7 ms·

Exposing food manufacturers to widespread civil suits like this would surely depress domestic production of food just as opening up fabric manufacturers to fire

by wyager 2y ago

Exposing food manufacturers to widespread civil suits like this would surely depress domestic production of food just as opening up fabric manufacturers to fire-related civil suits (e.g. Chapman v Brown) destroyed domestic fabric production. Even if the manufacturer wins 99% of the time, the proliferation of suits like this is sufficiently costly to force production overseas. You still end up with the same (or greater) risks, but the system routes around the legal friction by reducing production in the costly legal regime.

JadeNB 2y ago
> Exposing food manufacturers to widespread civil suits like this would surely depress domestic production of food just as opening up fabric manufacturers to fire-related civil suits destroyed domestic fabric production. "Requiring safe standards is bad for business" is possibly true (at least in the short term), but I'm not sure that the alternative is better. EDIT: I inadvertently read the parent post uncharitably, as suggesting that there should be no enforcement at all. gizmodo (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42452514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42452514) points out that arguing against civil liability is not arguing against effective regulation and enforcement.
- wyager 2y ago
  It's more efficient to treat food safety standards as a criminal matter rather than a civil matter. If it's frequently treated as a civil matter, it results in endless (and endlessly costly) civil suits. The standards for successfully pursuing a civil judgement have to be extremely high in situations like this to discourage destructive ambulance-chasing.
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    No. Treating everything like a criminal matter gets you Italy. It didn't actually fix anything because the process is reactive not proactive.
    - n4r9 2y ago
      The EU mandates testing of food products, monitoring of farms and processing facilities, and enforces strict trade controls on potentially contaminated products. This works just fine and drastically reduces disease due to pathogens such as Salmonella relative to the US.
      - throwaway48476 2y ago
        A lot of the EU relies on basically slave labor for agriculture so I'm not inclined to believe that everything is universally enforced, especially on the periferry.
        n4r9 2y ago
        We can look at the number of infections per year to quantify the effectiveness of the regulations. In the US there are approx 1.35 million per year [0], i.e. 1 in 255 people, with around 450 deaths. In the EU there are approx 70k reported cases [1] i.e. 1 in 6500, with around 90 deaths. Moreover the number of cases drastically dropped in the EU since regulations came into force earlier this century. The data here is very clear that regulations save lives. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/index.html [1] https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/index.html
        n4r9 2y ago
        Second link should have been: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/SALM_AER_2022_Report.pdf https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/SAL...
    - wyager 2y ago
      Italian food is good. I'm not saying to do this for every single industry, just for food
  - frgtpsswrdlame 2y ago
    10 people died from the Boars Head contaminated meat. I guess I don't really mind if a few lawyers chase those ambulances and extract a lot of money out of that company?
    - wyager 2y ago
      A) It's not going to stop at the most egregious cases B) I hope you like meat imported from China
- gizmo686 2y ago
  There are different mechanisms for requiring safe standards. The point is that 'enforcing standards through civil liability' is bad for business. There is also 'enforcing standards through regulation and regulatory agencies'; which is arguably better for both safety and business compared to the civil suit. On the other hand, civil suits are more insulated from the regulatory wims of the current administration.
  - JadeNB 2y ago
    Thank you. This is a good point. I definitely misread my parent post as arguing against all enforcement of safe standards, rather than just against enforcing them through civil liability.
parsimo2010 2y ago
I think there is a way to distinguish between blanket liability any time someone gets sick eating your product, and suing Boar's Head for continuing to operate with deficiencies that were documented in a report and known to the company. It is regrettable that the FSIS did not enforce harder, but I think someone who's family died because of this should be able to sue.
- everforward 2y ago
  > I think there is a way to distinguish between blanket liability any time someone gets sick eating your product, and suing Boar's Head for continuing to operate with deficiencies that were documented in a report and known to the company. I would generally expect the latter to be accomplished by regulatory fines; it's simpler and cleaner than an array of individual civil suits. The greater issue is that I'd be very surprised if many of those civil suits were effective, and especially so for being cost effective (for either side). Citizens will need to prove beyond a preponderance of evidence that their relative's infection was due to Boar's Head, which is going to be very difficult. Everyone is exposed to dozens of potential Listeria sources every day; it's hard to prove it was Boar's Head and not Chipotle or McDonald's or whatever else they've eaten/touched. It genuinely probably makes more sense to do a regulatory fine on Boar's Head, and then distribute the fine to affected people via a mechanism with a lower bar. Maybe everyone who had a Listeria infection around that time, which is much easier to prove than the source of the infection.
dghlsakjg 2y ago
Your understanding of how liability works is flawed. Manufacturing products overseas doesn't exempt you from liability for selling t-shirts that are too flammable. I can still sue The Gap for selling me a dangerous item that they made in Bangladesh as easily as I can sue them for selling me a dangerous item that they made in San Francisco.
- wyager 2y ago
  And yet manufacturer liability was a significant causal factor in domestic textile production collapsing
  - QuercusMax 2y ago
    Making sure they employees don't all die in horrendous fires is why US textile production collapsed? Do you have a citation for that? Because that sounds insane. I thought it moved overseas because they can pay children pennies, not because they literally want to roast their peons alive.
    - nickff 2y ago
      I linked to the cited case in my comment; it's an interesting read, and I suggest that you check it out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42452760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42452760
  - dghlsakjg 2y ago
    The suit you cited happened in 1961. However, in the 1950s every domestic textile category had seen at least double digit declines (97% for wool!), while imports had seen triple digit growth (cotton fabric imports tripled). The industry was already well on its way to failure, so I have a hard time believing there is a causal relationship. As I stated before, the liability still exists even when you manufacture outside of the country. There are no net cost savings from a liability lawsuit standpoint to be had by moving production overseas.
- dehrmann 2y ago
bee_rider 2y ago
I think it would be really hard to show causation there; I’d expect, at least, that higher wages and higher regulation would be pretty correlated (more well off populations might be less willing to sacrifice lives to industry). Maybe the fabric industry moved out because American workers weren’t cost-competitive.
- nickff 2y ago
  > "Maybe the fabric industry moved out because American workers weren’t cost-competitive." That seems like a likely factor, but insurance against product liability suits can be very expensive in some (litigious) industries, and is also a factor in total cost analysis.
dec0dedab0de 2y ago
The obvious answer is to find a way to open up overseas production to the risk of being sued. Perhaps putting all liability on the importer, distributor, or retailer for imported goods.
- nickff 2y ago
  > "Perhaps putting all liability on the importer, distributor, or retailer for imported goods." These parties do carry extensive liabilities when there's a product defect or fault, as was the case in the cited case. The issue is that manufacturers usually produce larger volumes, and are thus vulnerable to more of these lawsuits, as well as class-actions. Class-action cases are often extremely and expensive, even when there was no clear fault.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > Perhaps putting all liability on the importer, distributor, or retailer for imported goods. Standard product liability law already has joint and several liability for manufacturing defects on all parties in the chain of commerce, so each of the retailer, distributor, importer, and manufacturer already bear full liability.
Etheryte 2y ago
If you produce food without meeting the bare minimum standard of don't make people sick then your operation absolutely should get, as you say, depressed.
- nickff 2y ago
  The problem is that there are a lot of spurious and dubious cases, and class-actions are very expensive and risky to defend, even when the defendant is innocent, largely because they're seen as unsympathetic 'piggy-banks' (whereas the plaintiffs are often very sympathetic).
nickff 2y ago
Thanks for the citation of 'Chapman v Brown', it's an interesting case that I hadn't heard of: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/198/78/1671808/ https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/1...
michaelmrose 2y ago
It seems much harder to move meat production overseas. You can use destructively high tariffs to prevent it. You can also require imports to follow the same standards including domestic inspection. Any suits that fail 99% of the time are frivilous and the normal method of dealing with same is punishing claimants who should have known better by fining and disbarring lawyers and making claimant bear costs. Ways exist to distinguish between a frivilous and non case in this category. -Has responsible party exhibited a pattern of failures of their normal duty of care according to testimony and evidence that would be collected by the government as part of reasonable investigations and inspection -Is it more likely than not that present issue is related. It seems unreasonable that we must either open up bobs meats to lawsuits with every sandwich or ignore the fact that Bob killed dozens because he has been known to be a filthy pig for years.

by wyager 2y ago

JadeNB 2y ago

> Exposing food manufacturers to widespread civil suits like this would surely depress domestic production of food just as opening up fabric manufacturers to fire-related civil suits destroyed domestic fabric production. "Requiring safe standards is bad for business" is possibly true (at least in the short term), but I'm not sure that the alternative is better. EDIT: I inadvertently read the parent post uncharitably, as suggesting that there should be no enforcement at all. gizmodo (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42452514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42452514) points out that arguing against civil liability is not arguing against effective regulation and enforcement.

wyager 2y ago
It's more efficient to treat food safety standards as a criminal matter rather than a civil matter. If it's frequently treated as a civil matter, it results in endless (and endlessly costly) civil suits. The standards for successfully pursuing a civil judgement have to be extremely high in situations like this to discourage destructive ambulance-chasing.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  No. Treating everything like a criminal matter gets you Italy. It didn't actually fix anything because the process is reactive not proactive.
  - n4r9 2y ago
    The EU mandates testing of food products, monitoring of farms and processing facilities, and enforces strict trade controls on potentially contaminated products. This works just fine and drastically reduces disease due to pathogens such as Salmonella relative to the US.
    - throwaway48476 2y ago
      A lot of the EU relies on basically slave labor for agriculture so I'm not inclined to believe that everything is universally enforced, especially on the periferry.
      - n4r9 2y ago
        We can look at the number of infections per year to quantify the effectiveness of the regulations. In the US there are approx 1.35 million per year [0], i.e. 1 in 255 people, with around 450 deaths. In the EU there are approx 70k reported cases [1] i.e. 1 in 6500, with around 90 deaths. Moreover the number of cases drastically dropped in the EU since regulations came into force earlier this century. The data here is very clear that regulations save lives. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/index.html [1] https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/index.html
        n4r9 2y ago
        Second link should have been: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/SALM_AER_2022_Report.pdf https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/SAL...
  - wyager 2y ago
    Italian food is good. I'm not saying to do this for every single industry, just for food
- frgtpsswrdlame 2y ago
  10 people died from the Boars Head contaminated meat. I guess I don't really mind if a few lawyers chase those ambulances and extract a lot of money out of that company?
  - wyager 2y ago
    A) It's not going to stop at the most egregious cases B) I hope you like meat imported from China
gizmo686 2y ago
There are different mechanisms for requiring safe standards. The point is that 'enforcing standards through civil liability' is bad for business. There is also 'enforcing standards through regulation and regulatory agencies'; which is arguably better for both safety and business compared to the civil suit. On the other hand, civil suits are more insulated from the regulatory wims of the current administration.
- JadeNB 2y ago
  Thank you. This is a good point. I definitely misread my parent post as arguing against all enforcement of safe standards, rather than just against enforcing them through civil liability.

parsimo2010 2y ago

I think there is a way to distinguish between blanket liability any time someone gets sick eating your product, and suing Boar's Head for continuing to operate with deficiencies that were documented in a report and known to the company. It is regrettable that the FSIS did not enforce harder, but I think someone who's family died because of this should be able to sue.

everforward 2y ago
> I think there is a way to distinguish between blanket liability any time someone gets sick eating your product, and suing Boar's Head for continuing to operate with deficiencies that were documented in a report and known to the company. I would generally expect the latter to be accomplished by regulatory fines; it's simpler and cleaner than an array of individual civil suits. The greater issue is that I'd be very surprised if many of those civil suits were effective, and especially so for being cost effective (for either side). Citizens will need to prove beyond a preponderance of evidence that their relative's infection was due to Boar's Head, which is going to be very difficult. Everyone is exposed to dozens of potential Listeria sources every day; it's hard to prove it was Boar's Head and not Chipotle or McDonald's or whatever else they've eaten/touched. It genuinely probably makes more sense to do a regulatory fine on Boar's Head, and then distribute the fine to affected people via a mechanism with a lower bar. Maybe everyone who had a Listeria infection around that time, which is much easier to prove than the source of the infection.

dghlsakjg 2y ago

Your understanding of how liability works is flawed. Manufacturing products overseas doesn't exempt you from liability for selling t-shirts that are too flammable. I can still sue The Gap for selling me a dangerous item that they made in Bangladesh as easily as I can sue them for selling me a dangerous item that they made in San Francisco.

wyager 2y ago
And yet manufacturer liability was a significant causal factor in domestic textile production collapsing
- QuercusMax 2y ago
  Making sure they employees don't all die in horrendous fires is why US textile production collapsed? Do you have a citation for that? Because that sounds insane. I thought it moved overseas because they can pay children pennies, not because they literally want to roast their peons alive.
  - nickff 2y ago
    I linked to the cited case in my comment; it's an interesting read, and I suggest that you check it out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42452760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42452760
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  The suit you cited happened in 1961. However, in the 1950s every domestic textile category had seen at least double digit declines (97% for wool!), while imports had seen triple digit growth (cotton fabric imports tripled). The industry was already well on its way to failure, so I have a hard time believing there is a causal relationship. As I stated before, the liability still exists even when you manufacture outside of the country. There are no net cost savings from a liability lawsuit standpoint to be had by moving production overseas.
dehrmann 2y ago

bee_rider 2y ago

I think it would be really hard to show causation there; I’d expect, at least, that higher wages and higher regulation would be pretty correlated (more well off populations might be less willing to sacrifice lives to industry). Maybe the fabric industry moved out because American workers weren’t cost-competitive.

nickff 2y ago
> "Maybe the fabric industry moved out because American workers weren’t cost-competitive." That seems like a likely factor, but insurance against product liability suits can be very expensive in some (litigious) industries, and is also a factor in total cost analysis.

dec0dedab0de 2y ago

The obvious answer is to find a way to open up overseas production to the risk of being sued. Perhaps putting all liability on the importer, distributor, or retailer for imported goods.

nickff 2y ago
> "Perhaps putting all liability on the importer, distributor, or retailer for imported goods." These parties do carry extensive liabilities when there's a product defect or fault, as was the case in the cited case. The issue is that manufacturers usually produce larger volumes, and are thus vulnerable to more of these lawsuits, as well as class-actions. Class-action cases are often extremely and expensive, even when there was no clear fault.
dragonwriter 2y ago
> Perhaps putting all liability on the importer, distributor, or retailer for imported goods. Standard product liability law already has joint and several liability for manufacturing defects on all parties in the chain of commerce, so each of the retailer, distributor, importer, and manufacturer already bear full liability.

Etheryte 2y ago

If you produce food without meeting the bare minimum standard of don't make people sick then your operation absolutely should get, as you say, depressed.

nickff 2y ago
The problem is that there are a lot of spurious and dubious cases, and class-actions are very expensive and risky to defend, even when the defendant is innocent, largely because they're seen as unsympathetic 'piggy-banks' (whereas the plaintiffs are often very sympathetic).

nickff 2y ago

Thanks for the citation of 'Chapman v Brown', it's an interesting case that I hadn't heard of: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/198/78/1671808/ https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/1...

michaelmrose 2y ago

It seems much harder to move meat production overseas. You can use destructively high tariffs to prevent it. You can also require imports to follow the same standards including domestic inspection. Any suits that fail 99% of the time are frivilous and the normal method of dealing with same is punishing claimants who should have known better by fining and disbarring lawyers and making claimant bear costs. Ways exist to distinguish between a frivilous and non case in this category. -Has responsible party exhibited a pattern of failures of their normal duty of care according to testimony and evidence that would be collected by the government as part of reasonable investigations and inspection -Is it more likely than not that present issue is related. It seems unreasonable that we must either open up bobs meats to lawsuits with every sandwich or ignore the fact that Bob killed dozens because he has been known to be a filthy pig for years.