even not making a dent in a large business that only had 1 out of 1000 workers caught in violation
In addition to per-incident escalation, what I could get on board with are scaled fines based on contract / business size. The first incident is still “survivable” for small businesses but will actually have teeth for those larger ones. And then of course if they keep violating, say bye-bye economic viability.
I agree very much. I think on the low end fines should go down to be survivable for a small business, and we don’t need to fine a big company $100k because someone took their mask off.
But fines should increase steeply by number of offenses, and multiply if management is willfully refusing to provide a safe working environment (IE doesn’t want to pay to have a machine hooked up to water/drain, doesn’t want to pay to have filters cleaned, doesn’t want to pay for masks / goggles / other PPE, etc).
gonna need higher fines than that. Its not some rinky dinky small outfits that are handling fancy counter tops like that.
Yeah, it needs to be a percentage of revenue.