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Walmart Spends $2M To Save $7K (Or, Why Regulations Do Matter)
AngelHedgie
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Again, not a joke, folks. Walmart has spent over $2 million to fight a $7,000 OSHA fine relating to the trampling death of a Walmart worker on Black Friday a couple of years back. And while it sounds insane on the surface, when you look at the cruel calculus that Walmart uses, it makes a certain sick sense. At the heart of the matter is whether the government has the right to hold a business accountable in any manner for placing employees unnecessarily in harm's way - Walmart claims that the government is wrong for considering "crowd trampling" an occupational hazard that employers must take steps to avoid.
The saddest part is that this isn't an isolated incident. As is pointed out in the article, the coal industry and BP also fought back hard against safety regulations, with similar, if much more far-reaching results. It's a cultural issue - the bottom line has become the only thing that matters in business, and they'll fight to protect that principle - even if it means spending $2 million to fight a $7,000 fine.
The saddest part is that this isn't an isolated incident. As is pointed out in the article, the coal industry and BP also fought back hard against safety regulations, with similar, if much more far-reaching results. It's a cultural issue - the bottom line has become the only thing that matters in business, and they'll fight to protect that principle - even if it means spending $2 million to fight a $7,000 fine.
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Here's a link to the actual NYT article the OP's site cribbed from.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/business/07walmart.html?_r=3
No, they're just fighting that such behavior should be regulated. And that unless a specific behavior is expressly proscribed, then it's completely legitimate.
Basically, what Walmart and other corporations are arguing is that they should be trusted to self-regulate. Considering their track record, why should we?
[ed] Also, when there are legal and monetary ramifications I like things to be expressly proscribed as much as possible. Is an employee doing cart returns considered dangerous?
Can you define this "neo-liberalism" and why it is responsible for this? I'm not too savvy on all the neo-'s and -ism's.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Whether or not something should be regulated is presumably for a legislature to decide, no?
Trying to push the power and responsibility for that decision to another authority is just putting more bandaids over the problem.
I'm not sure if there would be a way of counteracting this at this point. They have this built-up system where regulations are appealed through the courts to determine their legitimacy and presumably you'd need to have a large body of casework upholding the legitimacy of regulation for it to tend to discourage appeals to the court (which would take time and might outright fail given the current institutional inertia).
Unless one made these sorts of things ineligible from being reviewed by the courts under certain circumstances or levied actual penalties for a failed court challenge against a regulation, but I don't think that those options are either practical or wise given the huge potential for abuse.
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Please, explain to me why it's not healthy. Because from where I'm standing, Walmart is the one fighting for inflexibility.
The sky isn't falling
The real issue is who's responsibility it is to protect the workers, and whether Walmart's voluntary changes will be effective (and whether the government's changes would be effective).
We all like ideological pot-shots, right? How about this one: the Government regulates off-shore oil drilling. Same with coal mining. Still disasters though.
What I want to know is what penalties Walmart already suffered by having a worker death in one of it's stores. It's something they obviously never want to happen again, and they are probably already subject to police investigations, bad pr, civil lawsuits and maybe criminal lawsuits. So why are we focusing on Occ Health regulations?
And what will new Occ Health regulations do anyway?
I think we need to know more before a "rawr! Walmart!" reaction.
Neoliberalism was/is an economic approach to the role of the state in the economy/government's policy-setting in general, popularized through Thatcher & Reagan's terms and running through much of the 90s. It tended to stress easing of regulations or privatization where the market-based approaches to solving policy problems were much more preferential than the governmental agenda-setting approach.
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Wow. You must be a disappointment to your civics teacher. You really should read up on how the interplay of the legislative and executive branches in the US work.
Edit: To elaborate more on this, it has always been held that the executive branch is given latitude in how they choose to execute the laws passed by the legislative branch. This is not a "bandaid", it's a logical solution, because it's unlikely that Congress will have more expertise in a field than the individuals working in the division of the government that will be responsible for the execution of the law.
The legislature legislates in broad strokes, and leaves the details to the executive. That's not a bug, that's a feature.
As for why it's responsible for this and things like it, it creates a system where corporations are not answerable to the public or even their workers (typically by not allowing unions or outsourcing labor when they strike). That the OSHA fined them is admirable I guess, but near as I can tell it doesn't really change anything. For example, they have fined BP 760 times for safety violations, yet they are still the largest provider of fuel to the Pentagon. If the public at large was aware of this, I doubt they would want BP to continue getting their contracts from the US government.
I've only posted in like two threads, and in the first (something about consumer ethics) I admit I really should have made an attempt to explain myself, but in the second (Israel's blockade of Gaza) I feel I explained my assertions quite well. Maybe you're mistaking me for a different poster?
Neoliberalism: originally a term bandied around by Latin American policy thinkers for proposed sets of market-oriented reform. Nowadays mostly used as a pejorative reference to sets of policies with a perceived excessive amount of faith of the goodness of markets.
The policies actually meant by the term vary according to the speaker's favorite hobbyhorses; I venture that most speakers who use it in a pejorative sense would not actually favor returning to a 70s policy framework (remember that the industrial complex and weakening of labor organizations was already well in hand by then; what has changed is a corresponding weakening of individual megacorporations and financialization).
In any case the term has largely lost its meaning; like "capitalism" or "socialism", the only thing one can really say to "X is bad!" is "what kind?" Most academic discussions clearly list the policies the speaker intends to refer to when invoking the term.
I do believe I have mistaken you for someone else. I apologize, good sir.
Why should a regulatory agency be allowed to change the rules after the fact? Isn't the point of regulations to specifically define behaviors and situations that are dangerous so as to avoid them? Wouldn't letting a regulatory agency rely on vague regulations simply open the door for more ambiguity in their regulations and enforcement process?
The sword of precedent cuts both ways here; if Walmart wins its battle, we all get stuck with the precedent too.
And I shouldn't really have to explain the problems of relying on the discretion of regulators post-Bush-II.
When we're writing the criminal code, do we make every single example of manslaughter a part of the code? No. Why should regulations be the same? I don't see a problem with OSHA stating that "If you let your employees die in a completely preventable manner, that's a violation."
Well, there is the legal/regulatory argument centring around situations where examples listed in policies are either exhaustive or illustrative and thus how a given statue is/should be implied.
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Yeah, that's less a problem of "relying on regulators" and more a problem of "what happens when you put the fox in charge of guarding the henhouse."
And the precedent that Walmart seeks to set is vastly more dangerous than the one OSHA wants. Just because there are no bright lines doesn't mean that things are being changed after the fact.
Edit: We're getting away from the topic, sorry TC. You can respond Ronya, I'll read it and leave it be.
no, but we did define different degrees of murder and manslaughter, so that every single person who ends someone's life isn't sentenced to death. And Walmart is arguing that "opening the store" is not a situation that was considered hazardous.
Again, just because there are no bright lines doesn't mean that things are being changed after the fact. You have heard of the "reasonable person" standard, right?
This is what Walmart is arguing though, that up to this incident a reasonable person wouldn't have considered "opening the store" a hazard. That it didn't fit the regulation in place, yet OSHA fined them.
Which is what makes Walmart's position so ludicrous. It's not that "opening the store" is a hazard, it's that "sending one person to open the doors when there's a large crowd pushing against them without any plans for controlling said crowd" is a hazard. You can't ignore the totality of the situation.
Edit: And as pointed out, the $7K fine is a fucking rounding error on Walmart's books.
A couple of important parts bolded there. Wal-Mart took many precautions, noticed the scene was possibly going to be bad, and reacted accordingly. I'm curious why no manslaughter charges were ever brought against the crowd. Then again, there's an awful lot of people to charge there... but I'd be ok with it.
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This is a stupid and completely terrible analogy. Stop it.
This is moving off-topic so I'll keep it short. Subsidized businesses and protected monopolies were even stronger prior to deregulation, and whilst the US still has protectionist policies in areas where lobbies are particularly strong, the degree of protection is considerably less (and many of these lobbies are labor lobbies, so both sides of the fence are tainted here). In 1967 JK Galbraith (yes, that Galbraith) observed that collapse or even shrinkage of businesses was far rarer than theory would predict, that competition was virtually absent, that the managerial technostructure had overpowered its nominal owners, and that the similarities of the nominally capitalist US economy to the nominally communist Soviet economy were stunning - both were, essentially, centrally-planned. And this of course extended throughout the capitalist and communist periphery states; virtually every developed country had industry and government closely intertwined, albeit under a variety of different labels (keiretsu in Japan, dirigisme in France, etc.)
Likewise the degree of US intervention in other countries was far greater; this was a period where the US was prepared to go to war to maintain its influence, as you may recall? And where companies like United Fruit really could get US government to depose foreign leaders?
Businesses are still powerful, and they still are political entities, but they exercise far less influence than they used to. And, of course, within businesses themselves power has generally shifted from the managers to shareholders.
Let's look at why OSHA levied the fine in the first place:
Walmart can add all the extra personnel they want - it won't do a bit of good if they don't know what they're doing. The hazard was caused by a lack of preparation by Walmart.
Yes, this is how it's always been done, and it's always been a stupid idea. The degree of detail that Congress devolves to the executive and especially the judiciary is way too large, and the latter really loves itself its interpretive precedent. Discretionary regulation in areas is inevitable but since discretion is only safe when subject to public attention, a proliferation of discretionary power invariably sucks. It was fine when the federal government didn't have to have over a thousand different agencies to deal all the myriad complexities of being a modern liberal democracy, but now it does and the US adapts or suffers. I'm predicting the latter, but I can always hope, yes?
This isn't a minor detail over subsection 13(a)(i) of section 4(b), or WalMart wouldn't be spending two million freaking dollars over it, as you have already pointed out. The $7k fine is tiny and irrelevant. The question over whether OSHA does have the power to regulate behavior that it hasn't explicitly proscribed is a fairly fundamental one.
The fact that bright lines don't exist isn't inherently bad.
What upsets me is that these mouth-breathing, asshole-sucking, fucking-sad-sack excuses for humans KILLED someone and TRAMPLED multiple others because they wanted to get a deal on something, and there's really not a damn thing we can do about it. We can impede their progress, making them move more slowly, and in a more organized fashion in the future, but their behavior is INEXCUSABLE. I really really really wish there was some way to punish the person that delivered the killing stomp, but also EVERY OTHER ASSHOLE in that crowd that was pushing, hurrying and otherwise helping to make this situation into what it was. :x