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> It might save a few jobs from getting outsourced, > but will leave behind a sick employee pool, with > the state bearing the cost of health care. As
by avar 9y ago
> It might save a few jobs from getting outsourced,
> but will leave behind a sick employee pool, with
> the state bearing the cost of health care.
As opposed to the current state of affairs where the West just outsources its dangerous pollution to poorer countries, with health care systems even less prepared to take care of those sick employees?
This line of argument seems to have more to do with nationalism than concern for overall human safety.
Yes, ideally nobody would have to suffer from toxic exposure in the workplace, but the situation we're in right now is that strict Western regulations just lead to more sick people on the other side of various nation-state fences.
Given that, it's not at all clear to me that declawing an institution like the EPA is a bad thing. This pollution is happening right now on Earth, is the US better prepared to deal with it than e.g. Vietnam? Probably. But I'd love to hear some arguments on this topic that aren't essentially nationalistic NIMBY-ism.
- xg15 9y agoNo, as opposed to adhering to decent workplace safety standards. Your reasoning implies that any resistance to outsourcing is mindless nationalism and therefore the choice is some kind of trolley problem between lowering standards here or elsewhere. That's not true. You could very well introduce some restrictions with better reasons than political power-play. In the EU, there are restrictions to ship waste off-country because it would pollute the environment. You coukd just as well restrict outsourcing jobs if the workplace environments are known to be unsafe.
- avar 9y agoI'm pointing out the casual fallacy and blatant disregard for foreigners in the GPs comments "leave behind a sick employee pool", as if though moving an obviously dangerous job from their own country (with stricter safety regulations) to another country will just magically fix the problem, as opposed to just making people in some other country sick instead. Assuming a world where every country had the same workplace safety regulations, it seems obvious that a richer more developed country would be better prepared to deal with workplace injuries and other ailments that result having less strict regulation. Which is why I'm critiquing the GPs comment as having more to do with "nationalism than concern for overall human safety". We should be concerned with the overall human cost of the products we use, not whether the people injured in their production happen to live in place A or place B. Some of the EU laws you mention are certainly a step in the right direction, but they're only skin deep. No penalties are paid for outsourcing toxicity to poorer countries during the normal import of consumer products, just for some exports of toxic material. The former category is much larger than the latter.