When a company values profits above all else, the only thing that can save us from that company’s gross negligence is fines strong enough to eliminate those very same profits (and ideally the company’s budget for bribing politicians too).
You have to go directly after the people who are making decisions for the company.
Executives seem to have a pretty good time tanking companies to line their pockets and then leave before the company has to deal with the fallout.
If the CEO's only concern is shareholder profit, crime usually pays pretty well.
We had one of these cases recently in my country.
CEO of one of the biggest X in the country goes to trial for lying/not informing correctly about Y gross malfeasance. Walks free after years of investigation, because didn't know about it.
Holding both companies and management responsible can be tricky as well. IIRC Exxon-Mobil had an aggressive policy of destroying records from projects as soon as they were legally able to prevent them from being used against the company in litigation or investigations. In this case, having poorly structured laws or regulations encouraged the company solve the problem of liability, rather than one of accountability.
If you get the big pay check for leadership it is your responsibility when shit goes bad. Sadly about the worst consequence a failed CEO has is that he/she doesn't get invited to play golf for a few years.
I think after taking down Enron and Arthur Andersen and lot of people lost their jobs, which does not look good on TV. Politicians on both sides stopped supporting taking down execs/companys. So now the new normal is to push for fines.
There's a web of power and influence invisible to people who aren't part of the system. Politicians who could create this legislation don't get reelected if they aren't participants; their election war chest evaporates.
This is how monied interests managed to design the system to work.
Maybe the responsibility is too diffuse. But these "no one could have predicted this" kind of Therac-25 situations with multiple people responsible are exactly where that boss -- the one getting paid the big bucks (for the risk they take! for the difficult decisions they have to make! for the complex structures they have to oversee!) -- to actually take responsibility for the decisions inherent in the incentive structure they created in the workplace that they have total control over.
Is it? The article tries strongly to imply that the whistleblower is right and the manager is wrong, but that's never conclusively established. With the same facts presented in the article, I can paint a different story of the whistleblower trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill, and how he was obviously wrong everyone else seems to think it's fine.
But with CEOs it seems RICO doesn't apply.
All we need to do is extract that portion of the bill. However, I suspect the answer is like usual. Congress does not represent the people and their corporate owners would not be pleased. Larry Fink would probably have a millenia worth of consecutive life sentences alone. We might spur innovation in healthcare technology just making him serve the time he owes.
You then create a top-down incentive for these people to genuinely make sure everything is on the up and up. The biggest problem is that this probably creates a strict cap on how large a single corporation can grow, which sounds much more like a feature than a bug.
In theory at least I guess. Maybe someone else can comment on how it actually works in practice.
Why can't you appoint a fall guy as the "CEO", and then have a COO or whatever that actually runs the day to day?
If corporations have the same rights as humans, make them suffer the same consequences.
Yeah... that'll show them.
And if people would be out of jobs - good. It would stop people from working for companies that don't provide transparency into the legality of their operations.
Usually in this case the person really making the decision doesn't take the blame; that just flows downhill.
You need Unions. Blue collar workers care about safety and can pressure execs into doing the safe thing when the incentives aren't there higher up.
https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/mou/2012-07-16
Note regarding "refusing to work under certain conditions:"
https://www.osha.gov/workers/right-to-refuse
I used to work in interstate freight (barge, not train). They make it crystal clear any employee has the right to stop work and are protected. The rail workers could have stopped working under their dangerous conditions, they just negligently kept going. The big bad railroad is to blame, but so are the employees.
>She said: “The regulation at the time stated that a wheel bearing was bad when it had ‘visible seepage’. But that was very vague, and the bosses used that vagueness to their advantage. For me, it was whenever oil was visible on the bearing. For my bosses, they wanted actual droplets and proof it would leak on the ground.
That's probably why we have an audio leak story, because the company may have some ground to stand on because of this vagueness.
The railway has unions. They even wanted to strike at the end of last year over working conditions, but Congress and Biden quickly passed a law in December to prevent it.
Starting with social security, railroad employees have a different social security system and other related law regarding retirement benefits.
Second there’s the labour laws, much of which is older and more Byzantine than “normal” labour laws because of the historical context behind the era when they were introduced, and having been introduced in such a way that they managed to isolate themselves from other kinds of workers. You can really see this in the complex series of steps necessary for a railroad union strike, compared to other workers it’s just crazy, but each step of that complicated process had at least some justification from greed and backhanding to genuine concerns regarding the crucial role the railroad has in the fabric of the nation.
That sort of “crucial role” or justification has been at the heart of how the railroads got to the present state. The railroads were at one point in the 19th century, arguably more powerful than the federal government, to the point where in some places you had to clarify that “The President” didn’t mean the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad if you wanted to refer to the President of the United States. This level of power is obviously long gone, but it represents the level of power they once had, power which has translated into over a century of “special cases” carved out for railways in law at all levels of society across the USA.
The railroad unions can’t just threaten to stop work like others can, because the government has a right of refusal on their ability to strike, which basically acts as a muzzle on widespread union action and allows the railroads to squeeze the shit out of employees… if you haven’t, look at what the unions were trying to strike for last year… and then think about if employees willing to put up with that, will be the sort of people to take a stand and blow the whistle on bad workplace practices… railroad unions just don’t have the same level of power as normal unions, they do have power, just not “tactical” power, the kind you use to fight the small things like individual safety breaches by having everyone in the workplace threaten to walk out.
Yep. This happens all the time in other unionized industries. Manager: "Do [unsafe thing that is against policy / the law, or even that is simply physically impossible]". Worker: "Yeeeeah, I'll be looping my union rep into this conversation". Manager: "On second thought, never mind".
I'd guess the problem's that the railroad workers' union is toothless.
[EDIT] Downvotes why? Disbelief? This comes second-hand from friends in various unionized workplaces, it's damn common. Without strong unions they'd 100% for-sure have been forced to choose between doing something unsafe, and losing their jobs, many times—and that's with managers already knowing unions are a factor, I assume the rate of attempts to get workers to do unsafe things (including setting various metrics or policy such that it's impossible to meet expectations while maintaining proper safety) is higher at non-union workplaces, or those with weak unions.
Truth be told, CIA needed the drug sales to fund ISIS before it was cool, but I digress. Anyway, if you expect corporations to be held responsible in penal courts…
Which, sure, is probably true in many industries, but it's not supposed to be the case that any given business can just pass extra costs to consumers. If they could, they should already have been charging higher prices.
And, you only truck things that are already in trailers or containers. You don't truck things that are in boxcars or tank cars - the cost of unloading into a trailer just to truck it to a different railroad would be insane.
And, trucks carry, what, 70% of freight in this country? That's the railroads' competition. It's not other railroads. (That said, competition between railroads is not the constraint on railroads passing the cost of fines onto their customers.)
And obviously the primary competitor to shipping via train is trucks, I deliberately ignored it because there’s a huge class of rail freight that can’t really use trucks (non-perishable bulk commodities like coal, potash, construction gravel for cement, bauxite and other minerals) and this is slowly becoming a larger component of their bottom line because they aren’t incentivised to compete with each other, let alone the trucking industry… they are all in their own individual races to the bottom by way of profit maximising efforts like precision scheduled railroading and a general aversion to capital spending inherent in their focus on business metrics such as the “operating ratio” which is quickly undermined by capital expenditure on things like new locomotives and rolling stock. Most of the “parallel running” (two companies can ship from A to B) rail lines where they had to compete with other companies were dumped as not productive enough long ago… (or never built back in the days when it was cheaper, or got rationalised away as part of the government restructuring on the east coast… because railroad history is a whole different subject)
A public service ought to be motivated to deliver a good service. It won't be motivated by taking shortcuts. A private company seeks profit and cannot afford to lose money, contrary to a public service which can be not profitable. Offering a good service it a means to be profitable but that's not the end goal, even if many people actually want to do good work.
Of course there's a big if. IF the government throws enough money at it.
This IF is unfortunately too often "IF only". If not, we are back to shortcuts.
It's not law enforcement that keeps everyone from committing crimes, because you cannot put a policeman watching everyone.
Way more efficient way is self-policing, that's the main difference of developed cultures IMO.