Foresight, hindsight, oversight
As object lessons go, it was a pretty big one.
And on Monday, the resignation of Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg was the corporate apogee.
The company’s 737 Max aircraft have been grounded for months, a grounding that now extends to at least April and, as some have suggested, may mean the aircraft doesn’t fly again at all. The company has announced the suspension of production of the aircraft in January.
It’s a grounding that has even been felt in this region, as airlines shuffle aircraft and, in some cases, reduce some flights in an effort to make up for the missing aircraft in their fleets.
The 737 Max was grounded after a pair of crashes were connected to faulty software in the planes — since then, plenty of questions have been raised about self-regulation during the aircraft’s construction, and the cutting of corners to keep schedules and prices in line.
It’s something that Americans might want to be thinking about, as changes in federal regulations hand more and more oversight of the pork industry over to pork processors — the recurring idea of governments championing the ability of profit-centred businesses to regulate themselves.
There have been issues in this country, too. The Walkerton E. coli crisis in 2000, for example, pointed out the dangers of removing provincial oversight from municipal water purification systems — but pointing it out included seven deaths. In all, 2,300 were sickened in the outbreak.
Red tape reviews are a regular staple for new governments, particularly conservative ones — Ontario and Alberta are in the midst of them now. (Ontario went as far as to enshrine it in a piece of legislation named the “Better for People, Smarter for Business Act 2019.”)
But what sometimes gets forgotten is that regulations — particularly health regulations — aren’t just put in place because someone in government doesn’t have much on their plate and needs to look busy when the boss comes around.
Usually, regulations are put in place to directly address problems; they might not be the precise and best solution, but most often they are an attempt. Government regulators and inspectors aren’t conflicted about their jobs. They don’t have to meet deadlines, maximize profits or get the last pallet of goods onto the truck regardless of its condition.
The simple point is that government regulation and impartial oversight is not always “red tape” — it sometimes saves lives and saves companies from disasters of their own making.
Certainly, government departments and agencies can have overlapping legislation and regulations that make it difficult for businesses to figure out where the buck actually stops. Simplification is one thing — and a good thing. But wholesale downloading of government’s responsibilities to keep citizens safe onto businesses that have other concerns is not the ultimate solution.
And when things go wrong, not only CEOS, but companies themselves, can find themselves out of the business entirely.