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.
> 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??