28 ms·

How factories were made safe

133 points by jasoncrawford 5y ago

helen___keller 5y ago
I love reading about the industrial revolution and the social and economic change from the mid 19th to early 20th century, because you can draw so many parallels to the modern information revolution. The details of the story are different, but the outline is the same: We've got massive progress and insane improvements to efficiency. The world as it exists now couldn't have been dreamed up half a century ago. On the other hand, there's also serious regressions caused by the efficiency, with novel problems that our society is ill-equipped to solve. All the while, we have a wild west business environment and the founders, executives, and capitalists leading the way are getting unfathomably rich as they make a land grab for ownership over the infrastructure and technology that enables our modern efficiency.
- maxwell 5y ago
  Do you have specific examples of "massive" progress and improvements to efficiency since, say, the late '60s? I tend to agree with Neal Stephenson that "the threat now has become not too much innovation, but not enough". [1] 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0n_5qPmRM&t=333s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0n_5qPmRM&t=333s
  - helen___keller 5y ago
    I wasn't alive in the late 60s but most things I spend all day doing were literally not possible for consumers until the 90s-aughts
    - maxwell 5y ago
      Listening to music? Looking at television screens? Pushing typewriter keys? Playing videogames? Programming computers? Video calls? While more expensive when adjusted for inflation, all were commercially available in the '60s. You could make video calls in Grand Central in 1964, even if you could only call DC or Chicago and it cost $5 a minute. The future was already here, as Gibson observed. The internet seems like the last thing humanity invented. Every meaningful (commercially available) "invention" since then has been an internet application or appliance (or has by now been beaten in the marketplace by an internet application or appliance).
      - helen___keller 5y ago
        This past week: I smoked ribs for the first time in my life. Despite having 0 bbq experience and being a relatively new owner of a charcoal grill, I for free and on a whim tapped into the nearly infinite font of human knowledge available at my fingertips to learn about the 3-2-1 method of competition barbecue and made amazing hickory smoked ribs. Without the internet I wouldn't have even bothered, and acquiring that knowledge would have required a trip to a book store or a personal contact with a BBQ expert. I gave a tour of my newly renovated home to my mother who lives in another state and is in quarantine, having recently tested positive for covid. I navigated somewhere I've never been easily using a handheld GPS which can navigate any modality (ie, bus directions and train directions for us city folk) I drove 70 minutes to another state for a small collectors sale in my niche hobby and found something to add to my collection. I wouldn't have known about the sale, or hell even adopted this hobby in the first place, if I didn't have an internet group with dozens of strangers in my city all interested in the same topic. I made two sales of items in said niche hobby to other hobbyists in my city. Absolute strangers I've never met before. I listed the item in the weekly "deal or no deal" style thread, after striking a deal I sent my address, and when they said they were on the way I left the item on the doorstep for them. I watched a significant amount of TV without a single commercial break and on my schedule. Not pay per view either. I left a message for my downstairs neighbor that the contractors are scheduled to show up Monday to replace their basement windows. My neighbors were in another state and got the message anyways. I continue to work a job with my boss who lives in a other state (and has been for years). These are all examples of "massive progress and insane improvements to efficiency" In particular with respect to information, hence why this is called the information revolution.
        maxwell 5y ago
        Most of what you describe could've been accomplished with sufficiently advanced telegraphy, optical media, and mechanical transport. Untenably expensive, but doable with 19th century tech. The idea of "timeshifting" TV has been around since at least the '60s, Jeannie paused live TV one time so they wouldn't miss the game. But yeah, there's been innovation in "TV," though I suspect you're actually talking about videos on the internet (as opposed to DTV), and most of the recent moves seem to be massively empowering rights holders over viewers by shifting permanent ownership of physical media to fleeting licenses and subscriptions with terms that could change tomorrow. And, with the removal of the Paramount Decrees and decline of feature films + cinemas, we seem to be heading back to the bad old days of a studio system. Satellite-based navigation, first implemented with GPS between '73 and '93, is a good example of innovation, and real advancement, after the late '60s though.
  - sanxiyn 5y ago
    We went from thousands of transistors in chip in 1970 to billions of transistors in chip in 2020.
    - maxwell 5y ago
      Exactly. Transistors were invented in 1947, Engelbart presented on downscaling ICs to an audience including Moore in 1960, and he observed his law in 1965. It's mostly held, transistors have incrementally increased as predicted over 50 years ago. This is consistent with Stephenson's observation that there's been no meaningful innovation since the late '60s.
      - helen___keller 5y ago
        This is like arguing in 1870 that there had been no meaningful invention since the Newcomen engine in 1712, just as the transcontinental railroad connected the nation.
        maxwell 5y ago
        I'm specifically arguing that there has been little meaningful innovation between the late 1960s and 2020s. Outside internet protocols, applications, and appliances, what's been invented since the late 1960s? Between 1712 and 1870, interchangeable parts, bifocals, lightning rods, cotton gins, spinning jennys, carbonated water, thermometers, guillotines, parachutes, hot air balloons, sandwiches, mayonnaise, gas turbines, internal combustion engines, matches, electric batteries, microphones, typewriters, sewing machines, barbed wire, reflecting telescopes, stethoscopes, gyroscopes, mechanical reapers, corn planters, bicycles, telegraphs, postage stamps, photography, staplers, airships, gliders, light bulbs, traffic lights, Portland cement, the Bessemer process, and tin cans were invented. Watt's steam engine was an iteration, a few incremental improvements over Newcomen's design. And then most of the inventions that shape contemporary life came between 1870 and 1970.
        helen___keller 5y ago
        > Outside internet protocols, applications, and appliances, what's been invented since the late 1960s? Do digital innovations not count as innovations? By that definition of course the digital revolution has not produced any meaningful innovation Naturally, the industrial revolution has innovations that were related to industry while the information revolution has had innovations that are related to information.
- madacol 5y ago
  Generally, the benefits of progress more than compensates the regressions (if any) Very few people today, after knowing how people lived in the past, would make that tradeoff and go back P.S: "rich = bad" is an awful proxy for the real underlying problems
  - helen___keller 5y ago
    > Generally, the benefits of progress more than compensates the regressions That's certainly how this outline played out for the industrial revolution. The ending isn't written yet for the information revolution, but I do hope for the same.
kiba 5y ago
So, one lesson we might apply to is infosecurity would be automatic liability for information they collected and leaked. That would cause companies to fight for their user privacy and implement stronger security measure while also collecting less information. Well, maybe. We won't know if it work well until it's actually implemented.
- flerchin 5y ago
  Info leaks have negligible provable harms. It's a real moral hazard. It's not that there aren't harms, it's that it's nearly impossible to link any harms back to any specific leak.
  - goodcanadian 5y ago
    Which is why automatic defined liability for the leak might be the solution to the problem.
    - lmkg 5y ago
      Well, CCPA started doing this in California. In the event of a data breach, the company can be sued for actual damages, or statutory damages of $100-750 per affected consumer. As a point of comparison: If CCPA had been in effect during the Equifax incident, the statutory damages only for California residents would have been $1.5 billion minimum. As far as I can tell for Wikipedia, the settlement they agreed to with 48 states combines to about 1/3 of that amount.
      - adolph 5y ago
        If a multistage class action lawsuit is settled for billions and people harmed receive only free credit monitoring gift cards, is our sense of justice served?
        bluGill 5y ago
        I don't care so much about justice as nobody does it again. If the lawyers make a ton once and there isn't a next time I'm happy. Well better would be it doesn't happen again
pessimizer 5y ago
This is a summary of how the factories were made safe masquerading as a summary of why the factories were made safe. It comes to the Whiggish conclusion that factories were made safe because time moves forward. It mentions that the real reason was Workers' Comp., which made injured workers a cost for employers, and buries in a parenthetical that Workers' Comp was created by socialist union protests, and taken up by German politicians as a way to reduce the socialists' popular support. It concludes with some weird-ass hypothetical conversations between the author and a made-up socialist that ignores that fact. In between, it implies that socialists and anarchists weren't responsible for the 40 hour workweek, either, without offering any evidence (who would need evidence that time moves forward?) It's really an apologia for capitalism masquerading as a history of factory safety. Apparently it's because of attitudes and mindsets and lack of systems thinking that everybody had, including the workers. If the workers were universally fine with the situation, it's really strange that they protested in the streets until the general populace backed them to the degree that government had to adopt the policy for fear of being voted out. edit: It's really telling that it starts with an anecdote blaming a child for his own death. You see, the child sat during his shift because one of the managers would let him. With proper systems-thinking mindset, he would have of course been forced to stand for 80 hours a week.
- Jochim 5y ago
  See also the trend for offshoring production to countries that lack any safety standards or worker protections. The only real progress has been that some companies try to cover up that they're employing child labour by doing it through third parties rather than doing it openly.
- pnutjam 5y ago
  Thanks for posting this. I noticed that, install a guard was one of the last "if only" possibilities.
- ghostly_s 5y ago
  Really pathetic but unsurprising that people here are downvoting this comment. It's not often that you see an author constructing a literal straw-man these days; the piece flatly ignores the importance of the massively powerful labor movements of this period--so powerful that states were regularly resorting to armed struggle with them--instead pretending that "social reformers" existed in a vacuum.
sanxiyn 5y ago
We really do need liability for software.
- bserge 5y ago
  Which software? Drone target acquisition or TikTok?
  - Cilvic 5y ago
    Both. All?
    - bserge 5y ago
      Granted, Hacker News is banned for causing depression in too many people :D Mozilla went bankrupt because too many ~~idiots~~ outstanding citizens tripped and fell while using Firefox. YouTube was banned for causing deaths with their irresponsible use of information. Who knew fixing a car, building a high powered laser or eating a Tide pod is dangerous? Not the users' fault.
      - qualudeheart 5y ago
        Hacker News causes depression in me. I learnt to code believing it would let me live a meaningful and productive life. I was wrong. I see all these wonderful innovations happening and I miss out on their benefits.
  - sanxiyn 5y ago
    Web browsers, to start. Why are Apple and Google not liable for zero days of Safari and Chrome? How is it sane? Grace period may be necessary, but it needs to happen.
    - clipradiowallet 5y ago
      You don't pay for these products though, which removes most of your options to seek monetary damages for <anything>. The same argument applies to nearly all [free] software - whether it's Chromium or curl.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
It's tempting to use macro trends, like the advent of workplace safety, to confirm one's existing beliefs. Economy-wide changes like this are pretty much without exception driven by a bunch of different factors working together and you can pretty much always find some to cherry pick to back whatever your opinion is that minute. Pretty much all the current literature about workplace safety seems to follow one ideological bent. I commend the author for at least hitting the topic from a wide array of angles even if he missed a couple.
- OneEyedRobot 5y ago
  I absolutely agree. 3..2..1 until someone blames or credits some President or the other or a famous worker strike. Models are particularly comforting when they are so simple as to be useless. Now, back to some work on the lathe while wearing my necktie.
OkayPhysicist 5y ago
The audacity of that tangent at the end. "Natural and inevitable"? People fought and died for your 40 hour work week. You know May Day? The Labor Day for the rest of the world? Commemorates the Haymarket Massacre, which was fighting for the 8 hour work day.
- rtkwe 5y ago
  Yeah there’s a lot of people who don’t know the history of labor at all and have been convinced that companies without outside regulation would totally treat their employees well and not abuse, over work, injure, or flatly refuse to pay owed wages. It’s a real success story for the pro-business groups in the US and around the world.
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    You see the same misconception with environmental regulations, it makes for some interesting (though frustrating) discussions though.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      You see the same misconceptions in the other direction as well. It's like some people think a work stoppage from cleaning up a dead worker or hazardous material spill don't result in lost productivity that workplaces would rather not incur.
      - content_sesh 5y ago
        The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire happened on March 25, 1911. The owner kept the factory doors locked and as a result 146 people either died in the fire or jumped to their deaths. The owners were acquitted of manslaughter, but did have to pay $75 per person they killed. The owners made $60,000 profit due to the insurance payout. Two years later in 1913, the one of the owners was arrested for locking his factory doors, again, and fined $20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire#Consequences_and_legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
dataflow 5y ago
Just wanted to say thanks for posting this, I'm finding this incredibly fascinating. I can clearly see there's been so much ingenuity (and suffering) that's finally gotten us to where we are now.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Roots of Progress explores a fascinating and critically vital question, but does so under ideological blinders and using manifestly obvious rhetorical techniques (strawman arguments, blame-the-victim, historical revisionism) which hugely impair the entire project. Tremendous potential. Miserable accomplishment.
- andjd 5y ago
  This particular article is actually pretty informative ... until the dialog at the end. And in it, he's approving of a _strict liability_ scheme. I doubt most other pro-business ideologues would approve of a law that 'simplifies' legal disputes by mandating that the business always lose the case. (In fact, there's currently an effort to overturn New York's Scaffolding Law, and the arguments fall in line with that detailed in the article -- victims are being negligent or careless, so why should contractors pay?) The article is not without flaws ... Workers comp was a compromise that created strict liability, but also limited the compensation workers could receive for on-the-job injuries, so it can be argued that it was actually a windfall for owners at the expense of workers.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    It is an exceedingly slanted narrative omitting much and painting a pointedly inaccurate history.
tpmx 5y ago
Thus, accidents were typically attributed to worker “carelessness.” Even if partly true, this was a dead end in terms of understanding the causes and how to fix them. It would not survive a modern root-cause or “five whys” analysis. In modern parlance, “systems thinking” was lacking. This way of thinking still appears to be common in US road/street design.
toss1 5y ago
>>a simple and effective change to the law set in motion an entire apparatus of management and engineering decisions that resulted in the creation of a new safety culture. It’s a case study of a classic attitude from economics: just put a price on the harm—_internalize the externality_—and let the market do the rest. There it is — internalize the externality — when someone is profiting via externalizing costs or harms, they are essentially stealing from others (either the commons or the specific people on whom the harm falls). Ensuring that external costs are borne by those who create them is simply requiring that people creating business are actually ADDING value to society, and not simply extracting or stealing value by creating greater external harm than their products/services create.
gumby 5y ago
> Thus, accidents were typically attributed to worker “carelessness.” This attitude survives, not only in the workplace (where safety laws are often fought as "needless red tape") but outside it too (your poverty is due to carelessness, and is nobody else's responsibility).
- coding123 5y ago
  This is true, we have the ability to house every homeless person. There are more second vacation homes than homeless people. Why not just move them in? I'm not even talking about the ones available for rent - just the ones sitting there empty.
  - big_curses 5y ago
    As far as I understand, we do have the physical capability of housing that many people, but a significant number of the homeless are drug addicted, have mental illness, or both, and attempts to provide housing in mass like that leads to many of the houses becoming filthy and/or damaged. And who would want to give up a house for that? Homelessness can't just be solved with a housing band-aid, but needs to be addressed at the source with support for the drug addicted and mentally ill.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago
      Having safe, stable shelter would seem to be a prerequisite to helping people deal with drug addiction and mental illness. Baxter, A. J., Tweed, E. J., Katikireddi, S. V., & Thomson, H. (2019). Effects of Housing First approaches on health and well-being of adults who are homeless or at risk of homelessness: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. J Epidemiol Community Health, 73(5), 379-387.
      - bluGill 5y ago
donjoe 5y ago
> The lack of systems thinking We managed to make factories safe but kill 1.3 M people/year in traffic instead [1] I wonder: will we ever manage to apply systems thinking in traffic as well? [1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffic-injuries https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...
- trangus_1985 5y ago
  One start would be to disable smartphones from operating when linked to a car system, massively increase enforcement of smartphone use while driving, and increase penalties. None of that would be popular, but it would be effective.
  - hhhhdnxndn 5y ago
    Let police agencies access cell phone location history and fine anyone moving above the speed limit on a road. Force cell phones to stop working when velocity is above 5 mph.
    - repiret 5y ago
      Not all cell phones being used in cars are used by drivers. I wouldn’t want my cell phone disabled in an Uber, or to get a ticket because my uber driver was speeding.
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        But Uber drivers are all using their cell phones for routing, are they not? So never mind your phone, how would their business even operate if no phones were allowed?
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    That would create temporary disruption, but how would it have any long term benefit, once cars started having navigation as an option again?

133 points by jasoncrawford 5y ago

I love reading about the industrial revolution and the social and economic change from the mid 19th to early 20th century, because you can draw so many parallels to the modern information revolution. The details of the story are different, but the outline is the same: We've got massive progress and insane improvements to efficiency. The world as it exists now couldn't have been dreamed up half a century ago. On the other hand, there's also serious regressions caused by the efficiency, with novel problems that our society is ill-equipped to solve. All the while, we have a wild west business environment and the founders, executives, and capitalists leading the way are getting unfathomably rich as they make a land grab for ownership over the infrastructure and technology that enables our modern efficiency.

maxwell 5y ago
Do you have specific examples of "massive" progress and improvements to efficiency since, say, the late '60s? I tend to agree with Neal Stephenson that "the threat now has become not too much innovation, but not enough". [1] 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0n_5qPmRM&t=333s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0n_5qPmRM&t=333s
- helen___keller 5y ago
  I wasn't alive in the late 60s but most things I spend all day doing were literally not possible for consumers until the 90s-aughts
  - maxwell 5y ago
    Listening to music? Looking at television screens? Pushing typewriter keys? Playing videogames? Programming computers? Video calls? While more expensive when adjusted for inflation, all were commercially available in the '60s. You could make video calls in Grand Central in 1964, even if you could only call DC or Chicago and it cost $5 a minute. The future was already here, as Gibson observed. The internet seems like the last thing humanity invented. Every meaningful (commercially available) "invention" since then has been an internet application or appliance (or has by now been beaten in the marketplace by an internet application or appliance).
    - helen___keller 5y ago
      This past week: I smoked ribs for the first time in my life. Despite having 0 bbq experience and being a relatively new owner of a charcoal grill, I for free and on a whim tapped into the nearly infinite font of human knowledge available at my fingertips to learn about the 3-2-1 method of competition barbecue and made amazing hickory smoked ribs. Without the internet I wouldn't have even bothered, and acquiring that knowledge would have required a trip to a book store or a personal contact with a BBQ expert. I gave a tour of my newly renovated home to my mother who lives in another state and is in quarantine, having recently tested positive for covid. I navigated somewhere I've never been easily using a handheld GPS which can navigate any modality (ie, bus directions and train directions for us city folk) I drove 70 minutes to another state for a small collectors sale in my niche hobby and found something to add to my collection. I wouldn't have known about the sale, or hell even adopted this hobby in the first place, if I didn't have an internet group with dozens of strangers in my city all interested in the same topic. I made two sales of items in said niche hobby to other hobbyists in my city. Absolute strangers I've never met before. I listed the item in the weekly "deal or no deal" style thread, after striking a deal I sent my address, and when they said they were on the way I left the item on the doorstep for them. I watched a significant amount of TV without a single commercial break and on my schedule. Not pay per view either. I left a message for my downstairs neighbor that the contractors are scheduled to show up Monday to replace their basement windows. My neighbors were in another state and got the message anyways. I continue to work a job with my boss who lives in a other state (and has been for years). These are all examples of "massive progress and insane improvements to efficiency" In particular with respect to information, hence why this is called the information revolution.
      - maxwell 5y ago
        Most of what you describe could've been accomplished with sufficiently advanced telegraphy, optical media, and mechanical transport. Untenably expensive, but doable with 19th century tech. The idea of "timeshifting" TV has been around since at least the '60s, Jeannie paused live TV one time so they wouldn't miss the game. But yeah, there's been innovation in "TV," though I suspect you're actually talking about videos on the internet (as opposed to DTV), and most of the recent moves seem to be massively empowering rights holders over viewers by shifting permanent ownership of physical media to fleeting licenses and subscriptions with terms that could change tomorrow. And, with the removal of the Paramount Decrees and decline of feature films + cinemas, we seem to be heading back to the bad old days of a studio system. Satellite-based navigation, first implemented with GPS between '73 and '93, is a good example of innovation, and real advancement, after the late '60s though.
- sanxiyn 5y ago
  We went from thousands of transistors in chip in 1970 to billions of transistors in chip in 2020.
  - maxwell 5y ago
    Exactly. Transistors were invented in 1947, Engelbart presented on downscaling ICs to an audience including Moore in 1960, and he observed his law in 1965. It's mostly held, transistors have incrementally increased as predicted over 50 years ago. This is consistent with Stephenson's observation that there's been no meaningful innovation since the late '60s.
    - helen___keller 5y ago
      This is like arguing in 1870 that there had been no meaningful invention since the Newcomen engine in 1712, just as the transcontinental railroad connected the nation.
      - maxwell 5y ago
        I'm specifically arguing that there has been little meaningful innovation between the late 1960s and 2020s. Outside internet protocols, applications, and appliances, what's been invented since the late 1960s? Between 1712 and 1870, interchangeable parts, bifocals, lightning rods, cotton gins, spinning jennys, carbonated water, thermometers, guillotines, parachutes, hot air balloons, sandwiches, mayonnaise, gas turbines, internal combustion engines, matches, electric batteries, microphones, typewriters, sewing machines, barbed wire, reflecting telescopes, stethoscopes, gyroscopes, mechanical reapers, corn planters, bicycles, telegraphs, postage stamps, photography, staplers, airships, gliders, light bulbs, traffic lights, Portland cement, the Bessemer process, and tin cans were invented. Watt's steam engine was an iteration, a few incremental improvements over Newcomen's design. And then most of the inventions that shape contemporary life came between 1870 and 1970.
        helen___keller 5y ago
        > Outside internet protocols, applications, and appliances, what's been invented since the late 1960s? Do digital innovations not count as innovations? By that definition of course the digital revolution has not produced any meaningful innovation Naturally, the industrial revolution has innovations that were related to industry while the information revolution has had innovations that are related to information.
madacol 5y ago
Generally, the benefits of progress more than compensates the regressions (if any) Very few people today, after knowing how people lived in the past, would make that tradeoff and go back P.S: "rich = bad" is an awful proxy for the real underlying problems
- helen___keller 5y ago
  > Generally, the benefits of progress more than compensates the regressions That's certainly how this outline played out for the industrial revolution. The ending isn't written yet for the information revolution, but I do hope for the same.

kiba 5y ago

So, one lesson we might apply to is infosecurity would be automatic liability for information they collected and leaked. That would cause companies to fight for their user privacy and implement stronger security measure while also collecting less information. Well, maybe. We won't know if it work well until it's actually implemented.

flerchin 5y ago
Info leaks have negligible provable harms. It's a real moral hazard. It's not that there aren't harms, it's that it's nearly impossible to link any harms back to any specific leak.
- goodcanadian 5y ago
  Which is why automatic defined liability for the leak might be the solution to the problem.
  - lmkg 5y ago
    Well, CCPA started doing this in California. In the event of a data breach, the company can be sued for actual damages, or statutory damages of $100-750 per affected consumer. As a point of comparison: If CCPA had been in effect during the Equifax incident, the statutory damages only for California residents would have been $1.5 billion minimum. As far as I can tell for Wikipedia, the settlement they agreed to with 48 states combines to about 1/3 of that amount.
    - adolph 5y ago
      If a multistage class action lawsuit is settled for billions and people harmed receive only free credit monitoring gift cards, is our sense of justice served?
      - bluGill 5y ago
        I don't care so much about justice as nobody does it again. If the lawyers make a ton once and there isn't a next time I'm happy. Well better would be it doesn't happen again

pessimizer 5y ago

This is a summary of how the factories were made safe masquerading as a summary of why the factories were made safe. It comes to the Whiggish conclusion that factories were made safe because time moves forward. It mentions that the real reason was Workers' Comp., which made injured workers a cost for employers, and buries in a parenthetical that Workers' Comp was created by socialist union protests, and taken up by German politicians as a way to reduce the socialists' popular support. It concludes with some weird-ass hypothetical conversations between the author and a made-up socialist that ignores that fact. In between, it implies that socialists and anarchists weren't responsible for the 40 hour workweek, either, without offering any evidence (who would need evidence that time moves forward?) It's really an apologia for capitalism masquerading as a history of factory safety. Apparently it's because of attitudes and mindsets and lack of systems thinking that everybody had, including the workers. If the workers were universally fine with the situation, it's really strange that they protested in the streets until the general populace backed them to the degree that government had to adopt the policy for fear of being voted out. edit: It's really telling that it starts with an anecdote blaming a child for his own death. You see, the child sat during his shift because one of the managers would let him. With proper systems-thinking mindset, he would have of course been forced to stand for 80 hours a week.

Jochim 5y ago
See also the trend for offshoring production to countries that lack any safety standards or worker protections. The only real progress has been that some companies try to cover up that they're employing child labour by doing it through third parties rather than doing it openly.
pnutjam 5y ago
Thanks for posting this. I noticed that, install a guard was one of the last "if only" possibilities.
ghostly_s 5y ago
Really pathetic but unsurprising that people here are downvoting this comment. It's not often that you see an author constructing a literal straw-man these days; the piece flatly ignores the importance of the massively powerful labor movements of this period--so powerful that states were regularly resorting to armed struggle with them--instead pretending that "social reformers" existed in a vacuum.

sanxiyn 5y ago

We really do need liability for software.

bserge 5y ago
Which software? Drone target acquisition or TikTok?
- Cilvic 5y ago
  Both. All?
  - bserge 5y ago
    Granted, Hacker News is banned for causing depression in too many people :D Mozilla went bankrupt because too many ~~idiots~~ outstanding citizens tripped and fell while using Firefox. YouTube was banned for causing deaths with their irresponsible use of information. Who knew fixing a car, building a high powered laser or eating a Tide pod is dangerous? Not the users' fault.
    - qualudeheart 5y ago
      Hacker News causes depression in me. I learnt to code believing it would let me live a meaningful and productive life. I was wrong. I see all these wonderful innovations happening and I miss out on their benefits.
- sanxiyn 5y ago
  Web browsers, to start. Why are Apple and Google not liable for zero days of Safari and Chrome? How is it sane? Grace period may be necessary, but it needs to happen.
  - clipradiowallet 5y ago
    You don't pay for these products though, which removes most of your options to seek monetary damages for <anything>. The same argument applies to nearly all [free] software - whether it's Chromium or curl.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

It's tempting to use macro trends, like the advent of workplace safety, to confirm one's existing beliefs. Economy-wide changes like this are pretty much without exception driven by a bunch of different factors working together and you can pretty much always find some to cherry pick to back whatever your opinion is that minute. Pretty much all the current literature about workplace safety seems to follow one ideological bent. I commend the author for at least hitting the topic from a wide array of angles even if he missed a couple.

OneEyedRobot 5y ago
I absolutely agree. 3..2..1 until someone blames or credits some President or the other or a famous worker strike. Models are particularly comforting when they are so simple as to be useless. Now, back to some work on the lathe while wearing my necktie.

OkayPhysicist 5y ago

The audacity of that tangent at the end. "Natural and inevitable"? People fought and died for your 40 hour work week. You know May Day? The Labor Day for the rest of the world? Commemorates the Haymarket Massacre, which was fighting for the 8 hour work day.

rtkwe 5y ago
Yeah there’s a lot of people who don’t know the history of labor at all and have been convinced that companies without outside regulation would totally treat their employees well and not abuse, over work, injure, or flatly refuse to pay owed wages. It’s a real success story for the pro-business groups in the US and around the world.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  You see the same misconception with environmental regulations, it makes for some interesting (though frustrating) discussions though.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    You see the same misconceptions in the other direction as well. It's like some people think a work stoppage from cleaning up a dead worker or hazardous material spill don't result in lost productivity that workplaces would rather not incur.
    - content_sesh 5y ago
      The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire happened on March 25, 1911. The owner kept the factory doors locked and as a result 146 people either died in the fire or jumped to their deaths. The owners were acquitted of manslaughter, but did have to pay $75 per person they killed. The owners made $60,000 profit due to the insurance payout. Two years later in 1913, the one of the owners was arrested for locking his factory doors, again, and fined $20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire#Consequences_and_legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...

dataflow 5y ago

Just wanted to say thanks for posting this, I'm finding this incredibly fascinating. I can clearly see there's been so much ingenuity (and suffering) that's finally gotten us to where we are now.

dredmorbius 5y ago

Roots of Progress explores a fascinating and critically vital question, but does so under ideological blinders and using manifestly obvious rhetorical techniques (strawman arguments, blame-the-victim, historical revisionism) which hugely impair the entire project. Tremendous potential. Miserable accomplishment.

andjd 5y ago
This particular article is actually pretty informative ... until the dialog at the end. And in it, he's approving of a _strict liability_ scheme. I doubt most other pro-business ideologues would approve of a law that 'simplifies' legal disputes by mandating that the business always lose the case. (In fact, there's currently an effort to overturn New York's Scaffolding Law, and the arguments fall in line with that detailed in the article -- victims are being negligent or careless, so why should contractors pay?) The article is not without flaws ... Workers comp was a compromise that created strict liability, but also limited the compensation workers could receive for on-the-job injuries, so it can be argued that it was actually a windfall for owners at the expense of workers.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  It is an exceedingly slanted narrative omitting much and painting a pointedly inaccurate history.

tpmx 5y ago

Thus, accidents were typically attributed to worker “carelessness.” Even if partly true, this was a dead end in terms of understanding the causes and how to fix them. It would not survive a modern root-cause or “five whys” analysis. In modern parlance, “systems thinking” was lacking. This way of thinking still appears to be common in US road/street design.

toss1 5y ago

>>a simple and effective change to the law set in motion an entire apparatus of management and engineering decisions that resulted in the creation of a new safety culture. It’s a case study of a classic attitude from economics: just put a price on the harm—_internalize the externality_—and let the market do the rest. There it is — internalize the externality — when someone is profiting via externalizing costs or harms, they are essentially stealing from others (either the commons or the specific people on whom the harm falls). Ensuring that external costs are borne by those who create them is simply requiring that people creating business are actually ADDING value to society, and not simply extracting or stealing value by creating greater external harm than their products/services create.

gumby 5y ago

> Thus, accidents were typically attributed to worker “carelessness.” This attitude survives, not only in the workplace (where safety laws are often fought as "needless red tape") but outside it too (your poverty is due to carelessness, and is nobody else's responsibility).

coding123 5y ago
This is true, we have the ability to house every homeless person. There are more second vacation homes than homeless people. Why not just move them in? I'm not even talking about the ones available for rent - just the ones sitting there empty.
- big_curses 5y ago
  As far as I understand, we do have the physical capability of housing that many people, but a significant number of the homeless are drug addicted, have mental illness, or both, and attempts to provide housing in mass like that leads to many of the houses becoming filthy and/or damaged. And who would want to give up a house for that? Homelessness can't just be solved with a housing band-aid, but needs to be addressed at the source with support for the drug addicted and mentally ill.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Having safe, stable shelter would seem to be a prerequisite to helping people deal with drug addiction and mental illness. Baxter, A. J., Tweed, E. J., Katikireddi, S. V., & Thomson, H. (2019). Effects of Housing First approaches on health and well-being of adults who are homeless or at risk of homelessness: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. J Epidemiol Community Health, 73(5), 379-387.
    - bluGill 5y ago

donjoe 5y ago

> The lack of systems thinking We managed to make factories safe but kill 1.3 M people/year in traffic instead [1] I wonder: will we ever manage to apply systems thinking in traffic as well? [1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffic-injuries https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...

trangus_1985 5y ago
One start would be to disable smartphones from operating when linked to a car system, massively increase enforcement of smartphone use while driving, and increase penalties. None of that would be popular, but it would be effective.
- hhhhdnxndn 5y ago
  Let police agencies access cell phone location history and fine anyone moving above the speed limit on a road. Force cell phones to stop working when velocity is above 5 mph.
  - repiret 5y ago
    Not all cell phones being used in cars are used by drivers. I wouldn’t want my cell phone disabled in an Uber, or to get a ticket because my uber driver was speeding.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      But Uber drivers are all using their cell phones for routing, are they not? So never mind your phone, how would their business even operate if no phones were allowed?
- perl4ever 5y ago
  That would create temporary disruption, but how would it have any long term benefit, once cars started having navigation as an option again?