Boeing's defense contracts make it too big to fail.
Sure, huge fines might deflate its shares/exec's comp packages, but I don't think the risk of giant fines endangers Boeing the way they might other businesses.
This concept of 'too big to fail' is eventually going to come a cropper when something deemed as such, fails anyway and wipes out entire industrial sectors from the dependent country.
The idea behind being too big to fail is that the full faith and credit of the US government will be used to prop you up if necessary. Failing anyway? Go back to step 1.
A real fine that targets the company is not a deterrent. All the damages get to trickle down to employees, customers, partners, etc. The punishment has to be applied to the individual who knowingly broke the law. Taking a bad business decision is one thing, hiding behind corporate accountability after you falsified records to get that bonus should be punished with both prison time and fines.
Unfortunately part of that bonus probably went to "lobbying" so don't hold your breath for the moment when laws will be about actual justice.
When I hear this arguments, I just wonder, why does the argument always apply "to the executives," and not all of the employees down the line that signed off on a given decision. I think the reason we don't adopt more of these rules is that it's kind of naïve, in my opinion, to blame the problem on only part of the parties involved in a given decision. This would then have to be coupled with better whistle-blower protections, giving employees a right and duty to call out bad behavior.
> why does the argument always apply “to the executives”
Because the power asymmetry between executives and workers is vast and continuously growing. Executives are phenomenally powerful powerful people within these industries, whose influence and interests make it possible for such scandals to take place. And they’re the ones truly incentivized to cut corners and break rules in order to meet deadlines, generate as much growth as possible, etc.
Whistleblower rights, at least in the US, are completely insufficient to enable your vision of corporate oversight. Whistleblowers risk their careers, reputations and livelihoods, and often there’s no guarantee that blowing the whistle changes anything. Who makes such retribution not just possible, but inevitable? Executives.
> why does the argument always apply "to the executives," and not all of the employees down the line that signed off on a given decision
Because the executives are given a lot of power over those employees, they are paid accordingly, and they are privy to far more information to aid them in taking a decision.
A CEO is paid over 300 times more than the average worker. [0] Multiply that by a factor to represent the authority of the position, and the acute awareness of what those actions represent and you should get the magnitude of the difference in accountability.
> giving employees a right and duty to call out bad behavior.
You already have this right. But you either do it to the authorities at great personal expense (in any way you can imagine) and with far higher burden of proof, or you do it internally in front of another executive. There is no incentive to take any action because the executive will always have the company as a shield in front of the law.
Accountability is a word people use to express their loyalty to the organization. It's supposed to mean a commitment to correct something that went wrong. As long as we have organizations that are bigger than people, it's not going to be possible to follow a strict eye-for-an-eye principle. If an organization kills hundreds of people, like Boeing, you can only execute the CEO once.
> In ethics and governance, accountability is answerability, blameworthiness, liability, and the expectation of account-giving.
Accountability should be there to make sure those people wielding all the financial power and influence of an entire company don't use it for their own interest regardless of consequences. Unless all that financial power and influence are used to create favorable laws...
> If an organization kills hundreds of people, like Boeing, you can only execute the CEO once
So better do nothing, maybe they stop, right? Are you saying that committing more crimes than you can be punished for should be a get out of jail free card? Put that CEO in jail for life and all others will take notice. And depending on the country this will mean "pay more to get favorable laws".
I am not the CEO of Boeing. Why do you think I care if he is executed or imprisoned? I'm just saying that it's impossible to extract the value that someone destroys by being a bad leader, from that leader, because shit that breaks is usually far too big.
If it was possible to get good results by executing executives who fail, wouldn't it follow that some country would have already tried it and been eating our lunch by now? Wait a second, there is a country that comes to mind...
> it's impossible to extract the value that someone destroys by being a bad leader, from that leader, because shit that breaks is usually far too big.
Then you extract everything you can from that "leader" and move on to the next one responsible. Are you saying that Boeing's CEO could smash a couple of planes into some skyscrapers and get away because you can't extract the value from him? Laws also have the deterrence aspect. When you pick up that fat paycheck it comes with the responsibility. Unless you can buy your own justice. Make a list o high ranking executives or politicians that ended up in prison in the US...
And don't play with words, knowingly falsifying documents is not "being a bad leader" it's "being a criminal".
Here's your idea in a more mundane example: a driver intentionally plows into a crowd killing 2+ people. He can't pay back the damage having a single life to give himself so we'll just blame the car.
> If it was possible to get good results by executing executives who fail, wouldn't it follow that some country would have already tried
[note: "executing" was your term, mine were prison time and fines]
Oh but they did [0]. Just not with local companies in countries with extremely powerful lobby groups, where laws are written by CEOs. So the CEO of a US company like Boeing will never see the inside of a US prison. And since Boeing is so deep in US military contracts, I'm sure pressure will be put on any country that thinks of indicting him.
At a minimum when an employee gets punished we should also take a close look at the chain of command and work environment. Very often it's the executives setting up a dysfunctional environment where it's hard for the little guy to do the right thing. I work at a medical device company and my standards definitely go down sometimes when there is too much deadline pressure. It's a very subtle decline of morale and quality that happens over time.
We license engineers and many other similar professions.. perhaps we need an "executive" license, complete with certifications and standards and a long "journeyman's training" period before we trust you with the massive amount of power, both real and abstract, that can come with one of these positions.
We may never be able to hold them criminally liable with much success, but we could much more easily invalidate their license and prevent them from holding any similar position for a very long time. Which, for some reason, seems far more just than simply jailing and possibly fining them.
Would it make sense to you to also have a licensing scheme for politicians? After all, we don't even require them to be non-criminals under existing law (at least in my jurisdiction).
In France a lot of politicians went to an administration school (real dorky stuff, state accounting rules, procurement rules, how to interact with other countries etc.), but we have the same complaints about them. Also to be fair they have slightly better objective result with a longer life expectancy, but nothing extremely better.
We don't license software engineers, who essentially create the foundation of modern society. Just today, there was a news story about Boeing employing offshore contractors at $9/hr to write software for 737 MAX.
Nearly all large software companies utilize whiteboard coding quizz as a way to measure the quality of their candidates.
Imagine what would happen when the modern crop of javascript developers start working on avionics?
I don't know what's worse - an incompetent politician or an incompetent software developer. Think heartbleed, microsoft windows updating in the middle of surgery, Mars mission crashing because someone mixed imperial and metric units...
We may never be able to hold them liable (because people who write the laws are also corrupt and incompetent), and we will never be able to weed out incompetence in our technical infrastructure (because, frankly, most of us [me included] are lazy, incompetent, greedy, and selfish.
Well, they were caught (warned about it), so they came clean. It's still a bit troubling that they didn't detect themselves. Better than nothing I suppose.
I wouldn't characterize being caught out and warned about it, and then saying "Oh... you're right, let's report this." As necessarily the same thing as "self-audit"-ing and "self-report"-ing.
If we're going to characterize the article as misleading, I think the same can be said of your post.
The page says the records stated that manufacturing work had been completed when it had not.
If that statement is correct then it means Boeing or someone at Boeing had been lying to the FAA and that would be a rather big deal in line with the headline.
We learned all about it in common core engineering classes in Canada, even as software engineers. Crazy that nobody to my knowledge has been able to replicate what the pilot did.
Higher pay grades equal higher responsibilities. Accountability for an incident cannot ever sit with a single individual in an organization, nor should it sit with no individuals. Why was this allowed to occur? What processes failed? If it’s an endemic issue, getting rid of employees at the bottom won’t prevent future issues and potentially future loss of life.
That's a simple question with a complex answer. The answer is 'it depends'. Yes, there definitely are cases where execs should be jailed for their employees crimes, and others where that definitely should not be the case.
For instance, if an employee of a company embezzles a bunch of money from either a customer or the company itself then the execs should typically not be culpable. But, if the execs themselves were the ones that ordered the employee to do this, either directly or through the 'nudge, nudge, wink, wink' method of communications (and there is corroborating evidence that this indeed happened, for instance the issues not being limited to single employees but being institutionalized) then yes, they should definitely be punished as though they themselves were the ones doing it.
It should not be possible for executives to use employees as a cut-out layer when crimes are committed.
Sure, but the more likely way in which these things go is: "Do what you have to do to make us pass those emissions tests" and "Get rid of that industrial waste" and so on.
No clear command to do something illegal but the employee is left with two choices: do something illegal or end up not doing what they were told to do.
Culpability is a thing that can be smeared out effectively across the layers of a large organization where each layer only sees the delta between the one above it and the one below it, the people that know the law and the consequences are safely (or so they think) insulated from the hands that commit the crimes and the hands that commit the crimes typically don't know the law.
This situation has - as far as I know - never really been addressed explicitly in the law hence the institutionalization of 'the buck stops at the top'. Even if you don't know and even if you did not order it explicitly you are - and should - still be held responsible. The question at hand is if that should include criminal liability for all cases where the employees break the law and I think there are plenty of cases where employees breaking the law should not lead to culpability of management, for instance, those cases where employees gain an advantage for themselves at the expense of the company, the customers or the society they operate in. But in most other cases where the company gained an advantage the execs should be liable. That alone will get companies to behave like good (immortal) citizens.
My point is to exactly prevent this level of leeway being given to an employee. The execs must make it clear in writing how to do a significant task. If they do not, they are culpable for the outcome just as if they eg. forged the results themselves.
That has a serious problem: you can not possibly see in advance what people are going to do and if there is one thing I've learned from a couple of decades of programming and working with teams no matter how clear you thought your writing was there will always be something or someone that will take the last bit of ambiguity and interpret it in some creative way.
That's why there is such a huge gulf between US law and EU law: in the US, the letter of the law is all that matters, in the EU, where laws are a lot more ambiguously specified it is the spirit of the law that matters. So an EU executive could be found liable because the company violated the spirit of the law whereas a US executive would walk even though both companies would do the exact same thing. But once the letter of the law is violated - especially in so-called white collar crime - there is still no guarantee of a conviction because corporations have very large budgets to protect their execs and to try to find some legal loophole.
I'm (very well possibly because I'm European) more in favor of laws that are interpreted as to the spirit of the law, simply because it makes people reason from some level of goodwill rather than by trying to maximize the take by legal hair splitting.
> in the US, the letter of the law is all that matters
This is very wrong. In common-law jurisdictions (which the U.S. is broadly-speaking one example of - some exceptions may apply which are not relevant here), judicial precedent is a key factor in interpreting "the letter of the law", which is not the case in continental/civil law. This means that a vaguely-written statute can still provide some meaningful legal certainty in the U.S., where precedent provides some commonly-understood and commonly-developed guidance to what "the spirit of the law" might be; whereas in civil law jurisdictions, overly vague or ambiguous laws can only result in judges and government officials exerting arbitrary power (and in fact this happens routinely!), with not even consistency over time (much less some even more consistent "spirit of the law"!) as a real check and constraint.
So, you're suggesting that we should let those who perpetuate cultures like falsifying records to continue to exist in industry without punishment when they are directly responsible for the harm that happens?
That sounds patently ridiculous.
The culture comes from the top. It's super easy for them to allow people lower down to take the fall for something they pressured subordinates to do.
Shoot, just look at Wells Fargo last year.
The higher ups said that those lower needed to boost account signups, so, suddenly people found themselves signed up with accounts they had never signed up for.
But we blame those lower for following an order, even if it's an implied order, because they were the ones who did the deed. It was so hard to link Al Capone to murder they had to get him for tax evasion.
He called the shots, but others took the shots.
So, when you say that it's ridiculous to target those execs who are setting the standards which are causing these problems, these deaths, you got some screw loose up there friend, because those execs are getting paid hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars, while those doing what they are told so that they can keep their job are just trying to eat and pay rent.
Without any real knowledge of this situation, I'm pretty comfortable saying that anyone reporting this isn't perpetuating the culture. But, let's not jump to conclusions...
But even following direct orders is not an excuse to break the law. The notion that people shouldn’t be held liable for breaking the law under even less pressure is insane.
I would look higher still: It's the board of directors that hold the CEO's feet to the fire to produce a smooth stream of rising profits. If they could take bad news e.g. revenue shipments will slip while bad designs get reworked, then more CEOs would deliver that bad news. The root of the problem is systemic, and the blame should go all the way up.
All the revelations regarding Boeing are pretty damning. Though it seems they are too big to fail with defence contracts, huge market share and thousands of planes already in service, that will need continued maintenance. It is a worldwide duopoly, just Boeing and Airbus.
So where too from here? I can't see the USA ever jailing executives - but potentially they could ramp up the fines?
In my opinion we need Europe and other countries to begin heavily fining companies skirting their responsibilities, because what we are doing at the moment is obviously not working.
"In my opinion we need Europe and other countries to begin heavily fining companies skirting their responsibilities"
Well, the cliche when stuff like this happens is that the company diverted too much money to stock buybacks, dividends, and so on, leaving their actual business operations starved for resources. So, sounds reasonable, but how then does diverting more money to more external entities cause them to do better? I'm not arguing against it, I just don't understand what the rationale is. I think it's unwise to try to punish an abstract entity without thinking carefully about how it will affect the actual people involved.
A stock buyback decreases external liability. It may decrease liquidity for the company, but the asset tied up in that Stock is still retained, and remaining stocks increawe in share value accordingly. This can increase liquidity in the long run, by stimulating demand whilst supply dwindles. It all depends on the Market.
The fine, to my understanding, extracts liquidity whilst also leaving all existing liabilities intact. It "sets the company back'. As it were. At least, that's how it works to my meager understanding.
If that isn't, could you go into detail about what really happens?
That is my understanding as well. The GP suggested that fines would be ineffective because resources were “spent” on stock buybacks. I asked for clarification of the GP’s understanding of the difference between buybacks and fines.
I do not care to argue the consequences of stock buybacks, because I was just referring to a commonly held opinion, not endorsing it. If you want to dispute how it works, could you please not frame it as a vague argument with me.
Wasn't framing it in an argumentative manner. What was written seemed to be phrased in a way that indicated the author had an expectation of the existence of a shared context, not in need of articulation.
I offered an articulation of what I've come across through research to be the eventual outcome of a stock buyback, and how it differs from a fine, along with some encouragement to share what knowledge you may have that contradicts it.
It's not the first time I missed the bus on some common understanding after all, and I don't mind learning something new.
We also need to think of ways to invert the incentives. Right now, most of these are public companies, who are incentivized to hide details because (mostly idiotic) shareholders do bad things to the stock price when they reveal any kind of technical issues.
If I were a shareholder, I'd actually bid up a stock if they were forthcoming and honest, because I value transparency, scientific rigor, and admitting fault where it is due. I would inherently consider such a company to be more valuable in the long term.
Unfortunately 99.99% of investors would do the exact opposite and short the stock; their actions are the exact opposite of an honesty-valuing system.
You may find LTSE.com interesting. It stands for “Long Term Stock Exchange”. It is an ongoing attempt to create a new stock exchange, with rules meant to discourage short-term minded investors.
They ripped off rich people ... no evidence Boeing has done that.
I realise this is a pretty low-effort comment, however, there is an alarming lack of accountability both in the US and the UK when lives are lost, but not when wealthy, connected, people have had their money lost. See also the Grenfell Tower.
> Boeing said it self-disclosed the problem to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration after Air Canada notified them of the fuel leak.
> The records stated that manufacturing work had been completed when it had not.
> "immediate corrective action was initiated for both the Boeing mechanic and the Boeing inspector involved."
So "Boeing" didn't falsified records, 2 of their employees did.
Now, whether Boeing's company culture (tight deadlines? overworked employees?) contributed to this or not, is another story, but, the headline is misleading; borderline dishonest.
Wouldn’t that mean that a company can never be responsible for the output of the company? At every level, anything is just “a couple of employees”. The headline is reasonable.
Absolutely this. There is a tendency in higher management circles to only want paper trail created after a decision to deal with or dismiss an issue is made. I never realized why until I found out about e-discovery.
You can get around this somewhat by fulfilling their request to be notified without paper trail, then immediately e-mailing them and everyone involved with a copy of the problem discussed, the decision made, the reasoning behind the decision (including attribution to who said what), and the the action plan moving forward.
If you really feel uncomfortable about it, include the weather outside the office day. It seems silly, but it can lead to some interesting lines of questioning in legal proceedings, and it also serves as a canary to those paying attention to what you are concerned may be in the future moving forward. Sometimes this may kindle a more in-depth review of the subject matter at hand.
People may think you're weird. However, most just file it under "there is no communication like over-communication."
"If you really feel uncomfortable about it, include the weather outside the office day. It seems silly, but it can lead to some interesting lines of questioning in legal proceeding"
Sure, but is it really a question here that Boeing definitely would not try to hide this in the first place?
Why would Boeing willingly and knowingly ship a plane with a fuel leak? They know a fuel leak has an extremely deadly potential.
What could _possibly_ be the interest for Boeing to ship _one_ plane with a fuel leak? If that was a systematic thing, then yes why not, we could say they hid it on purpose. But here it doesn’t make sense.
Why not punish both the corporation AND the employees? Civil punishment for the corporation, criminal charges for the individuals.
We need not seek financial damages from the wage slaves, but the corporation should be disincentivized from grinding people into unsafe corners with unreasonable demands for effort.
I m willing to bet these two employes where new when they made that decision. New to the company- and most likely new to the industry and the world of employment.
The trainees are always the ones who have these disgusting conversations with middle-management, where the manager specifys a goal or asks for something, that is clearly either illegal or creates great risks for the employee. In industrial automatization, its usually the request to temper with security settings, progams and sensors - "to make production more efficient". There is never a paper trail, there is always plausbile deniability, and if something happens, because another employe dances around some deactivated light-grid into a running maschine and gets squished by a robot, the guy who made the last change (when and what is usually chronicled by a hash over the security programs)is going out of a job, into prison for manslaughter. Even if he is found not guilty, he wont be touched by companys, while the investigation is hanging over him/her.
The industry which had the accident then promptly has a change of heart, vows that "never again will such a thing happen." Security is tightend, machines reinvestigated, and reprogrammed to remove all those procedures who where created to circumvent the sec-tax slowdown. After this, those in managment who survived the affair, are promoted, new fresh faces, replacing the old guard, asking why this or that cant be more efficent, and wether that new trainee could not temper with the program. The cycle of screw begins anew.
My recommendation is that a CEO has to wear a permanently active 360° sealed camera + mic on the shoulder. Middle Management has to do so while on duty. Make the burden of proof a burden of evidence.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadSure, huge fines might deflate its shares/exec's comp packages, but I don't think the risk of giant fines endangers Boeing the way they might other businesses.
That absolutely describes Boeing.
Unfortunately part of that bonus probably went to "lobbying" so don't hold your breath for the moment when laws will be about actual justice.
Because the power asymmetry between executives and workers is vast and continuously growing. Executives are phenomenally powerful powerful people within these industries, whose influence and interests make it possible for such scandals to take place. And they’re the ones truly incentivized to cut corners and break rules in order to meet deadlines, generate as much growth as possible, etc.
Whistleblower rights, at least in the US, are completely insufficient to enable your vision of corporate oversight. Whistleblowers risk their careers, reputations and livelihoods, and often there’s no guarantee that blowing the whistle changes anything. Who makes such retribution not just possible, but inevitable? Executives.
Because the executives are given a lot of power over those employees, they are paid accordingly, and they are privy to far more information to aid them in taking a decision.
A CEO is paid over 300 times more than the average worker. [0] Multiply that by a factor to represent the authority of the position, and the acute awareness of what those actions represent and you should get the magnitude of the difference in accountability.
> giving employees a right and duty to call out bad behavior.
You already have this right. But you either do it to the authorities at great personal expense (in any way you can imagine) and with far higher burden of proof, or you do it internally in front of another executive. There is no incentive to take any action because the executive will always have the company as a shield in front of the law.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianahembree/2018/05/22/ceo-pay...
> In ethics and governance, accountability is answerability, blameworthiness, liability, and the expectation of account-giving.
Accountability should be there to make sure those people wielding all the financial power and influence of an entire company don't use it for their own interest regardless of consequences. Unless all that financial power and influence are used to create favorable laws...
> If an organization kills hundreds of people, like Boeing, you can only execute the CEO once
So better do nothing, maybe they stop, right? Are you saying that committing more crimes than you can be punished for should be a get out of jail free card? Put that CEO in jail for life and all others will take notice. And depending on the country this will mean "pay more to get favorable laws".
If it was possible to get good results by executing executives who fail, wouldn't it follow that some country would have already tried it and been eating our lunch by now? Wait a second, there is a country that comes to mind...
Then you extract everything you can from that "leader" and move on to the next one responsible. Are you saying that Boeing's CEO could smash a couple of planes into some skyscrapers and get away because you can't extract the value from him? Laws also have the deterrence aspect. When you pick up that fat paycheck it comes with the responsibility. Unless you can buy your own justice. Make a list o high ranking executives or politicians that ended up in prison in the US...
And don't play with words, knowingly falsifying documents is not "being a bad leader" it's "being a criminal".
Here's your idea in a more mundane example: a driver intentionally plows into a crowd killing 2+ people. He can't pay back the damage having a single life to give himself so we'll just blame the car.
> If it was possible to get good results by executing executives who fail, wouldn't it follow that some country would have already tried
[note: "executing" was your term, mine were prison time and fines]
Oh but they did [0]. Just not with local companies in countries with extremely powerful lobby groups, where laws are written by CEOs. So the CEO of a US company like Boeing will never see the inside of a US prison. And since Boeing is so deep in US military contracts, I'm sure pressure will be put on any country that thinks of indicting him.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/6/16743308/volkswagen-olive...
We may never be able to hold them criminally liable with much success, but we could much more easily invalidate their license and prevent them from holding any similar position for a very long time. Which, for some reason, seems far more just than simply jailing and possibly fining them.
Nearly all large software companies utilize whiteboard coding quizz as a way to measure the quality of their candidates.
Imagine what would happen when the modern crop of javascript developers start working on avionics?
I don't know what's worse - an incompetent politician or an incompetent software developer. Think heartbleed, microsoft windows updating in the middle of surgery, Mars mission crashing because someone mixed imperial and metric units...
We may never be able to hold them liable (because people who write the laws are also corrupt and incompetent), and we will never be able to weed out incompetence in our technical infrastructure (because, frankly, most of us [me included] are lazy, incompetent, greedy, and selfish.
Seems like they're being transparent, and the auditing they have in place has found a problem which is being addressed.
Talk about a misleading headline.
I wouldn't characterize being caught out and warned about it, and then saying "Oh... you're right, let's report this." As necessarily the same thing as "self-audit"-ing and "self-report"-ing.
If we're going to characterize the article as misleading, I think the same can be said of your post.
If that statement is correct then it means Boeing or someone at Boeing had been lying to the FAA and that would be a rather big deal in line with the headline.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236
For instance, if an employee of a company embezzles a bunch of money from either a customer or the company itself then the execs should typically not be culpable. But, if the execs themselves were the ones that ordered the employee to do this, either directly or through the 'nudge, nudge, wink, wink' method of communications (and there is corroborating evidence that this indeed happened, for instance the issues not being limited to single employees but being institutionalized) then yes, they should definitely be punished as though they themselves were the ones doing it.
It should not be possible for executives to use employees as a cut-out layer when crimes are committed.
or (and this often seems more likely) if the execs have not clearly instituted reasonably sufficient protocols to prevent X from happening...
They are the buggers abundantly paid for good governance, after all.
No clear command to do something illegal but the employee is left with two choices: do something illegal or end up not doing what they were told to do.
Culpability is a thing that can be smeared out effectively across the layers of a large organization where each layer only sees the delta between the one above it and the one below it, the people that know the law and the consequences are safely (or so they think) insulated from the hands that commit the crimes and the hands that commit the crimes typically don't know the law.
This situation has - as far as I know - never really been addressed explicitly in the law hence the institutionalization of 'the buck stops at the top'. Even if you don't know and even if you did not order it explicitly you are - and should - still be held responsible. The question at hand is if that should include criminal liability for all cases where the employees break the law and I think there are plenty of cases where employees breaking the law should not lead to culpability of management, for instance, those cases where employees gain an advantage for themselves at the expense of the company, the customers or the society they operate in. But in most other cases where the company gained an advantage the execs should be liable. That alone will get companies to behave like good (immortal) citizens.
That's why there is such a huge gulf between US law and EU law: in the US, the letter of the law is all that matters, in the EU, where laws are a lot more ambiguously specified it is the spirit of the law that matters. So an EU executive could be found liable because the company violated the spirit of the law whereas a US executive would walk even though both companies would do the exact same thing. But once the letter of the law is violated - especially in so-called white collar crime - there is still no guarantee of a conviction because corporations have very large budgets to protect their execs and to try to find some legal loophole.
I'm (very well possibly because I'm European) more in favor of laws that are interpreted as to the spirit of the law, simply because it makes people reason from some level of goodwill rather than by trying to maximize the take by legal hair splitting.
This is very wrong. In common-law jurisdictions (which the U.S. is broadly-speaking one example of - some exceptions may apply which are not relevant here), judicial precedent is a key factor in interpreting "the letter of the law", which is not the case in continental/civil law. This means that a vaguely-written statute can still provide some meaningful legal certainty in the U.S., where precedent provides some commonly-understood and commonly-developed guidance to what "the spirit of the law" might be; whereas in civil law jurisdictions, overly vague or ambiguous laws can only result in judges and government officials exerting arbitrary power (and in fact this happens routinely!), with not even consistency over time (much less some even more consistent "spirit of the law"!) as a real check and constraint.
Because that's what you're suggesting, and it sounds patently ridiculous.
That sounds patently ridiculous.
The culture comes from the top. It's super easy for them to allow people lower down to take the fall for something they pressured subordinates to do.
Shoot, just look at Wells Fargo last year.
The higher ups said that those lower needed to boost account signups, so, suddenly people found themselves signed up with accounts they had never signed up for.
But we blame those lower for following an order, even if it's an implied order, because they were the ones who did the deed. It was so hard to link Al Capone to murder they had to get him for tax evasion.
He called the shots, but others took the shots.
So, when you say that it's ridiculous to target those execs who are setting the standards which are causing these problems, these deaths, you got some screw loose up there friend, because those execs are getting paid hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars, while those doing what they are told so that they can keep their job are just trying to eat and pay rent.
Without any real knowledge of this situation, I'm pretty comfortable saying that anyone reporting this isn't perpetuating the culture. But, let's not jump to conclusions...
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorauseilender_Gehorsam
Shall we jail every shareholder in Boeing?
So where too from here? I can't see the USA ever jailing executives - but potentially they could ramp up the fines?
In my opinion we need Europe and other countries to begin heavily fining companies skirting their responsibilities, because what we are doing at the moment is obviously not working.
Well, the cliche when stuff like this happens is that the company diverted too much money to stock buybacks, dividends, and so on, leaving their actual business operations starved for resources. So, sounds reasonable, but how then does diverting more money to more external entities cause them to do better? I'm not arguing against it, I just don't understand what the rationale is. I think it's unwise to try to punish an abstract entity without thinking carefully about how it will affect the actual people involved.
The fine, to my understanding, extracts liquidity whilst also leaving all existing liabilities intact. It "sets the company back'. As it were. At least, that's how it works to my meager understanding.
If that isn't, could you go into detail about what really happens?
I offered an articulation of what I've come across through research to be the eventual outcome of a stock buyback, and how it differs from a fine, along with some encouragement to share what knowledge you may have that contradicts it.
It's not the first time I missed the bus on some common understanding after all, and I don't mind learning something new.
Of course I don't think there is no difference between a stock buyback and a fine; that would be stupid.
If I were a shareholder, I'd actually bid up a stock if they were forthcoming and honest, because I value transparency, scientific rigor, and admitting fault where it is due. I would inherently consider such a company to be more valuable in the long term.
Unfortunately 99.99% of investors would do the exact opposite and short the stock; their actions are the exact opposite of an honesty-valuing system.
Enron?
I realise this is a pretty low-effort comment, however, there is an alarming lack of accountability both in the US and the UK when lives are lost, but not when wealthy, connected, people have had their money lost. See also the Grenfell Tower.
> Boeing said it self-disclosed the problem to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration after Air Canada notified them of the fuel leak.
> The records stated that manufacturing work had been completed when it had not.
> "immediate corrective action was initiated for both the Boeing mechanic and the Boeing inspector involved."
So "Boeing" didn't falsified records, 2 of their employees did.
Now, whether Boeing's company culture (tight deadlines? overworked employees?) contributed to this or not, is another story, but, the headline is misleading; borderline dishonest.
Because the moment there is a paper trail, they can't hide.
As an employee you always want to create a paper trail otherwise they will pin it on you. Print emails if necessary.
You can get around this somewhat by fulfilling their request to be notified without paper trail, then immediately e-mailing them and everyone involved with a copy of the problem discussed, the decision made, the reasoning behind the decision (including attribution to who said what), and the the action plan moving forward.
If you really feel uncomfortable about it, include the weather outside the office day. It seems silly, but it can lead to some interesting lines of questioning in legal proceedings, and it also serves as a canary to those paying attention to what you are concerned may be in the future moving forward. Sometimes this may kindle a more in-depth review of the subject matter at hand.
People may think you're weird. However, most just file it under "there is no communication like over-communication."
Will remember this!
Why would Boeing willingly and knowingly ship a plane with a fuel leak? They know a fuel leak has an extremely deadly potential.
What could _possibly_ be the interest for Boeing to ship _one_ plane with a fuel leak? If that was a systematic thing, then yes why not, we could say they hid it on purpose. But here it doesn’t make sense.
Ultimately the company is responsible for having processes that prevent this to happen.
However, processes fail.
Obviously if both the mechanic and the inspector plot together, then the process fails. And that’s what happened here.
Boeing reported it as soon as they were made aware of it.
Why not punish both the corporation AND the employees? Civil punishment for the corporation, criminal charges for the individuals.
We need not seek financial damages from the wage slaves, but the corporation should be disincentivized from grinding people into unsafe corners with unreasonable demands for effort.
If that statement is accurate it means Boeing the entity took ownership of what was being reported.
It also means they take ownership of the accuracy of the information being reported.
So if that information was wrong then Boeing the entity has misled the FAA.
You should become a lawyer.
I’m simply commenting on what I think is a misleading clickbait headline.
Then when it is found out; you throw your employees under the bus.
The trainees are always the ones who have these disgusting conversations with middle-management, where the manager specifys a goal or asks for something, that is clearly either illegal or creates great risks for the employee. In industrial automatization, its usually the request to temper with security settings, progams and sensors - "to make production more efficient". There is never a paper trail, there is always plausbile deniability, and if something happens, because another employe dances around some deactivated light-grid into a running maschine and gets squished by a robot, the guy who made the last change (when and what is usually chronicled by a hash over the security programs)is going out of a job, into prison for manslaughter. Even if he is found not guilty, he wont be touched by companys, while the investigation is hanging over him/her.
The industry which had the accident then promptly has a change of heart, vows that "never again will such a thing happen." Security is tightend, machines reinvestigated, and reprogrammed to remove all those procedures who where created to circumvent the sec-tax slowdown. After this, those in managment who survived the affair, are promoted, new fresh faces, replacing the old guard, asking why this or that cant be more efficent, and wether that new trainee could not temper with the program. The cycle of screw begins anew.
My recommendation is that a CEO has to wear a permanently active 360° sealed camera + mic on the shoulder. Middle Management has to do so while on duty. Make the burden of proof a burden of evidence.
Suddenly no more PLEASE.