Obvious question: Are workers reliably better off at non-datacenter job sites in Europe? My suspicion is "no" - but nobody much cares about the actual workers.
Does that make it okay to get electrocuted at a data center?
Not to justify what is happening at data centers, but just enter "worker electrocuted" in the web search (be it Google or others) and read the news. There are hundreds if not thousands articles about that.
But on the Hacker News the news about accidents related Google clicks best. Everyone harvest clicks on news related to Google company.
No, but it would suggest a couple things to people who actually care about the workers:
- DC's are just a crime scene du jour. As always, the real problem is governments failing to enforce rules about worker health & safety, payroll fraud, etc.
- The folks getting excited about worker exploitation at DC's are not fresh converts to any worker-protection cause, just potential allies du jour.
This is The Guardian fermenting anti-data center sentiment, rather than doing interesting investigative journalism about worker conditions in Europe, even something as basic as comparing worker experiences, risks, injuries across industries or countries, etc.
Those comparisons could for example contextualize and frame whether the conditions they report on are abnormally high, unusually low, or average.