Punishing a corporation is easy, but the government hates doing it for obvious reasons. It means ruining something which is useful to you and punishing tens of thousands of completely innocent people, with inevitable layoffs.
What Boeing really needs is a complete change in management culture, as that was the real root cause for the MAX disasters, but that is impossible to enforce, you can't even really verify that it has happened.
I also think people don't understand how extremely lucky Boeing is. If all of this had happened during a time of low demand the company would be facing a far more dire situation, likely with many major airlines canceling orders. But since airplane demand is very high and order books are full, airlines have to keep their orders at Boeing if they want new planes.
Your employees can be criminals regardless of culture. The precedent this would set is ridiculous.
The person committing that crime.
>If we want companies to have legal personhood, how about they suffer the same perils of breaking the law (prison time, etc)?
Companies can not be put to jail.
But that's not the situation here anyway. Is an architect guilty of murder if a building he designs collapses? Flaws in his design may have contributed. What about the construction company that built it? Perhaps they were incompetent and sloppy in their construction. The suppliers might be at fault as well; they could have sold inferior steel or concrete. What about the politicians that passed faulty legislation for building codes? Does some of the blame not fall on them too? Or the maintenance company that skimped on their maintenance checks and could possibly have seen the cracks forming?
There is very rarely, despite the assurances of five-whys and other incident response practices, a clear-cut and obvious point of failure when complex systems break. The Boeing situation was a failure of culture, people say. Maybe. They justify criminal charges on the C-suite as a result. Maybe even that is just, for a certain definition of justice. But the buck doesn't have to stop there. Where are the criminal charges for the shareholders, who chose to keep these criminals at the head of the company? Where are the charges against the FAA, who continued to do leave Boeing to be its own regulator? Why not cast blame on the previous CEOs as well? After all, culture takes a long time to change, and the current CEO has only been in the role since 2020 - the MAX's first flight was in 2016!
2) If the CEO knows, then the word "conspiracy" comes to mind, does not require them to perform the criminal act, only their agreement to act.
It’s the CEO’s job to ensure that sufficient measures are in place to prevent failure. They should not be punished for accidents; they should be punished if the accidents were reasonably predictable.
Which was most certainly the case when they decided to the redundant AoA sensor an optional extra.
Then drag him to court for that. But this is totally different to charging him with the crimes of other people he couldn't have known about.
From [1] in 2021:
> The airplane manufacturer broke the agreement by “failing to design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of the U.S. fraud laws throughout its operations,” the DOJ said.
He’s not being held responsible for the crime, he’s being held responsible for looking the other way.
The CEO is 100% responsible for designing programs to ensure that the business operates within the parameters of the law.
What else do you think their job is?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/07/doj-fines-boeing-over-2point...
Possibly, but not if it were a one-off. Are the airlines that chose to keep flying Boeing 737 MAX not equally (or more) responsible?
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Boeing knew what was going on, and if the CEO didn’t know then he wasn’t doing his job.
There really is no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Boeing did not disclose the existence of MCAS to pilots, and therefore did not train the pilots on how to recover from MCAS failure, and there was no redundancy in the key sensors that fed MCAS.
IIRC at least one of the crashes was caused by an AoA sensor failure.
https://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-white-collar-crimina...
> What Boeing really needs is a complete change in management culture
Who is ultimately responsible for management at a company though? The CEO and the other C-level people. This isn't really the daunting difficult problem you make it out to be: the buck stops at the C-suite. Who else could possibly be ultimately responsible??
As far as I understand, the legal theory is that the CEO and the directors are organs of the company rather than natural persons when acting in their roles. Therefore some of the usual legal protections do not apply. Assigning liability like that is an inherent part of the social trade-off that allows limited liability companies to exist.
You can identify the people responsible. I won't bother to explain it all, but at very step of the manufacturing process different workers signed off on the integrity of their work. All of that paperwork was logged with the US government. If you let me peruse those papers I could tell you who designed each and every component of the landing gear, and which workers assembled that landing gear on each and every MAX out there. I can tell you which executives signed off on it, and if you subpoena the documents I could even tell you what they were all emailing back and forth. More importantly, I can tell you which QA engineers and executives were involved in the QA and testing process for that landing gear and give you the results of the tests they ran. So on and so forth, all the way up to the CEO.
We can identify people. We've simply decided that we won't. You guys are arguing an orthogonal point as to whether or not to hold C level executives accountable. I can tell you right now you're going to effect much better change if you target key executives at the director-VP level than if you target C level people.
We do need to get rid of the rats. And a lot of those are C level executives, but it's important right now to get rid of all the rats. And right now, many of those rats are being promoted.
If you are the CEO and you did not, you should have, and you are responsible. It doesn't really need to be more complicated to incentivize rooting out evil - if we hold people responsible authorities (those with power) who should have known, they will figure out a way to increase integrity of their organizations instead of spreading accountability through infinity vendors.
If some random person on the floor didn't properly log a maintenance activity, that is the CEO's fault for not creating a culture in which proper documentation is properly stressed. Again, the buck stops at the top.
That person on the floor must be, and usually is, indemnified, because it's more important to get open and honest feedback from them on what happened. That way we know the changes the CEO failed to implement to prevent it from happening, and should now implement to prevent it from happening again. This is because the buck stops at the top.
That's not how FAA submitted documentation works. Just don't sign it if you have any questions. I never signed anything until I had personally verified the data and/or the code for myself.
If there are young engineers out there reading this, please disregard these people telling you that you are indemnified. Talk to a lawyer yourself if you don't believe me, but please don't follow the advice these people are laying out.
Signing off on something you know to be untrue and submitting that to the FDA or FAA as part of an approval process is a federal crime. Not only that, but the way our lawyers explained it to us, each time we sign off on something that turns out to be false, it counts as one count of lying to the federal government. And, no, you being an employee who was directed to sign does not absolve you from culpability.
Any 1L knows that you cannot, under any circumstances, contract away criminal liability. You are always liable for the actions you take that turn out to be criminal.
Again, don't believe me telling you that you will be committing a crime if you sign off on a fix or design that turns out to be bunk. Definitely don't believe these guys telling you will be protected if you sign off. Go talk to an attorney for yourself. You'll find what I'm saying is true. You want to find that out before you sign off on a fix or a design. Not after. Believe me.
Just some fatherly advice from an older engineer to younger ones. Please protect yourselves.
A CEO who builds a culture encouraging technicians to skip a maintenance entry (no signing off on something that isn't there), is accountable for failings that result from it, because the buck stops at the top.
A CEO who builds a culture which attacks whistleblowers and people who would report the above incident, is accountable for failings that result from it, because the buck stops at the top.
The regulators are also culpable since the design of the system was in the public domain before the second crash and they did nothing about it.
No civilised justice system in the world is getting to murder from these facts.
Manslaughter via negligence if you're feeling really lucky
>To avoid the need for reliance upon common law interpretations of what felony conduct merges with murder, and what offenses do and do not qualify for felony murder, many U.S. jurisdictions explicitly list what offenses qualify in a felony murder statute. Federal law specifies additional crimes, including terrorism, kidnapping, and carjacking.
Note that US states are not consistent on what is second degree murder. I cannot find a federal definition (I'm not a lawyer - this should be seen as me not knowing the right search terms). There are many other countries with their own definitions of murder which are all slightly different.
Felony murder statutes disagree.
Now, knowing what the law is in specific, narrow areas that you're operating in, or with sufficient budget to hire experts, that's something different, and might be closer to knowable.
CEOs, surprisingly are protected by the law as well.
You are the one person on the planet (I hope) who believes a leader is not responsible for those under his leadership.
Before you take offence understand this is just a difference of opinion of what a leader is, nothing against you personally.
I feel that punishing sobriety and rewarding drunkenness is probably not a good idea, if we want to avoid our ships hitting icebergs.
The junior watch officer should have summoned the master long before the ship hit an iceberg, if they are inattentive (e.g. they fall asleep in the warm dark of a bridge at night) the BNWAS will alarm to try to wake them, then eventually summon senior officers (typically the master, but maybe also a chief engineer and others) to the bridge. The master is responsible for ensuring the BNWAS is operable.
It would be extremely unusual for a commercial vessel (not to mention military vessel) to allow officers to drink booze, especially enough booze to fall "asleep in a drunken stupor". Of course just because something is prohibited doesn't mean it won't happen, but now we're talking about culpability and of course you're culpable if as a foreseeable consequence of your prohibited actions bad things happen, that's negligence at best.
If it really is your philosophy then who is to blame?
No. But also, this is not the situation.
Plenty of people have to respect a much higher standard of accountability: did the CEO take actions to ensure that proper adherence to industry standard was respected? Which processes were put in place to ascertain the continued respect of these standards?
In many jobs, incompetence will get you in jail. Sure, sometimes your reports go out of their way to conceal issues, but aside from extreme cases, a CEO should have to show what they did to prevent issues, and merely "believing" should land them in jail.
Did the CEO create the culture in which they could not despite being able to?
He should bear responsibility for the door plugs, though.
It's not about the result or what the CEO "believes", it's about what they reasonably did to avoid bad outcomes. Did the CEO do anything to be certain his people are competent, or that an incompetent person cannot tank the quality of the product? Did they take any reasonable measures, implemented checks, ordered audits, spent more to prioritized safety and quality?
The CEO has the highest executive authority and the highest pay. This means the highest level of accountability. Until the shit hits the fan, or the ground, and then the employees were incompetent, the processes were weak, the consultants that weren't picked by the CEO said it's all good.
The reason they get away with this isn't that the law protects them, it's that they fill pockets and buy laws to protect them. Random "Empty Pockets" Joe won't get a pass for building something that kills people because they didn't bother to verify anything.
Of course no good captain would leave the ship in control of a new second in command in hard conditions. However sometimes the second in command would be captain years ago if there was need for a captain but there isn't, and then there is flexibility.
A the time honored excuse of "sorry mister officer I did not know the car I was driving was stolen, I just found it on the road a few days ago and had no idea I swear".
There'd be a filtering effect where the best and brightest avoid industries where we need them to be. That standard would likely reduce the quality of the leadership and bias it further towards people who are delusional about safety.
Shareholders use positive incentives, not negative ones. Because positive incentives generally lead to better results in this case.
You seem to be arguing that the C-suite can do anything it wants to. As long as it does it in an official capacity, it can cause whatever harm it wants.
That seems like a very strange argument. Do you believe corporations and corporate officers have no moral obligation to act ethically?
Because if so, I'm finding it hard to understand the difference between a corporation and a crime family.
You say this like it's crazy, but we literally already do this with Doctors and Surgeons, it's not as tricky as you make it sound.
There's no valid reason that CEO/C-Suite folks get to forever escape any responsibility and accountability.
Citation needed + dubious analogy
The only reasons some folks push up there to the top are 2 - power, and money. They receive extra money because they are holding massive responsibility for their part or whole corporation. Lets stop finding reasons why there is actually 0 real responsibility on them. Its literally part of the deal they sign up for, and they know it very well.
Yes, it may sometimes mean that they get the heat for something caused by their predecessors, its part of the risk they take on themselves by pushing into such role. Its still firmly their failure, ie to a) identify it; b) act upon it. But as we see this wasn't a priority in Boeing, and I presume it still isn't.
Besides, Understaffed/Poorly staffed orgs tend to have more issues like this anyway... which tends to be the result of executive decisions, right?
Being too insulated from day to day ops is a symptom, not an excuse.
This is currently an advantageous single point-of-failure for companies and CEOs, and the advantage grows the more safety critical the industry that they're in. The company structure prevents any real responsibility except when the crime is blatant (like the CEO was recorded or wrote down something).
You are responsible for your property (land) and can be sued quite successfully for issues you had no knowledge of and no way of knowing.
It feels like maybe the financial industry made some reforms along these lines, right? Where they established that somebody specific in an executive position was required to sign personally guaranteeing that various financial filings were not fraudulent?
Presumably that personal risk incentivized said executive staff to want to know more rather than less, and the residual risk (of having to stand by your word) became priced into the pay packages.
Technically the board is ultimately responsible for management. It’s the board’s responsibiity to hire delegates and to monitor their performance.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, but it seems to me it’s been a very long time since board have been anything other than rubber stamps for the CEO.
That's not how this works. The shareholders don't have direct authority over the decisions made by the company's chief officers. They can demand "higher profits" all day long, but that doesn't absolve the board of directors or management from their responsibility, and it doesn't give them a blank check to behave unethically or even criminally.
> or, to generalize even more, capitalism.
Ugh, that is such a knee-jerk, fallacious take. Short-sightedness and misalignment of incentives are traits that are hardly specific to capitalism.
Yes the Captain of a Ship is always responsible for everything that happens on his ship 100%.
CEOs are appointed based on their ability to do what the board wants while shielding the board - this is why they get paid the most
Until investors and the board significantly hurt, to the point where their investment is either a total loss, or they are liable for additional financial inputs then nothing will change
If that big CEO paycheck came with some actual risks if you ignored ethics then maybe there would be fewer CEOs willing to do that.
Boards want the media to focus on the CEO because they are literally there to shield the board from accountability while “taking the brunt” of the bad PR - and also being a show piece for the company in good times
So, the real answer IMO is to change the law to implicate board members and investors directly as though they are officers equivalent with the CEO is setting corporate direction and incentives
Of course they have intentionally made the law such that any actions taken by the corporation, limit the liability of the board legally, while not taking the power away from the board to drive the direction and priorities and incentives of the corporation
The whole thing is an accountability shell game - Wherein a CEO is the whipping boy for whatever the board needs them to be the whipping boy for - and there’s a balance and ownership
The simplest way to put it is that the CEO is there to ensure that everything, the company does benefits investors primarily.
Until it is legally the case that corporate leadership must prioritize the benefits to labor above investors, nothing functionally is going to change.
Replace the C-suite. This is done frequently in M&A's and other corporate strategies in extremis. Fire the guys at the top and replace them with people with good track records.
It’s not like Boeing is going to get a new CEO and then suddenly middle management is going to start prioritizing safety, engineering rigor, and risk management over profit.
This conversation is so weird to me, I don't get what people are arguing: is the argument that it's better to replace middle management than top level management? That we shouldn't do anything? What?
Idk, doesn't sound like a problem to me.
It also avoids sacking the "innocent people" and it sets an example for other companies. The greedy corporate culture really needs a bit of check-and-balance.
Then people will start asking questions about what they are told to do, because they know that if they do something wrong they're going to jail or have to pay the fines themselves, not a bank account of the company. And they won't have much else to go to get shielded from responsibility, because all jobs will be like that. Even our own jobs.
Disagree. I think most people can see how lucky it is for them that they can avoid an expensive and protracted court case, just say "oh yeah, we're guilty of a serious fraud" and the only consequence is some fines that amount to about 1% of their annual revenue. With consequences like that, it seems like the government is actively encouraging them to commit fraud...
And as it stands they've already been losing money for the past 5 years. They could be losing a lot more money.
Granted a lot of those losses are due to their own mismanagement of projects like KC-46, Starliner, AF1, etc.
It's funny... when some people get paid A LOT of money, it's because they have "a lot of responsibilities", but when something goes wrong, those responsibilities suddenly vanish.
Serious question: why not? Why couldn't we require Boeing to change its culture, and then verify and enforce that change? Verification might involve periodically interviewing employees across all levels of the organization, performing spot checks and audits to make sure that procedures are being followed (no more failing to enter a work item into the system), and so forth.
(I don't mean to imply that this would be feasible under current regulatory law – I have no idea whether that is the case or not. I'm just saying that you could imagine a world where this could be done.)
Unfortunately an airplane building company has high upstart costs and is also not a cool industry to get into.
There are no layoffs of you apply the punishment into the shareholders. Confiscate enough of the company proportionally to the fine value.
Shareholders are, of course, free to sue the actual decision makers afterwards to pin down any non-mandated illegal behavior and recover their losses.
Also, fines that go up to say 10% of global revenue. That ensures that even activist shareholders take note and do not pressure the CEO to cut corners.
It is completely ridiculous to criminally prosecute leadership for crimes which happened without their knowing/consent/acknowledgment. It would be a perversion of justice to jail someone because many levels down someone else committed a crime. The best corporate culture does not prevent criminality.
If a Boeing engineer has a breakdown and robs a 7-11, the C suite of Boeing is not responsible for that.
If the Boeing engineer murders people in their course of duty because of the incentive structure set up by the C suite then they are responsible for that. How do you prove that? The same way how you prove anything. Lots of discovery which reveals concrete evidence of the C suite setting up and maintaining said incentive structure and then the prosecutorial team describing the connection to a jurry of their peers.
It is the difference between little Jimmy deciding to rob a 7-11 because they are dumb as a rock, vs doing the same because they grown up in an organised crime family.
"Culture" is completely ephemeral and having a court of law determine that the CEO "caused" some change in culture which then caused criminal behavior is ridiculous. This obviously can not be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt".
>I mean parents are liable for their children
Parents do not take on the crimes of their children. They are criminally liable for not overseeing their children's action and/or for not preventing their actions, which is something totally different.
It is not completely different. The CEOs should be liable for not properly overseeing their company and for not preventing the illegal actions of the company they're in charge of.
For example: if someone breaks into a bank, do you always fire the CEO?
Then: if an employee of the bank breaks into a bank, now do you always fire the CEO?
The specific case here about criminally negligent software design errors almost certainly never came up to the CEO. If there is evidence otherwise and the CEO was aware of the problem and decided that the risks were acceptable then he obviously should go to jail. This was not the case here as far as I am aware.
Knowing of the issue is the important thing here. If you want another case you can look at the Diesel Gate Scandal at VW, it is German law, but the single most important question is always "who knew", because if the person did not know and had no reason to want to know he HAS to be innocent, regardless whether it is the CEO or anyone else.
Why does the cost of investigation have to be paid by society?
He or she is responsible for the culture and governing within the company. So either way they are involved either by knowing and ignoring or by setting the precedent for this to go ahead without their knowledge. The punishment for those might differ but it's not a free pass.
It’s the CEO’s job to make sure these things “come up” to him. If he didn’t know about an engineering problem that got people killed then he is negligent and still should go to prison.
I don’t get all this simping for CEOs. CEOs don’t need us to defend them on HN. Trust me, they are doing fine without passioned arguments in support of them.
Juries are unlikely to criminally convict in a true case of "didn't know and couldn't know" but they also are likely to award large civil settlements even in those cases.
10% ?
What? if you or I were found negligent that resulted in hundreds of deaths we would be in jail for the rest of our lives, effectively fining us 100% of ALL revenue FOREVER.
At a minimum they should have a massive fine (like 100% of revenue for a year) and do whatever it takes to halve the stock price, thus punishing the stockholders too - after all, they invested in a business that killed people, they should be punished too.
That will also keep the costs at the company and not with society and after the fact.
They cannot die. They cannot go to prison.
This concept of a moral person is a totally unfair advantage that they exploit again and again.
I do not think that a corporation is considered to be a person beyond that. It‘s merely a way to establish limited liability for shareholders which requires a mechanism for the corporation to sign contracts without an owner signing on it‘s behalf.
Basically, we gave the power to the company without the responsibilities to the humans behind it because there is less consequences, less skin in the game.
Before that, companies had to have everything attached to a human, not the company. So the human was responsible.
You are so used to it that you think it's normal, but it's not.
It's a concept we have created: that companies can act in their own name, like they are actually something concrete.
But when we did that, we failed to give companies expiration date, something like inheritance tax, the equivalent of prison and so forth.
Something that doesn't exist, a concept, enjoy many things a concrete human can do, but won't pay nearly the same consequences.
In fact, it's sometimes in the title: limited liability company. It's by design.
And of course, it allowed humans to do a lot of things without risking to lose all their life if they failed. But we went to far and now, we have companies that can enjoy all those benefits but with much less limitations than the humans counterpart.
It makes them too powerful.
I don't think companies can sign contracts. What is the power of having a bank account and moving funds around? It's still people deciding to do this, and doing it, just under a group name. What power?
> Something that doesn't exist, a concept, enjoy many things a concrete human can do, but won't pay nearly the same consequences
People are still doing it. You seem to have totally mis-framed this. If you say "people can get away with doing things inside a company" you'd have a point, perhaps, but you're talking as though companies are sentient.
It's like a union type: `type Person = Human | Company`. Or like inheritance: `class Human(Person)`, `class Company(Person)`. Or a typeclass/trait/interface...
It allows you to reuse many laws for both humans and companies, without having to specify them or define special cases every time it is mentioned.
We can't punish countries either, even though they can also do these things. We can only punish people. So what?
Same with companies: mostly fines, but also limits on how they can operate, additional oversight...
Of course, the consequences trickle down to people, but these punishments are not meant to target any given individual, and if the individuals in charge change, the ones that leave don't necessarily carry the punishment with them.
This makes sense, legal entities like companies are guided by incentives. And it sometimes makes more sense to punish the legal entity to change its behaviour, by imposing disincentives, rather than punishing whichever people are running it at the time.
For example, people within a company might pressure an individual to commit a crime, because even if that individual might get punished, the company may benefit as a whole. But if the company's (financial) survival is at stake, everyone is more likely to collaborate to prevent that situation, including the shareholders, if the punishments are big enough.
The point here is, that for issues like negligence and fraud, the current punishments are not significant enough to act as a real deterrent. The punishment on the companies is too lenient (they can absorb the fines, they are rarely an existential threat), and the punishment on the individuals responsible is too lenient (difficult to attribute culpability, limited liability...).
We do want to figure out how to hold individuals more accountable, as you said, we are just having a conversation about why it works like that right now and what could be changed to improve it.
We are currently trying to punish entities (with fines), and it's ineffective.
We should move back to punishing people more, and moving back the responsibility to people, instead of pretending companies are people, and therefore responsible.
- Make them more liable.
- Make the people behind them more liable.
- Give companies limitations. What would be the equivalent of jail for a company ? Unable to sale for x years ? How long a company should be able to exist ?
Right now there is way too much power and shielding at the same time.
If they can't sell then they don't have money, and everyone is fired. Is that what you mean? Why are you trying to make companies into physical people who can be punished separately to their employees/shareholders, instead of thinking of the actual outcome you want and coming up with something to achieve that?
Because limited liability means exactly that the owners are shielded to a degree. That‘s my point. That‘s why corporations were created as a concept.
This concept is necessary because the company represents collective decisions and if each and every one of those would be individually accountable then less business would be done.
As someone else pointed out it‘s a union type. Instead of person you could call it „entity“ and rewrite all the laws. Happy now?
It's an interesting thought that I keep coming across, I'm not sure if I necessarily agree with it.
In a sense, companies are super-human intelligent autonomous beings, with much more power to act on the world than any individual. We are able to partially control them within a complex incentive and enforcement structure, but it is difficult to fully align them with what society needs.
It's good news in a sense, we can control AGIs with similar systems, they have the same resource constraints as any other entity if they want to have an impact in the real world.
A blind focus on the concentration of wealth will only improve tech if it helps profit, will only improve lifes if it helps profit, will only protect the environment if it helps profit, will only influence politics to increase profits. It will try to create poverty because that eases exploitation. As you already hinted, the motivation has to change.
The fine is quite low.
Politicians care about getting elected, which means they don't want layoffs on their watch. Politicians don't care what the military thinks or else they'd stop funding a lot of dumb projects that the military doesn't give a shit about - of which there are many.
There are so many examples of congress putting their hand on the scale that I really don't understand the popular insistence that the military is the problem here.
Military brass don't control procurement. That would be Congress. In fact the military often frequently has systems it doesn't want/need precisely because Congress. See the Zumwalt destroyer and the Littoral Combat Ship.
Who else are they going to buy planes to bomb different-colored countries with? SpaceX? Airbus? It is to laugh.
When you get a company that is too big to fail, it rests directly on the government for not identifying and solving the issue earlier.
The latest big bomber purchase, B-21, went to Northrop Grumman, as did the not so recent B-2. Fighters have been going to Lockheed (F-22 and F-35).
The biggest recent win for Boeing was KC-46 tanker airplane, which is just modified 767. I suppose there is also the handful of F-15EXes that are vestige from their McDonnell Douglas merger.
It's a monopoly. Just break it up.
> How many jobs would be lost if that happened
"We don't negotiate with [economic] terrorists."
> especially in this economy?
$77b annual revenue. Positive quarterly growth rate the last 8 out of 12 quarters. Two global wars we refuse to negotiate peace in and Boeing is a major weapons supplier.
Then again, if you kill and scare enough people with faulty planes, the state of the economy will be immaterial to what will happen to your interests.
This is just so silly. Shutting down a company results in people losing their jobs. No terrorists involved.
I'm always baffled by this unholy protection of "jobs".
Making asbestos essentially illegal resulted in tens of thousands of people losing their jobs and shutting down coal plants will do the same.
It makes no sense to protect jobs at all costs, and doing so can have very bad outcomes.
If a company is doing something illegal or dangerous or that does not serve society anymore, we shouldn't bend over backwards just because people will lose their jobs.
I wasn't invoking any unholy protection of jobs. It's very clear the context I was replying to: that "job loss" isn't "economic terrorism".
Can we not treat the comment section as that party game where people only read the previous sentence of the story and write a follow-on sentence? You have the whole thread available to you.
And ending murder and child victims results in people (investigators, litigators, counselors) losing their jobs. Should we stop trying to solve these problems too?
There is an option to punish the first aspect while limiting the damage on the second one : the nationalisation of the company, with limited compasation to its shareholder. Strangely it seems to only be done or considered to save "to big to fail" business, such as bank, in time of crisis, not as a tool of law enforcement.
One of the problems here is that a lot of the time, the worst thing that happens to an individual from the company is just that they get fired. That's just not a very strong deterrent when the upside if you don't get caught is potentially huge raises/promotions/bonuses.
Imagine if the worst thing that could happen to you when robbing banks if you get caught is just that you can't rob banks in that area anymore. That's kind of how this works for individuals in corporations.
The supply chain of software in aerospace is extremely long and finding out who exactly was acting negligent is near impossible.
This won't be sufficient to fix Boeing, but it would be a start.
Yeah, hard to prove.
It is not illegal to be a bad CEO.
He lead an airplane maker, not a coffee shop. Focusing on profit the way Boeing did was planning a murder and trying to reap the profit in the meantime. All the participating management belongs in a court room.
Then you just have to prove that they intentionally deprioritized safety/engineering in their systems and culture.
Otherwise it is a decision where the manager who decides to stretch the limits will get praise and cash if it works out, without carrying much or any personal risk — even if they are fined or fired, chances are they already got their share.
If we want such things from happening the people taking these gambles need to be painfully aware that it might land them in prison for a long time, and fines need to be proportional to the money earned — that means higher by a magnitude or more so there is not even a doubt that it won't pay off.
I like to live in a society where people building critical infrastructure go to prison if they are willingly taking shortcuts.
We used to have a law that two different types of banking institutions could not be owned and housed inside the same entity. So, effectively, and based on history, yes. You absolutely do need to do that.
> That is hard to achieve.
Not particularly. Congress has broad and sweeping powers. They just don't use them.
> Who's going to change the evaluation procedures that HR has in place to measure what rating or bonus you get this year?
These are publicly traded companies. In the case of Boeing, more than half is owned by institutions and not individuals, and these institutions are known to have questionable practices in all sorts of industries. Again, the solution seems annoyingly simple.
That's less per person than the price of a hot-coffee spill.
To quote wikipedia:
> In addition, they awarded her $2.7 million in punitive damages. [...] The judge reduced punitive damages to $480,000, three times the compensatory amount, for a total of $640,000. The decision was appealed by both McDonald's and Liebeck in December 1994, but the parties settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.
""" Liebeck went into shock and was taken to an emergency room at a hospital. She suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent.[14][13] She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. During this period, Liebeck lost 20 pounds (9.1 kg), nearly 20 percent of her body weight, reducing her to 83 pounds (38 kg). After the hospital stay, Liebeck needed care for three weeks, which was provided by her daughter.[15] Liebeck suffered permanent disfigurement after the incident and was partially disabled for two years.[16][17] """
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Rest...
Regulating decision making in companies, however, as to make sure people have to look at their own personal risk when bad things are on the line is going to get a lot of pushback, precisely because that's very inconvenient. But without something like this, the Wells Fargo situation is the natural outcome that will keep repeating.
When it comes to justifying the compensation packages, they are first to claim that they are responsible for the company achievements.
If they would actually face jail-time for non-disputable wrongdoing, then it would actually balance it out.
So I don't think they're a great example of having excellent QA everywhere. And kind of helps with your point of if the ORG and the division of that org is really thinking about quality and what they ship then it carries through. But that might not be the case for every part of the company (I.E. Boeing)
Turned out to be extremely bad code and some potential mechanical issues from what I understand[1]
[1] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_...
Money. Control.
Either the fine should be high enough to alert investors and ensure that they make the company change its ways..
Or
The govt. should provisionally or in a timebound manner take a seat or two on the board.
Let the govt. Do this for a few companies, and every otger company will fall in line.
Corporations must be treated as children of the country they are born in. Sure, they become big, earn money for the govt. and are essentially independent. But if the kid goes naughty, a watchful eye and a rap on the knuckles is how you teach manners.
You can't teach a corporation manners. If you are going to talk about corporations as if they are people (and legally they want us to treat them as people) then you have to face that they are, technically speaking, artificial psychopaths (incapacity to experience guilt, failure to conform to social norms and respect the law, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness in pursuit of profit, etc). Very powerful, immortal, artificial psychopaths.
When you dismantle a company, people lose jobs, that does not look good on TV for politicians.
Great risk should come with great reward. We no longer assign risk to most executives at publicly-traded, multinational corporations, but the reward is still great.
I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out what the risk should be, but it should be something that a golden parachute shouldn't be able to resolve.
In today's culture, I often hear C-suiters talking about how much "risk" they are taking, to justify their outrageous salaries and stock holdings, but I almost never see them pay much, in the way of penalties, except for the very smallest, most "raw" companies, where they have, literally, sunk their entire net worth into the endeavor.
It seems that, once a company has reached a certain threshold, the only real "risk" that executives experience, is that they'll only get a 5% bonus, instead of 30%. So, only $5M, as opposed to $30M.
AUTHORITEH: "Put out your hand!"
GUILTEH: "OK"
AUTHORITEH: <SLAP> "Bad Executive! Bad, bad, Executive! Don't let it happen again! See you at the party on Saturday?"
Boeing's problem is its management. If you tell the rank-and-file worker to use the company's billions of dollars worth of production capital to build a quality airplane and hold them to it, they've shown they have the ability to do so in the past.
I agree with that statement, but want so add: I believe that whatever you propose will have significant problems and is likely worse than the status quo in some major way. Sometimes I'll only be able to tell you what those problems are in hindsight. Sometimes those problems are fixable sometimes not.
Don't let this dissuade you from thinking about the problem - it needs to be thought about. However do think about is in more than a shallow way, look at it from all viewpoints (including ones of people who disagree with) try to see what the downsides are and how to mitigate them. Good luck, if enough people do this maybe someone will come up with a good enough answer, (as opposed to perfect!) and you will understand the problem well enough to help debate why the downsides are worth it.
Currently the overall culture for selecting business leaders is suboptimal in the western sphere and beyond. It incentivizes behavior that can lead to such problems. Nobody could sell a 10% growth in reliability to investors if it doesn't come with a similar revenue increase as well.
The agencies that oversee this need to have the will and the power to act. Regarding the former, our elected officials are mostly divided into two camps 1) the ones who work to minimize the will of agencies and the ones who are sort of inept and feckless about safeguarding agencies' ability to act.
Regarding the latter, the recent scotus Chevron decision monkey-wrenches agency power (seemingly by design). Bad actors will inject judges into the oversight process, in an attempt to sabotage regulators ability to regulate; Chevron hugely amps up the effectiveness of that attack.
What does it take? You have to dismantle a company before it changes these kinds of deep-rooted issues? Or can a government penalty call for that? That is hard to achieve. Who's going to change the evaluation procedures that HR has in place to measure what rating or bonus you get this year? That seems to me as important as who is CEO.
None of the penalties courts mete out (short of dissolution/fined into bankruptcy) seem to be able to achieve this level of change needed.