Pain And Suffering
link Hertz to fight Muslim workers suit over prayer breaks | Reuters.
When you read the article, you will notice a standard legal line which we see on a regular basis but which we mostly accept as background noise.
As restitution for the despicable and unreasonable demands of the Hertz company, the aggrieved workers want as part of their settlement, back pay plus damages for emotional pain and suffering. This little phrase has worked its way into western culture over the past few generations as one of the standard reparation demands in any grievance lawsuit. In doing some cursory research, there is no definitive record of how this standard restitution came to become part of most damages actions today. If anyone out there knows, by all means please enlighten me.
Being an evolved and sophisticated society, we no longer practice the eye for an eye stuff stipulated in the Bible and which practice is still adhered to even to this day in numerous Muslim cultures. The closest western cultures come to retributive justice is the death penalty for certain heinous crimes, but because of the lengthy appeals process, is actually more like the possibility of an eye for an eye, but first, 30 years on death row while we talk about it.
Instead, we substitute the notion that to alleviate whatever mental anguish was suffered by party A as a result of actions by party B, that a transfer of money from the aggriever to the aggrieved would be satisfactory compensation for the insult. It’s easy to see how this makes sense at some level and in fact every year, grotesque amounts of money changes hands in furtherance of this principle via tort lawyers, insurance companies, aided by all and sundry types of experts in damages lawsuits.
In many cases, such as the one referred to in the article, the ability to place a dollar value on the extent of the insult is iffy at best. If the folks described in the article are wanting compensation for the time they were not allowed to pray, divide the hourly rate of pay by the minutes lost to praying and voila, it’s done. I’d hazard $10 tops. Any more than that and a case could be made that there was more time spent praying than driving cars around…in which case, Hertz should really hire legitimate workers.
In many other cases, the notion of making someone pay as compensation for some aggrievance, real or imagined has become an end in of itself. The spectre of having to battle lawyers in both the courts of public opinion as well as the legal courts that are staffed with learned but misguided jurists has contributed mightily to the costs of mostly everything that people consume today from aspirins to x-boxes.
One of the more transparently greedy schemes to extort money in the guise of compensation came recently in a headline from the Durban climate talks. There was a proposal that the U.N. was to be granted the power to tax or fine nations that exceeded some fanciful metric of climate transgression. This body is to be named (in an orotund voice) The International Climate Court of Justice, not to be confused with the old Justice League of America. This body would have the power to enforce nations to pay ‘climate debt’.
The lack of logic of this proposal is stupefyingly obvious. If the climate transgressions are as imminently fatal to the earth as they all claim, what good will transferring money to the U.N. do? Presumably, this money will go towards alleviating emotional pain and suffering for…well, someone. If we’re all gonna die because of flatulent cows and aerosol hairspray, why bother moving money around from one pocket to another? How is having some extra cash going to help you if the seas rise and the atmosphere turns into a solid? If on the other hand, there were some guarantee that this proposed pool of fine money were to be spent on spaceships to send Global Warming alarmists off to another planet, then I’d be all in favour of the idea.
However, like the Hertz employees, the end game for the Global Warming crowd is the same; it’s just extortion at a larger scale. At the moment at least, the chances of such an outcome are low. At least I pray it is.