Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
The intention of that comment was to explore what Kate Moore seems happy to ignore: that there are real people involved on the company side and they had their reasons for acting like they did. At the start, at least, those motives were not necessarily immoral, nor even amoral.
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Everyone here seems to enthusiastically agree with the idea that this book is a good fit for the history repeating itself theme, and even I agree with that sentiment, but for a different reason: the book itself demonstrates why we keep repeating ourselves, because we refuse to try and see that the other side behaved as they did for a reason, or a variety of reasons.
Trying to find and understand those reasons could help us see how things got so out of hand. By the time we get into court it's too late to be analysing the situation. By then the beast has taken on a life of its own, with lawyers and journalists and reputations all embroiled in scoring points off one another, but with little respect or care for truth or for the suffering of the women.
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Of course the companies had reasons: self-interest and self-protection. Those are usually the reasons for all sorts of behavior, both good and bad. It's the reason the dial painters acted as they did, too.
But so what? The issue isn't reasons/motives, it's priorities. The companies did not prioritize worker well-being over profitability. They didn't care about the human cost; sure, at the outset it was probably a matter of simply not wanting to believe any problems existed, and as time went on they were so invested in their denials that they ignored and suppressed evidence and doubled-down.
I don't see the company management as mustache-twirling villains who cackled happily as the dial painters died. I see them more as bean counters toting up profits and willfully blind to anything that might cut into those profits.
The result is pretty much the same, though--the women suffered and died.