Businesses normally engage in single-minded pursuit of profits — which is what business leaders see as their role and responsibility — and it’s left to government regulators and unions to look out for the health, safety, and best interests of workers.
That’s why we need government regulators, and workers often (not always) are better off with union representations. (Unions, like anything else, can be corrupt and run by crooks or under the thumb of organized crime.)
Today’s teaching moment involves Illinois-based U.S. Minerals, which makes roofing products among other things.
“From 2013 to when it closed in June 2021 the company’s Anaconda plant converted mining waste known as black slag — a byproduct of a century of copper smelting in the town — into roofing materials called Black Diamond Abrasive Products,” a process that exposed its workers to arsenic poisoning, ABC News reported in a story published (here) on Friday, December 10, 2021.
There was nothing inadvertent or innocent about it. “Prosecutors said U.S. Minerals continued to poison its workers by exposing them to arsenic despite repeated warnings from regulators,” ABC News says. “In its guilty plea, the company acknowledged it ‘negligently placed another person in the imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury.'”
A federal judge fined the company nearly $400,000, ordered it to pay for health monitoring of former employees of the closed plant, and the workers also are free to sue the company.
The story also notes that “The company was earlier fined nearly $107,000 by OSHA for violations in 2016,” and “Montana’s health department ordered the plant to temporarily close in February 2019 after at least two workers had elevated arsenic levels in their urine in 2018.”
That is why impartial government oversight of business activities that can harm workers and surrounding communities is essential. Businesses are not self-regulating. Commerce, like streets and highways, needs traffic laws and traffic cops to enforce them. It’s silly to believe otherwise.