Philosophy 323

1
Philosophy 323

• Ethical Treatment of Employees
• Worker Safety

2
The Right to Risk Information

• Faden and Beauchamp examine the arguments
  surrounding the right of access to risk
  information and the right to refuse workplace
  hazards.
• Their thesis is that in order to claim that
  employees have freely assumed the risks of
  employment they must be aware of those risks and,
  lest the right to risk information be an
  essentially one, we must also recognize the
  derivative right to refuse workplace hazards.

3
OSHA

• Balances workers rights to a safe work place
  with the continued viability of business
• Generally safety improvements that offer
  substantial improvement in safety without
  threatening the continued function of the company
  are required
• Uses utilitarian cost benefit analysis to balance
  the costs to industry versus the savings to the
  economy as a whole

4
The Right to Risk Information

• The reasonable person standard
• What a fair and informed member of the relevant
  community would see as sufficient.
• Subjective standard
• What each individual would subjectively determine
  is a sufficient amount of information.

5
A Balancing Act

• Industry resists full disclosure of information
  because of trade secrets.
• OSHA balances between the safety concerns of
  employees and the viability of industry.

6
A Right to Refuse?

• A right to know is worthless without a right to
  refuse.
• Workers have the right to request an OSHA
  inspection if they believe an OSHA standard has
  been violated or an imminent danger exists.
• Have the right to participate in inspections.
• Are protected from retaliation for exercising
  their OSHA rights if there is a legitimate safety
  or health complaint.

7
Limits of OSHA

• OSHA does not cover small businesses (fewer than
  10 workers), federal, state, or municipal
  employees
• Does not require workplace health and safety
  committees
• Without collective bargaining power there is a
  concern that workers cannot sufficiently protect
  their workplace rights

8
Walkouts

• OSHA regulations allow for walk outs if there is
  a genuine danger of death or serious injury
  where workers jobs are protected.
• What about cases where risks are less serious or
  more uncertain?
• What if workers cannot afford the loss of pay
  when they walk out?
• Should employers be required to pay them?
• Legitimizes strike with pay which management and
  Congress have traditionally found unacceptable.

9
Standards for Justified Walkouts

• Good-faith subjective standard the worker
  honestly believes that a health hazard exists.
• Reasonable person standard requires the belief
  to be reasonable under the circumstances as well
  as sincerely held.
• Objective standard requires evidence, often
  established by an expert, that the risk exists.

10
Occupational Health and Safety

• Boatright examines the moral foundations for a
  right to occupational health and safety.
• He argues that the common law defense of
  voluntary assumption of risk is a faulty
  principle since it rests on how a right to a safe
  workplace is worked out.
• In the end he argues for a strong duty to not
  only provide safety information to employees but
  a duty to seek out safety information and a
  correlative right to refuse the hazards that are
  discovered or disclosed.

11
Safety vs. Health Hazards

• Safety Hazards generally involve loss of limbs,
  burns, broken bones, electrical shocks, cuts,
  sprains, bruises, and impairment of sight or
  hearing.
• Health Hazards factors in the workplace that
  cause illness and other conditions that develop
  over a lifetime of exposure.

12
Justification of a Right to a Safe and Healthy
Workplace

• Follows from the right to survival.
• Cost-benefit analysis essentially utilitarian
  reasoning balancing the costs to industry with
  the savings to the economy as a whole.
• Seems to be the motivation governing Congresss
  passing of OSHA.

13
The Question of Causation

• Direct Cause Companies are responsible for those
  harms that result directly from the actions of
  employers where the employer is at fault in some
  way.
• Two factors that allow employers to deny their
  actions are a direct cause
• Industrial accidents are typically caused by a
  combination of factors, often including the
  actions of workers themselves.
• It is often not practical to reduce the
  probability of harm any further than it has
  already been reduced.

14
VAR and Coercion

• Voluntary Assumption of Risk is a common law
  defense which claims that employees voluntarily
  (without coercion) assume the risk inherent in
  their work
• Coercion
• Getting a person to choose an alternative that he
  or she does not want.
• Issuing a threat to make the person worse off if
  he or she does not choose that alternative.
• A threat involves a stated intention of making a
  person worse off in some way.

15
Is it so easy?

• The defense of voluntary assumption of risk seems
  to be circular.
• Employers claim that they are freed from
  responsibility when workers assume the risks of
  employment without being coerced.
• However, whether employees are coerced or not
  depends on the right of employees to a safe and
  healthy workplace and the obligation of employees
  to provide it.

16
Is There a Right to Know about Risks?

• Autonomy in order to operate as an autonomous
  agent we must possess the requisite knowledge
  such that we may rationally make proper
  decisions.
• Utilitarian workers who are aware of hazards
  will be better able to protect themselves.
• Some economists hold that allowing market forces
  to determine the level of acceptable risk is the
  best means to secure welfare. This requires a
  trade-off between compensation and risks.
  However proper knowledge of the risks is required
  in order to successfully negotiate these
  trade-offs.

17
Corresponding Duties

• The right to knowledge about risk requires the
  fulfillment of four duties by employers
• the duty to reveal information already possessed
• the duty to communicate information about hazards
  through labeling, written communications, and
  training programs
• the duty to seek out existing information from
  scientific literature and other sources
• the duty to produce new information (i.e. through
  sponsorship of new studies).

18
Justifications for Refusing Hazardous Work

• The employee reasonably believes that the working
  conditions pose an imminent risk of death or
  serious injury.
• The employee has reason to believe that the risk
  cannot be avoided by any less disruptive course
  of action.