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- cross-posted to:
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Daihatsu, the Japanese automaker owned by Toyota, has halted domestic production after admitting it forged the results of safety tests for its vehicles for more than 30 years.
I don’t think that’s the way to do it. The workers who have nothing to do with it get shafted by losing their jobs and there is a little less competition in a world where there isn’t enough in some industries. I think long jail sentences will the best deterrent. Fines only do so much. C-level executives needs to start going to jail.
Shutter a company and instead of a fine force the company to continue paying those workers at full pay for a defined amount of time like 5-10 years.
where is the money going to come from if they can’t sell anything?
If they don’t have the cash on hand to survive payroll for 5 years they’ll have to liquidate assets and let people know they won’t be able to reopen so should try and find employment elsewhere while using the asset to pay them for the 5 year period wether they get a job elsewhere or wait to get a job after that 5 years.
Doesn’t that ultimately punish not the company, but anyone who lent money or sold material to the company? Usually assets would be liquidated to pay off creditors but if all the assets go to employees creditors don’t get paid. This really hurts all the small businesses who sold supplies or materials to the company and haven’t been paid for them yet.
And of course, this all ignores the fact that for most companies most of their valuation is in their intellectual property, mainly their brand identity and recognition. And for manufacturing company’s, even most of the tangible assets are going to be things like factory buildings and equipment. Those things are all highly specialized so it’s very difficult to get someone else to come in and use that space to the same level of productivity. That will result in major damage to the local economy when a huge source of tax revenue and jobs suddenly disappears.
I’m not saying all this because I think companies should get away with whatever they want. Not at all. I just want to give some context for why these “obvious solutions” aren’t being used. It’s not that the entire world is in some conspiracy. Many of these problems are legitimately very difficult to solve.
It would require a large overhaul of how the system currently works but eventually things would be priced into the risk a company poses. History of unethical decisions, choice of CEO and board members, etc. where lenders would require higher rates. Also companies may instead be forced to sell their IP instead of liquidate assets. Also maybe 5-10 years might be overkill and more feasible lengths of time could be 1-2 months because people choosing companies to supply them will be less likely to choose those which could have a month long disruption to their supply.
Also I just thought of this in 5 minutes for a random comment. I’m sure there’s plenty wrong with the idea but that doesn’t mean there’s not some form of the concept which could be feasible. It would probably require a committee of 10+ experts to write up something like that.
5 - 10 years is a bit much, but liquidate the entire company, assets, buildings, real estate, etc. pay the executives $0, and continue salaries for as long as possible with those funds.
But that would encourage workers to speak up if they see their companies doing something wrong because it could make everyone lose their jobs. I think that would be a benefit overall.
I agree people should go to jail too. For sure