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Why would the individuals pay? - when you do work for hire, you're presumed to be doing the companies bidding, and they hold the liability bag. As the article
by Aloha 9y ago
Why would the individuals pay? - when you do work for hire, you're presumed to be doing the companies bidding, and they hold the liability bag.
As the article states, it was not known how polluting some of these solvents were (sometimes) until decades after the disposal happened.
Also, this is largely how superfund stuff works, GE has paid out many hundreds of millions to clean up the millions of tons of PCB's they dumped into the hudson river in NY over a couple decades.
- dekhn 9y agoThis wasn't work for hire. Gordon Moore was a cofounder of Fairchild. As a founder who was doing primary research work, he should in fact be held directly accountable.
- Aloha 9y agoThat would fly in the face of a couple hundred years of law. That aside - in most cases no laws that existed at the time were violated, so its not as if he knowingly violated the law - TCE for example was not known to be harmful until the mid-70's, was not known to be environmentally persistent until even later, and was not declared a carcinogen until 2005. Imagine that you're a cofounder of a company that made billions - but you personally didnt benefit much from it - beyond a paycheck - is it fair for you to be personally responsible for that environmental damage, or should the government go after the company you worked for? Superfund is set up to follow the money, the money that Intel, and the successors of Fairchild has, wildly exceed the money the founders made.
- dekhn 9y agoI'm not sure what laws you're talking about, the Superfund law: applies liability to corporate owners who commit gross negligence, and in this case, Moore was a corporate owner. Corporate officers are specifically the people who are on the legal hook.