The reality is that there are many jobs that require a sacrifice in terms of health and safety. Until we're living in a post-scarcity economy, they always will. We can do things like make those jobs as safe as practically possible. Or make sure workers are aware of the risks before they sign up.
But, it's unrealistic utopian thinking to believe that no one will ever be asked to sacrifice their health or safety for their job.
You're completely right.
>The reality is that there are many jobs that require a sacrifice in terms of health and safety. Until we're living in a post-scarcity economy, they always will. We can do things like make those jobs as safe as practically possible. Or make sure workers are aware of the risks before they sign up.
I disagree. The point I am making is that we must make that illegal. We should require the employers to solve that problem. All of these have known hazards that which can be solved. We simply decide that we let employers profit off it. That's wrong.
>But, it's unrealistic utopian thinking to believe that no one will ever be asked to sacrifice their health or safety for their job.
There are some exceptions that obviously do need to exist. Military or law enforcement for example will have harms in their life that are by definition.
I look at your list of examples of higher mortality employers and I agree they exist, I even understand what makes them dangerous. Truck drivers for example is simply the Diesel Exhaust. Electric semi trucks is a thing now, but HEPA filters have existed for how long?
There's a fix for every single one of those industries.
There is definitely not a fix for every industry - and some people are happy with taking that risk for more money than a lower risk job/profession. "Just make dangerous job conditions illegal" is a naïve view of the world. Even if you could pass such laws, you'd get a massive skills drain and/or black market work to get those jobs done.
I think there's a better way to deal with this. Rather than legislate that certain abuses of health aren't okay, let's instead make it so people aren't stuck working jobs if they don't think it's worth it. Right now, the main reason workplaces can abuse employees so much is that employees can't quit, or else they'd starve on the street.
If we had a livable universal basic income, that would allow anyone to, at any time, decide if their job's extra income + the meaning it gave them was worth the stress and other issues.
We already have good evidence that this wouldn't result in no one working since, well, quite a few of the people born wealthy enough to never need to work do work anyway.
Why not both?
I know where you're going and I'm a fence sitter.
>If we had a livable universal basic income, that would allow anyone to, at any time, decide if their job's extra income + the meaning it gave them was worth the stress and other issues.
Here in Canada we have tried basic income systems and even have a current system for some of our people. It's a disaster. It single handedly increases poverty and crime like no other policy.
Have you ever heard of a negative income tax rate? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM
>We already have good evidence that this wouldn't result in no one working since, well, quite a few of the people born wealthy enough to never need to work do work anyway.
Only when you exclude systems that arent by name which is common for socialist/communist/collectivist/postmodernist or whatever the new brand is that they go by today as the old name becomes tarnished.
There's tremendous evidence that welfare system in general have never been successful. When we have a problem that which the welfare system is proposed as the fix. The problem gets worse as the welfare system is implemented. Then the fix is that the welfare system needs more money and as they get more money the problem becomes worse.
In fact many of these systems are not designed to help the poor even though by name they are supposed to be.
A small note: Germany does have a law like this. (I cannot find anything about it in English though.)
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
The more I know about Germany's government the more I like about it.
I'd really expect every democratic country to have some form of law requiring employers take care of their employees -- they should expect to do something in return for leeching off ones production of value.
In addition, you have to show a causal relationsship, which again is a lot more difficult for mental health as there are usually several factors at play even though work might be the pre-dominant one.
This is one of the weaknesses of government. A fundamental law that governments should have is that your employer cannot harm your health. Even in mental cases like burnout, the employer is almost certainly trading the employee's health for money. An employee's health is not something an employer should be allowed to trade.
In more physical injury, someone lifting 200lbs hurting their back or some ancient machine that lacks any safety features leading to injury. The employer is trading their employee's health in place of profits in not having safety.
Even with workplace safety measures, who ultimately pays is the government and therefore tax payers for these injuries. These bad employers get to keep their $.