I've never heard of a US employer that made someone clock out to don protective gear.

That feeble capitalist excuse won't fly in Europe. Health and Safety legislation in most (all?) of Europe requires workers to take effective safety measures for their own and others safety; it's part of the job.

A. How many unions agree to this? (Yes, in principle, they can, but is this common practice?)

B. This is Europe, not the United States, therefore irrelevant to the original article.

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.

How many times has this happened? Reading the article it seems like a handful of times over the last ten years in the entire European continent. No matter what you do you'll never get the accident rate to zero, and that seems pretty low.

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.

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.