OSHA penalties are laughably low. Willful and repeated violations only cost a maximum of $150k/per incident, while serious but non-willful/first time violations

OSHA penalties are laughably low. Willful and repeated violations only cost a maximum of $150k/per incident, while serious but non-willful/first time violations are capped at about $14k/incident. The real money can be in workers comp/lawsuits, but those damages are capped based on expected lifetime earnings or, if you're lucky, a multiple of expected lifetime earnings. What's really messed up is that courts typically use your demographics to calculate your expected lifetime earnings (e.g. if you're black you will get a smaller settlement than a white person because statistically black people earn less than the average person over their lifetimes). When I first read that I thought it could not possibly be true, that there had to be some vitiate that made it make sense, but it's just how it's typically done. Globally, protections for blue collar workers are crap. The US actually has pretty good worker protections all things considered (like, even compared to Europe).