Chelsea Sugar (also known as the New Zealand Sugar Company) has been fined $149,500 for importing and selling sugar products tainted with lead.
More than 970 tonnes of products were manufactured from sugar contaminated during sea transportation from Australia, resulting in the company recalling thousands of products in late 2021.
Two more recalls were needed when it was revealed incorrect information was provided to supermarkets resulting in more tainted goods being released to consumers.
If one company spends millions trying to do the right thing and got driven to bankruptcy by a mistake that could have happened to any large company, the other companies might instead just not do anything except the bare minimum then spend that money on insurance.
Edit: this is now hypothetical as it’s been pointed out to me they were not trying to do the right thing.
If a company spends millions and still doesn’t get it right then the punishment should encourage the remaining businesses to spend even more and actually get it right. Clearly those millions weren’t enough.
Unfortunately under capitalism we aren’t allowed to hold people personally responsible for harming others via corporations. The only thing we can do is to hold the shareholders responsible. In other nations it’s not uncommon for the CEO or even the board to be arrested and jailed for harming the public.
This might be an agree to disagree situation but if the company runs for 50 years and has one mistake like this, I don’t think the intent should be to bankrupt them because they screwed up.
I screw up in my job from time to time and no one is firing me because mistakes happen and we learn from them.
Depends on the mistake. If worked for a company for 50 years and your mistake killed a person you’d most definitely be fired. If you cost the company a significant client or a significant amount of money you’d most definitely be fired.
A corporation mistake could kill a thousand people or ten thousand people so they should be held to an even higher standard.
What if the mistake didn’t kill anyone?
Also I disagree that those examples would get you fired. They are examples of times when you might get you fired, but this isn’t the US, there would need to be due process. There are plenty of times when losing money wouldn’t necessarily get you fired (finance industry comes to mind), and even some circumstances when killing someone wouldn’t necessarily get you fired (certain circumstances for commercial drivers come to mind).
The devil is in the detail.
Depends on the mistake like I said. I know people who were fired for messing up an important contract. I know people who were fired for deleting a database in production. One time somebody I know got fired because he posted something embarrassing about the CEO of the company.
As an employee your employer can fire you for lots of reasons.
Yeah, my starting point in this post was giving them the benefit of the doubt, because it depends on the detail. But then it seemed I didn’t absorb the article properly because it seems the detail does not look good for Chelsea.