Cholla power plant near Joseph City, Arizona, photographed on Jan. 16, 2010.PDTillman/Wikipedia
In the singular search for profits, some corporations inadvertently kill humans. If this routinely occurs throughout an industry, this company may no longer serve a net positive social purpose for society and should be eliminated. This article provides a path to an objective quantifiable metric for determining when an entire industry warrants the corporate death penalty. First, a theoretical foundation is developed with minimum assumptions necessary to provide evidence for corporate public purposes. This is formed into an objective quantifiable metric with publicly-available data and applied to two case studies in the U.S.: the tobacco and coal mining industries. The results show the American tobacco industry kills 4 times more people per year than it employs, and the American coal-mining industry kills more than one American every year for every coal miner employed. The results clearly warrant industry-wide corporate death penalties for both industries in America. Future work is discussed to ensure industries only exist to benefit humanity in all the societies in which they operate.
“If we know that life trumps employment because you have to be alive to work,” author Joshua Pearce of Michigan Techological University told Michigan Tech News, “then for a company or industry to exist it must employ more people than it kills in a year. What this paper has done is set the minimum bar for industry existence.”
Full citation: Pearce, J. M. Towards quantifiable metrics warranting industry-wide corporate death penalties. Social Sciences,2019: 8(2), 62 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/socsci8020062.
Corporations and Health Watch 