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

Jul 10, 2024

The podcast discusses how corporations shift safety responsibility onto workers to save costs. It explores historical blame shifting onto employees for accidents. Amazon's workplace safety issues and corporate PR strategies are scrutinized. The impact of misclassifying workers and lax safety enforcement is highlighted. The importance of government regulators and unions in ensuring workplace safety is emphasized.

56:00

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Quick takeaways

Corporations shift safety responsibility onto workers by emphasizing personal behavior over systemic hazards.

Anti-regulatory PR tactics help companies evade accountability by framing workers as solely responsible for health and safety.

Behavioral safety programs place burden on workers, overlooking corporate role in ensuring safe workplaces.

Deep dives

The Shift of Responsibility in Workplace Health and Safety

Corporations have historically offloaded responsibility for workplace health and safety onto workers by promoting the idea of a 'culture of safety'. This strategy involves focusing on workers' behavior rather than addressing systemic hazards. The podcast highlights the ways in which companies evade accountability by emphasizing personal responsibility for health and safety, ultimately placing the burden on workers.

Intro

2min

Analyzing Corporate Responsibility Shift from Employers to Workers

2min

Shifting Blame: Corporate Liability for Workplace Accidents

8min

Amazon's Workplace Safety and Corporate PR Strategy

6min

Shifting Liability onto Workers in Corporate Culture

26min

Enforcement of Workplace Safety Regulations and Support for Low-Wage Workers

6min

Corporate Responsibility and Worker Liability

6min

"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.

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Citations Needed

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

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

Deep dives

The Shift of Responsibility in Workplace Health and Safety

Regulatory Deflection and Corporate Responsibility

The Impact of Behavioral Safety Programs

Cost-Benefit Analysis in Workplace Safety

Challenges in Ensuring Workplace Safety and Accountability

Remember Everything You Learn from Podcasts