7 ms·

Maybe I am just cynical, but I highly doubt many leaders would actually care about a worker’s death. Most would like have the decorum and PR experience to feig

• isthisthingon99 4y ago
  Think as you like but behave like others is the western approach. They would bemoan the loss and be very emotional about it while internally thinking the same thing this guy said. I prefer my leaders to be less fluff.
  • paulgb 4y ago
    What they’re thinking internally isn’t the issue. The statements send a signal to the rest of the organization and impact what gets prioritized. In this case, the signal is “life of workers doesn’t matter”.
    • isthisthingon99 4y ago
      You do realize in the us there are thousands of worker deaths. Do we hold a memorial each time?
      • paulgb 4y ago
        Working conditions in the US have improved dramatically over the last century because politicians and leaders took action to improve them. Your position seems to be that it doesn’t matter what leaders and politicians say if they don’t believe it in their heart. I think that’s less relevant than their actions. (And FWIW, yes, usually when a worker dies on the job in the US the company does sponsor a memorial)
        • isthisthingon99 4y ago
          Ah, so you are projecting your own society's ideals onto another which wasn't always how it was. Which society told you the way to do it was to create laws to deal with it? Was it your own? Have you perhaps considered that just because US society might be a few decades ahead in certain types of rights, that maybe that's just a fluke of nature and doesn't give the US any moral standing? Edit: can't respond any more, so I will just say: this thread is exactly an example of fake empathy. None of these guys will go out of their way to help the migrant worker, they will demand others do so. Fake empathy.
          • paulgb 4y ago
            > Ah, so you are projecting your own society's ideals onto another which wasn't always how it was. To the extent that those ideals are “migrant worker’s lives should not be treated as expendable”, hell yes I am. (FWIW I’m Canadian, not American) Your attempt at positioning that as some sort of cultural chauvinism is weird.
            • isthisthingon99 4y ago
              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_savior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_savior
            • djkivi 4y ago
              Canada had its own history of migrant workers. More than 4000 Chinese migrants died building our railroads: https://torontorailwaymuseum.com/?p=1152 https://torontorailwaymuseum.com/?p=1152
              • paulgb 4y ago
                Absolutely, I don't mean to imply that Canada is blameless, just that my point of view is not a projection of exclusively US-centric values.
        • lupire 4y ago
          > when a worker dies on the job in the US the company does sponsor a memorial What? Who? Amazon docks people productivity points for the time it takes to walk a longer route to avoid a dead body on the warehouse floor.
      • zopa 4y ago
        Maybe no memorial but for sure an OSHA incident report. https://www.osha.gov/recordkeeping/ https://www.osha.gov/recordkeeping/ There’s plenty of room for improvement. But it used to be that a 10,000 person steel mill could expect 1200 deaths and serious injuries each year. That only changed because people cared enough to fight for better conditions.
        • lupire 4y ago
          OSHA report is the memorial of the bureaucracy. It serves the same purpose.
          • zopa 4y ago
            Correct. Or at least overlapping purposes
  • rtpg 4y ago
    Maybe you think that, but I’m sure many people have basic human empathy at the end of the day. Yes statistically many people die on the job in many countries but every one is still a tragedy. You can think that and be running a large organization. I feel like many conservative thinkers believe that it’s all “fake” and just PR. But human empathy is a real thing.
    • isthisthingon99 4y ago
      Look at your leaders. What percentage do you think operate from sincere va feigned or politically beneficial empathy? Is it a majority? At what level of government do you think it becomes a majority or minority?
      • Aeolun 4y ago
        I honestly think my leaders (in the Netherlands) roughly do what they believe is in the best interest of the people. I think there’s few that truly feign empathy. There’s people that don’t care. I just don’t see them in politics, they’re all business leaders. I guess politics isn’t lucrative enough here.
        • isthisthingon99 4y ago
          This is my theory. The more local, the more "like you", the more empathy. The more "other", the more fake empathy.
      • rtpg 4y ago
        Moving the goalposts a lot here. I think that when confronted with a meaningless death directly most will feel empathy. I’m sure a lot of politicians will feel like it’s unfair to pin some event on them, and that might be their base reaction. But this is not a mutually exclusive thing! People can be mad about political messaging and still feel something about people dead while building a soccer stadium of all things.
    • BurningFrog 4y ago
      About two people die every second. I think it's essential for mental health to find a way to not grieve these strangers!
• Shugarl 4y ago
  To be honest, I highly doubt many people actually care about a worker's death, period. They'll be "shocked", then move on to the next bad news
• marstall 4y ago
  I think the implication is that the death is emblematic of a larger issue in Qatar, migrant worker rights. And that is something a good leader should and should be expected to care about!
• zopa 4y ago
  Maybe it’s all a facade, but in the U.S. such shows of concern have gotten us effective workplace safety regulation. I don’t really care if the politicians’ concern is fake: the avoided deaths are real.
  • mdp2021 4y ago
    Don't simply pardon civic decay - simulation - because of practical progress. Culture is paramount.
    • zopa 4y ago
      I think you might be missing the context of the thread, but maybe you can expand on your point a bit. If it helps, you can safely read “I don’t really care about X” as “I think X is significantly more important than Y in this particular situation.”
      • mdp2021 4y ago
        > significantly more important Those are much better terms ;)
• Aeolun 4y ago
  I don’t think that’s very unreasonable? In a analytical sense it’s bad of course, you don’t want workers to die if you can prevent it, but you cannot really expect me to care about every person that dies. This person is just very blunt about stating as much, or maybe they don’t care in the first sense either, and they wouldn’t change anything for the better even if they had opportunity to.
  • harimau777 4y ago
    I think the issue may be that humans have social norms which dictate that we express that we care. If someone flouts that norm then it implies that there is something significantly wrong with them.
    • inawarminister 4y ago
      Their social norms are different than liberal anglophones?
    • mdp2021 4y ago
      > social norms which dictate I thought we went past that three centuries ago. But then, globablization of communication showed differently. I am not even sure about when and where these "social norms about expression" emerged; I am not sure they existed among the Romans, the Carolingian Franks etc. Surely, they are apparent in some anglophone contexts. The Britons very often go "Will you apologize?" in odd contexts very far from those others would find consistent with the request (e.g. if A randomly knocked B down and showed indifference).
• stereolambda 4y ago
  I think a reasonable reading here is that workers dying is a systemic issue (also related to their overall conditions), not a series of just unfortunate accidents. We may expect the ruling class to do something to make people die less, and this would start with communicating that this is important matter. OTOH caring in front of camera is of course a pretty trash signal about the rulers actually doing anything, especially if said rulers are authoritarian and all they have to care about is strong police. An elected politician in representative democracy has a little more incentive to be half-truthful at least some of the time. You can be cynical all you want. These regime-type considerations are separate from whether we think the culture should value preserving life of people, and not saying "well it's just how things are for thousands of years, good thing I am hereditary elite".
• frontman1988 4y ago
  Yeah the countries which export the labour don't care themselves. None among India, Bangladesh, Pakistan have even issued any statement condemning the working conditions or the govt. of Qatar and that is when none of these countries are even playing in the world cup. The world certainly doesn't care. There are more people in this world than you can count in a lifetime, what matters if a few hundred poor people die. With the way things are, the west is also probably only condemning Qatar because of future plans of stealing their oil/natural gas resources than due to some poor people dying.
• CyberDildonics 4y ago
  I highly doubt many leaders would actually care about a worker’s death Not A workers death. 6,500 worker deaths. That's over double the number of people that died on 911. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/revealed-migrant-worker-deaths-qatar-fifa-world-cup-2022 https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/r... These were healthy people that had their passports taken away from them and worked until they died and you're talking about a single death. In 1931 5 people died building the empire state building. https://www.reference.com/history-geography/many-people-died-building-empire-state-building-48bddec3439ab036 https://www.reference.com/history-geography/many-people-died...