Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
Maybe we have trouble doing that now because some people are still willing to make excuses/find rationales for those prioritize profits over safety. How many times can corporations use ignorance as an excuse? Shouldn't caution and responsibility and vetting come beforehand, not just after the damage is done?
What "real cautions" are you getting from story that you think Moore incompletely addressed?
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I don't actually disagree with your first paragraph in a general sense. Business owners and the lack of care they sometimes exert over their employees has a long history. It's so commonly accepted that business owners will place profits over safety that it is a favourite device in fiction. As a particular caution for a non-fiction narrative written in the 21st century - about something that happened a century earlier - I might suggest it is redundant.
But I think it is necessary to exercise some sense of proportion. We don't know what was done - by the time Moore's narrative starts the women are being employed. Dngrsone's post covers some aspects of what happens next, and we see that in the way lip-pointing was started. And don't forget this started as part of the effort for WWI. By the time the war was over they already had experience in the activity and, it seems, no cause for concern. By the time the first injury shows up (that we are told about) they have accumulated years of experience, effectively
proving to themselves that there was no harm.
Safety and security costs money. The more you want the more it costs. There is no point of perfection, there is just a curve of diminishing returns. We have much higher standards of safety and security - both in law and in personal expectation - now than people had in the past. (We can thank these women for being one of the many steps along the path to our current position.) At some point in this equation it really does - every time - become a matter of prioritizing other factors over safety, because there is always more you could have done. It is always a matter of judgement as to whether you have done enough. (Please note that it's not just business that does this -
we all do! How much health insurance is enough? Do you buy the safest car on the market or the one you can more easily afford? etc. etc. etc.)
So the real test for business is not whether they prioritised profits over safety, rather it is whether the business has made a reasonable attempt to keep its employees safe and healthy (that "and healthy" is another thing we can thank these women for). "Reasonable" is different now to what it was a century ago, thanks in part to the events described in this book.
The "real cautions"? One I have already given a few times is that it should be possible to get help without first having to prove fault. Another might be that there is a difference between fault and responsibility. The big, obvious one, is that it can take years for some health impacts to become apparent; this case was just the beginning, eventually we get to see smoking and impacts that may not be realised for multiple decades. Maybe: just because it's law doesn't make it right (the compensation legislation), and doesn't mean it can't be changed. I'm sure I can find more.