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Episode 205: The Great Neoliberal Burden Shift (Part II) - How Corporate America Offset Liability Onto Its Workers

Added 2024-07-10 15:29:20 +0000 UTC

"How Railroaders Are Killed; Train Crews Grow Careless," read a 1906 syndicated article. "There is a kind of personality who is accident-prone," reported the Kansas City Star in 1944. Amazon's safety programs are "designed to keep its nearly one million warehouse workers worldwide fit and limber," The Seattle Times claimed in 2021.

For well over a century, it’s been standard practice for corporations, and the media more generally– echoing these "information campaigns" – to skirt, defy, or prevent regulations by shifting the burdens of protection and wellness onto relatively powerless workers. Just as corporations have historically shifted blame onto "consumers," as we discussed last week, so too have they shifted blame, and punishment, onto their own workers, at great social cost and much private profit.

Of course, workers anywhere must bear some level of personal responsibility in matters of health and safety. But, as regulations have threatened their bottom lines, industries from railroads to retail, bolstered by US media, have seized upon this notion in order to render their workers the ones who bear ultimate responsibility for whether they’re healthy or sick, safe or injured, and in the most extreme cases, whether they live or die.

This is the second episode in a two-part series on what we're calling "The Great Neoliberal Burden Shift." Part I discussed how this burden shift harms consumers. On this episode, Part II, we examine this anti-regulatory PR strategy, looking at the past and present of corporate deflection of responsibility, how media enable this subtle – but effective – practice, and discuss how media campaigns and media coverage have let us internalize the pro-corporate effort to off-load responsibility for workplace health and safety from the bosses on to the workers.

This episode was produced in collaboration with Workday Magazine.

Our guest is the National Employment Law Project's Anastaia Christman.

Guest

Anastasia Christman is a Senior Policy Analyst at the National Employment Law Project.

Show Notes

Amazon Says Its Injury Rates Are Down. They’re Still the Highest in the Industry.

Ella Fanger | May 2, 2024 | The Nation

Amazon’s Outsized Role: The Injury Crisis in U.S. Warehouses and a Policy Roadmap to Protect Workers

Irene Tung, Nicole Marquez and Paul K. Sonn | May 2, 2024 | National Employment Law Project

In Denial: Amazon’s Continuing Failure to Fix Its Injury Crisis

April 2023 | Strategic Organizing Center

She Refused To Take a Drug Test Before Getting a Workplace Injury Treated—And Was Fired

Sarah Lazare | February 21, 2023 | In These Times

When Cars Kill, It’s Not an “Accident”

Jessie Singer | August 11, 2022 | Mother Jones

Amazon warehouse workers suffer serious injuries at higher rates than other firms

Jay Greene and Chris Alcantara | June 1, 2021 | The Washington Post

Dying to Work: Death and Injury in the American Workplace [Excerpt]

Jonathan D. Karmel | 2017 | ILR Press, Cornell University Press

What Can We Do?

Jonathan D. Karmel | 2016 | Emory Corporate Governance and Accountability Review

America's Largest Meat Producer Averages One Amputation Per Month

Cora Lewis | February 18, 2016 | BuzzFeed News

Inside Corporate America’s Campaign to Ditch Workers’ Comp

Michael Grabell and Howard Berkes | October 14, 2015 | ProPublica / NPR

The Demolition of Workers’ Comp

Michael Grabell and Howard Berkes | March 4, 2015 | ProPublica / NPR

Examining the foundation: Were Heinrich’s theories valid, and do they still matter?

Ashley Johnson | October 1, 2011 | Safety & Health Magazine

Confronting Blame-the-Worker Safety Programs

Nancy Lessin | May 19, 2010 | LaborNotes

Blame the Worker or Fix the Safety Hazard?

United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America

The Origin and Fallacies of Behavior-Based Safety: The UAW Perspective

Steve Mitchell | UAW Local 974

Progressive Era Investigations

U.S. Department of Labor

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Transcript

For a full transcript of this episode, go here. In the meantime, you can find transcripts of past episodes, live shows, Beg-a-Thons, Interviews and News Briefs here.

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