Corporate social responsibility saves lives
Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuetngor told reporters on Tuesday morning before the regular Executive Council meeting that a special expert panel has been set up to investigate a serious case of construction regulation breaches at Hung Hom Station on the Sha Tin-Central rail link. She said the move is necessary because the structure when it begins operations involves public safety. So far the public has been told that construction workers hired by a particular subcontractor to build a steel-reinforced concrete platform cut some steel bars short for their own convenience. In doing this, they may have rendered the platform vulnerable. People do not need experts to tell them that a structurally weakened platform is a safety hazard.
Imagine what will happen if it collapses because some steel bars did not play their part in maintaining structural integrity.
This is one of the key questions the panel will answer after an exhaustive investigation. However, determining whether that platform’s structural integrity has been compromised is only the first step, which must be followed by finding out whose negligence allowed the ill-advised operation to happen. They then must make whatever technical recommendations are necessary to correct the mistake. Accountability is essential for the legitimacy of any leadership; it begins with accepting responsibility where it is due.
As a main investor and sole operator of Hong Kong’s railway system the MTR Corporation is without question a major party in this case. It is the MTR’s responsibility to ensure all subcontractors working on railway-related construction projects follow engineering rules to the letter. In this case the MTR management definitely failed to take proper action at multiple junctures when handling a scandalous oversight of such magnitude. This is because it forgot the political and social ramifications it has caused many times before. It all comes down to the ever so fleeting sense of corporate social responsibility. Cliched as it may sound, this sense of responsibility or lack of it can make or break an enterprise in just one instance.
The MTR management tried to calm down the press and public by stressing that its structural engineers believe the shortened steel bars will not adversely affect the structural integrity of the platform. But it did not reassure the public such mistakes will never happen again by accepting responsibility for it occurring in the first place. We all know one cannot correct a mistake and prevent it from recurring without admitting it first. But in the corporate world such a self-protecting instinct is simply too strong to keep in check. As the majority stakeholder of the MTR Corp, the special administrative region government needs to cure this corporate “disease” before it’s too late.