This is an issue that a lot of those on the Left, probably the majority of people in society, are too dumb and stupid to be able to think about correctly. A family is suing the company Amazon because an Amazon driver accidentally hit a 2-year-old girl, causing the child's death. Those on the Left look at this in glee as a type of situation to take money from a big corporation. But here's the thing: Should Amazon actually be responsible for this accident? Should an employer who hires someone else to drive automatically be responsible if that person, while doing their job, accidentally runs someone over and injures them? Why shouldn't that person themselves be held responsible? And do we take more money from bigger companies than small companies, for the same accident? If so, that could easily bankrupt a small business. Do you want to force all employers to have to buy accident insurance to cover their employees? You do realize those costs are going to be passed down to the customer, right? It's just going to result in higher prices. YOU are going to be the one paying for it. You'd have to be a stupid dolt not to realize that! It's a tragic accident. But, why should the family get ANY money? (I could maybe see some money for burial expenses, but beyond that...) And if you want to "punish" the company, what exactly are they being punished for? Shouldn't the person actually driving the car be the one who is punished? Money is not going to even be able to put the situation right or make the situation better. But it gets more interesting than that. Because apparently Amazon foresaw this type of situation might happen and had a plan to avoid liability. Amazon contracted with a separate third-party company to employ its drivers. Meaning, Amazon is not actually the company directly employing the drivers. Instead of a gigantic company being the employer, you have a relatively small and more local contracting company - a company that's not worth much money and could easily be shut down, go bankrupt, and be restarted up all over again, under a different company name. That just demonstrates how STUPID and absurd the idea is many people have of wanting to hold the company responsible. Family Is Suing Amazon After Driver Hit and Killed Their 2-Year-Old (insider.com) You just know they want to scare big companies into a settlement. "Pay me $700,000 or I'll sue you for $3 million, and then there's a good chance you might actually have to pay it." Pretty much just forces the company to pay the settlement because that's the cheaper and less risky thing to do, when they know there's a high chance the courts would award money to the family.
The United states is Sue Central. Hilarious that you think it's only the left that will sue a corporation.
This whole idea and concept mostly started from the Left, but now several on the Right have caught on, viewing this as a viable legitimate strategy. But that's only because it was legitimized and normalized in the first place. I'm at least glad someone like you can see there's a problem.
This is what insurance is for, and if Amazon was being shady in its employment practices to try to save a few pennies on insurance, then they deserve to be taken for everything they have. I've taken a few accounting classes recently, and from the ethics sections of my study, it turns out that a company is legally responsible for the actions of its employees. At least, that's what I took away from it.
Should a company be responsible for its employees? That is a key question. And what exact sorts of situations should a company be responsible for its employees? Intentional criminal conduct? Or only accidental damage caused in the normal course of doing the job? How about accidental misconduct when the employee was especially responsible in some way, through reckless conduct? I think these are important questions, to society, the economy, the legal field, to define exactly.
I've absolutely no idea and neither do you. There is nothing in this article (and little-to-nothing in the linked one) about the actually incident, which would obviously be necessary to make any kind of judgement on responsibility or failures. In general terms, an employee and an employer will both share responsibility for the consequences of the actions of the employee on the job. It is perfectly possible that employers instructions, rules or provided equipment cause or contribute to the risk of accidents, and the employer obviously has responsibility for that. It is also possible for an employee to take (or fail to take) actions that lead to accidents, despite or in direct contravention of employer rules or instruction. That would be the responsibility of the employee. In a lot of situations like this one, there will be a combination of factors that lead up to an accident and so it isn't a case of simply assigning responsibility to one individual or organisation for the entire thing, but Identifying all of the factors, all of the responsibilities and all of the failures to determine what went wrong, as much to try to prevent it happening again as simply assigning blame. In principle no, but scale can be relevant. If an accident brings to light that a small company is overworking their three delivery drivers, the penalty would be lower than if a large company is doing the same with thousands of drivers. I'm pretty sure they already will be, especially for things like drivers. Standard car insurance generally won't cover commercial use so specialist insurance would be required. Regardless of whether that is actually manged and paid for by the company or individual drivers, both will be legally (and morally) responsible for ensuring it is in place. The same reason for pretty much any civil lawsuit - if the actions or inactions of someone else contributed to their loss and suffering. We don't know if that is the case here, but it could be, on the part of the individual driver and either or both of the companies involved. Wouldn't that imply that the employer does have some level of responsibility though? Regardless, this is a technicality that would need to be addressed in detail in the case. The paperwork isn't the be-all and end-all, the practical implications are key. If Amazon directions, rules or provisions imposed upon that third-party company contributed to the accident, Amazon could still share in the responsibility. How do you know the third-party employer is a small company? Also, if you're concerned about the third-party suffering as a result of this, wouldn't that support Amazon being the focus of the case. Shouldn't you be condemning Amazon for shifting legal liabilities on to other companies that couldn't survive the potential consequences of that? It is also perfectly possible that is the true motive of this family (or lawyers working for them) but even if that were the case, it still wouldn't automatically absolve any of the parties involved of any and all responsibility contributing to the accident.
In a lot of these type of lawsuits, it was almost a completely unforeseeable situation by the employer, but the people suing try to twist the facts and logic as much as possible to convince the court that it's the employer's fault, to be able to get the money from the huge company. For example, they might say if the employer did not do this thing, or had had a different policy, this particular accident wouldn't have happened; or that if the employer had done something else, they could have prevented the accident. This doesn't mean it was the employer's fault, but lots of people are too stupid to understand the difference. Could anyone please elaborate, if the employer did not do anything wrong, why should they be held financially responsible? Do people believe employers should be forced to have insurance, or act as insurance, in case anything goes wrong?
People on the left think that using the death of this child to start a thread you use as a vehicle to bash the left for no reason is pathetic.
These third party contracting companies are set up to try to avoid legal liability in case anything goes wrong. That's one of their main purposes. For that reason, the shell company itself is not going to be too big and is going to be designed to be expendable. Often the assets of the company itself (such as the trucks) are held by another shell company, so if the first company gets sued or goes bankrupt, they can't take the assets. In other words, in response to the stupidity of the American lawsuit system, business has responded with an equally absurd framework, trying to avoid liability under the law. If the shell company gets sued and goes bankrupt, it almost doesn't matter. The owners just immediately set up a new shell company to replace it. Everything remains the same as before (although maybe with a slightly different shell company name, for legal purposes). In reality, this most of the time doesn't happen because the courts already know it, so often the courts award the plaintiff very little money, because the shell company is so "small" in terms of actual financial assets.
Did you bother thinking about what I said? Do you understand it? What do you think? Or, as typical, people like you just don't care. Just don't care about facts and reality and logic, and what the right and sensible thing to do truly is.
I'd prefer for the problem to be solved than to play the blame game. This is just so stupid, it's frustrating. How society and courts can be so stupid to let this be normal and continue on.
I don't quite remember the details, so I won't take a stance on this. A quick internet search shows that the general idea is that a company is responsible for the actions of an employee while they are doing their job.
Then Amazon should have thought of that before it started its own delivery service. It's their service, their logo is painted on all of their delivery trucks. Actually, this case might convince them to put a little money aside with each order to act like insurance when something does go wrong one time out of millions of deliveries.
How can that be anything other than a bad thing though? Can we all absolve ourselves of any legal responsibility by paying someone else to work for us? Liability isn't a fixed volume that can be shifted or traded anyway. Adding more organisations or people to a process only spreads and expands the liability across all of them. It is certainly true that there are aspects of the American civil legal system which could be improved (and, to an extent, elsewhere too) but I wouldn't say it is so unbalanced as to justify large organisations (and wealthy individuals) unilaterally excluding themselves from the entire process. If the system is flawed, the efforts should be on improving the system, not to just allow those powerful enough to exempt themselves. If the courts already know, why would anyone needs to avoid facing the system entirely? If this is a spurious case, it should (and I expect would) be thrown out. It is at least equally possible that Amazon and/or the direct employer do have some responsibility for the underlying causes of the accident via rules or policy though. In that situation, only being required to legally face up to that is going to force them to change and improve and so reduce the risk of such a tragedy happening again. Isn't that what we should be focusing on?
Then, in other words, you do believe a company should be held liable for accidents committed by its workers, even when the company has not done anything wrong? Or do you think the insurance should only have to cover when the company makes a mistake, a bad decision, that caused the accident? I'm not asking you what is the law or common practice; I'm asking you what you think the law should be about this. Maybe you have no opinion because it's too complicated to think about?
First, let me say I'm not exactly sure I understand you, but I think I understand what you are saying. It's true that the financial burden of liability does ultimately fall higher up the chain, and ultimately on the final customers. But this is not always true. Think about a gigantic lawsuit that involving a huge amount of money and a bankruptcy of the third-party shell company. The bankruptcy can allow the entire process to shirk off that excessive responsibility. Which could either be a good thing or a bad thing. (A bad thing if the lawsuit award is just, a good thing if the lawsuit award is unjust) That's theoretically true, of course, in a perfect ideal world. But theory and reality are oftentimes very different. I'm not sure I would want this "loophole" eliminated while there is still such a huge widespread problem that exists in the American lawsuit system. With the courts being so dysfunctional, corporations have got to have ways to protect themselves. Even though I find the whole thing absurd.
I'm not talking about financial responsibility, I'm talking about moral and legal responsibility. Any financial aspect can be consequential but should be somewhat separate, only determined after actual responsibilities have been determined. A major part of the problem here is perception, largely due to presentation in the media, with an obsessive focus on money rather than preventing future harm. If a company implements policies that contribute to some injury or harm, that company has responsible for that. If a company contracts a second company but, as part of that contract, implements policies that contribute to some injury or harm, the second company also has some responsibility but the parent company isn't any less responsible. Whether the actual harm was caused by a direct employee or a contractor doesn't make any difference if the flawed policy originated from the same place. (note that I'm not declaring that I what happened in this specific case, it is just the principle under which such a suit can be legitimately brought against a parent company, like Amazon in this case) As a simpler example, if one person robs a bank, they are responsible for that. If ten people rob a bank, they don't each have 10% of the responsibility. I agree to an extent. The difference between us seems to be that I think efforts should be made to improve the system that arguably makes the "loophole" necessary but you just seem resigned to the status-quo. I'd also question whether the civil legal system in the US is quite as bad as you make out, or that it's flaws always (or even primarily) favour private individuals against huge corporations. I suspect one of the reasons the system doesn't get reformed is because if it were improved, lots of big companies and powerful individuals would face more legitimate cases for their crimes, negligence and corruption.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. There are two forms of legal responsibility: financial (have to pay money) and criminal (sent to prison). That doesn't make any sense to me. Responsibility should always add up to 100%. If the sum adds up to more than that, it's not logical. The only exception is criminal intent, but that's different and should only apply to individuals, not corporations. (We could have a long discussion about that, but I don't think I want to go down that rabbit hole with you here in this discussion. But I will quickly say that punishing someone for criminal intent goes beyond just the concept of ordinary "one for one" responsibility and justice)
