Guardian (Monbiot): The risks of a killing

[muriel_volestrangler]

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One of the few courageous things Daschle did was to oppose a law restricting the amount of compensation companies will have to pay to the victims of asbestos. Daschle believed that firms such as WR Grace, which used to manufacture asbestos insulation, should have to pay the full cost of the deaths and injuries they caused. Big business exercised its democratic rights to the tune of $14m, and the Republican John Thune was duly elected. Now the law will almost certainly be passed, and sufferers from one of the modern world's nastiest diseases - mesothelioma - will be paid roughly half the compensation they were due.
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Last week John Sunderland, the president of the CBI, thundered that "Britain's greatness was built on risk-taking". Today, thanks to the compensation culture, we suffer from a "reduction in personal responsibility" and a "collective aversion to risk". We need to learn from China, whose businesses enjoy the same "fearlessness about risk" as Britain's did during the industrial revolution.

What Sunderland has done is deliberately conflate two kinds of risk: the risk to which we expose ourselves, and the risk to which we expose other people. In the heroic age of industrial accidents, the "risk-taking entrepreneurs" might have lost their money if their products did not find a market, but their profits were dependent upon the risks of losing limbs, eyes, lungs and lives they imposed on their workforce. China's "fearlessness about risk" means that Chinese bosses are allowed to kill their workers. Sunderland is calling for precisely the "reduction in personal responsibility" he affects to despise. The entrepreneur shall not be held responsible for any of the risks he dumps on other people.

The shadow chancellor, Oliver Letwin, gave an almost identical speech to the Centre for Policy Studies in September. "The call to minimise risk is a call for a cowardly society," he said. "If we are to have a courageous society rather than a cowardly society, we need to abandon the rhetoric of risk minimisation." The shadow chancellor failed to explain why it is courageous to expose your workers to asbestos. Or why it is courageous to lie down meekly and die when your lungs have been trashed by your brave employer.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1352227,00.html