It may well be (and it certainly sounds it in this case), but I wouldn't always just assume profit > cost logic. When you're dealing with heavy machinery and machines that can kill with a half second of inattention or slip, then deaths will occasionally happen regardless of how careful you try to be.
It's all just a game of numbers. If something is 99.99% safe then that sounds great, but that means a failure rate of 1 per 10,000 which means you're going to see large numbers of those fails. This is why even in a society of perfect drivers you'd likely still see thousands of people killed in crashes each year. There's enough entropy, and a large enough sample, that deaths will always remain relatively high.
A relative of mine has managed building sites in the UK for decades. Nobody has ever died or had a life-changing injury. The site in the story has had multiple incidents just this year.
What's the difference?
The fines for safety failures leading to deaths in the UK are frequently six figures and sometimes seven. So management takes safety seriously and accident rates are very low.
The fatality rate in the UK is 2.4 per 100k workers. [1] In the US it's exactly 4x at 9.6 per 100k workers. [2] That's a large difference, but obviously it's not like a something vs nothing type scenario.
And the difference is probably caused by worker quality than anything else. In the US a significant chunk of construction workers are in the country illegally, and tend to be relatively unskilled but willing to work hard, rarely/never complain, and work for very low wages. The article mentions that 475 workers were detained by ICE for this company in a single raid.
Obviously companies should be held liable for hiring people in the country illegally, but it comes down to plausible deniability. The applicant puts forth some fake documentation, including experience/qualifications alongside citizenship proof, and even if the employer knows it's most likely fake, they now have plausible deniability of the 'gosh I just had no idea' type.
Though I have to acknowledge I am ostensibly contradicting myself here as this is easy to see as a profit > cost type thing, but it's also not easy to overcome if one wants to take a politically correct approach to things. I can all but guarantee that the machinery operator in this case produced certifications and proof of competence, and was being managed by somebody comparably qualified, according to their papers. So it's a somewhat more nuanced situation than it might seem.
British construction workers are like construction workers everywhere. They like to ignore safety measures and cut corners so they can get the job done as quickly as possible and make more money. They constantly need management to tell them no. This costs everyone money so management won't do it without fairly strong incentives.
That is not how construction works. In construction you're generally paid hourly, and workers can often be aware of issues that may not be readily apparent to management. Construction workers play a very active role in the process and are largely responsible for overall outcomes, not only for the building but for themselves as well. Good, skilled, experienced construction workers and you're generally going to have a pretty good outcome. Poor quality workers and you're going to have a poor quality outcome far more than otherwise necessary.
It's generally management that has the desire to rush the project forward and may be looking to cut corners. Good workers help create a favorable balance between economic concerns and practical outcomes. But needless to say when you get a bunch of workers who are just the cheapest possible, may have fabricated experience, and who will generally be willing to do anything to not risk losing their job, it's going to create a very dangerous situation for both themselves and the job at hand.
> Good workers help create a favorable balance between economic concerns and practical outcomes.
Workers soon become inured to their daily risks and will adopt unsafe working practices if it increases their efficiency. Sure, they'll complain about other people's working practices if they pose a danger to them, but they will not self-regulate. If you doubt this look at the builders working on small jobs like domestic roofs and extensions where there is no management. They will not be following the rules.
I'm talking about my experience of the UK. I guess you're talking about America. The incentives are different. Not least because many British workers are self-employed and working "on a price". The big construction firms directly employ approximately nobody.
I'm not sure very small scale construction is relevant in this case. I've worked in this exact sort of job before and like you said it's mostly self employed or very near it. And, at least in my case, we literally didn't know a single rule or regulation. It's not like you go grab the hundreds of pages of ever-shifting regulations and memorize them before you start working. And the chances of getting any sort of governmental audit is very near zero.
But in this case you tend to get involved in the work because you enjoy construction and you want to do a good job for the sake of doing a good job. It's like programming. If there weren't external forces, it's not like programmers want to do a haphazard job - but they end up getting pulled in a dozen different directions and, at the end, making code that won't even be formally attributed to them. I suppose one huge difference is also in construction if you do a poor job, you can end up getting sued for everything you own - whereas in code when code crashes, people just shrug.
It's all just a game of numbers. If something is 99.99% safe then that sounds great, but that means a failure rate of 1 per 10,000 which means you're going to see large numbers of those fails. This is why even in a society of perfect drivers you'd likely still see thousands of people killed in crashes each year. There's enough entropy, and a large enough sample, that deaths will always remain relatively high.