Most Safety Complaints From Plane-Industry Whistleblowers 'Go Nowhere', Risk Retaliation (seattletimes.com) 40
America's aerospace industry is overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) — which also handles safety warnings from the industry's whistleblowers. But the Seattle Times says an analysis of reports to Congress found "an overwhelmed system delivering underwhelming results for whistleblowers... More than 90% of safety complaints from 2020 through 2023 ended with no violation found by the FAA, while whistleblowers reported them at great personal and professional risk."
Aside from the FAA's in-house program, employees of Boeing, Spirit and the FAA can report safety hazards to the Office of Special Counsel, which has no FAA ties, or through internal employer complaint programs, such as Boeing's Speak Up and Spirit's Quality 360, to trigger company reviews... In the aftermath of the door-plug blowout over Portland, Boeing specifically asked its employees to use the Speak Up program or the FAA's internal process to report any concerns, according to Boeing spokesperson Jessica Kowal. Both have done a poor job protecting whistleblowers from retaliation, according to a congressionally appointed expert panel... While both were designed to guard against retaliation, critics say they have instead become enablers of it...
A panel of aviation safety experts in February rebuked Boeing's Speak Up program in a report to Congress. Whistleblower advocates criticized Speak Up for commonly outing whistleblowers to the supervisors they're complaining about, exposing them to retaliation. Managers sometimes investigated complaints against themselves. Employees mistrusted the program's promise of anonymity. Collectively, the befuddling maze of whistleblower options sowed "confusion about reporting systems that may discourage employees from submitting safety concerns," according to the expert panel's report....
[Boeing quality inspector Sam Mohawk, who alleged the 737 MAX line in Renton was losing track of subpar aircraft parts], continues to pursue his FAA claim, originally submitted through Boeing's Speak Up program. Months passed before Boeing addressed Mohawk's complaint. When it did, Mohawk's report was passed to the managers he was complaining about, according to Brian Knowles, Mohawk's South Carolina-based lawyer. "If you do Speak Up, just know that your report is going to go straight to the guys you're accusing of wrongdoing. They aren't going to say, 'Thanks for speaking up against us,'" Knowles said.
The article includes this quote about the FAA's in-house whistleblower program from Tom Devine, a whistleblower attorney with nearly a half-century of experience across a spectrum of federal agencies, and legal director of the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, which helps whistleblowers navigate the federal system. "It's been a disaster from the beginning. We tell everyone to avoid it because it's a trap... We've warned whistleblowers not to entrust their rights there."
A panel of aviation safety experts in February rebuked Boeing's Speak Up program in a report to Congress. Whistleblower advocates criticized Speak Up for commonly outing whistleblowers to the supervisors they're complaining about, exposing them to retaliation. Managers sometimes investigated complaints against themselves. Employees mistrusted the program's promise of anonymity. Collectively, the befuddling maze of whistleblower options sowed "confusion about reporting systems that may discourage employees from submitting safety concerns," according to the expert panel's report....
[Boeing quality inspector Sam Mohawk, who alleged the 737 MAX line in Renton was losing track of subpar aircraft parts], continues to pursue his FAA claim, originally submitted through Boeing's Speak Up program. Months passed before Boeing addressed Mohawk's complaint. When it did, Mohawk's report was passed to the managers he was complaining about, according to Brian Knowles, Mohawk's South Carolina-based lawyer. "If you do Speak Up, just know that your report is going to go straight to the guys you're accusing of wrongdoing. They aren't going to say, 'Thanks for speaking up against us,'" Knowles said.
The article includes this quote about the FAA's in-house whistleblower program from Tom Devine, a whistleblower attorney with nearly a half-century of experience across a spectrum of federal agencies, and legal director of the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, which helps whistleblowers navigate the federal system. "It's been a disaster from the beginning. We tell everyone to avoid it because it's a trap... We've warned whistleblowers not to entrust their rights there."
To be expected. (Score:1, Flamebait)
The US ranks as one of the most corrupt of all of the advanced nations, with an obvious desire to increase that level of corruption.
So, to be blunt, it doesn't shock me.
What does shock me is that there are more actual "mysterious deaths" of whistleblowers in the US with no obvious reaction by the public than you get in either US or Korean mafia-based drama.
This is deeply disturbing. If fiction writers are unable to keep up with current affairs, we've a problem. But if Joe and Jane Public consider said probl
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The US ranks as one of the most corrupt of all of the advanced nations, with an obvious desire to increase that level of corruption.
Oh Bulllll-shit...
It's nowhere near perfection...but compared to the levels of corruption in other countries?
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Other countries have corruption out in the open. Here we pretend it doesn’t exist.
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This. When I taught English in Peru my students often remarked on how it must be nice in the US because there was no corruption. My reply was always, "There's plenty of corruption in the United States, just the people like you and I can't afford it so it's out of sight."
One of the reason why megacorps and the ultra-rich fund these "state's rights" astroturf groups is because it's a lot cheaper to suborn state and local officials, even if there's a couple dozen of them, than to bribe a US senator.
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Do you think there's no "unaffordable, out-of-sight" corruption for them in Peru?
Re: To be expected. (Score:2)
Of course there is, just look at the president's new Rolex.
Re:To be expected. (Score:5, Informative)
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Reference: https://www.globalcitizen.org/... [globalcitizen.org]
Though according to: https://factsinstitute.com/ranking/most-corrupt-countries-in-the-world/, the USA does rank as 27th most corrupt nation in the world... So, I guess it depends more on your poin
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They said "advanced nations" - how they define that gives them a lot of leeway in filtering the list. A significant proportion of the countries on the list in your first reference arguably aren't "advanced nations".
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Your reading comprehension isn't great. I said, "the countries on the list in your first reference," i.e. the one you linked to on globalcitizen.org that doesn't include the US. Also, you linked two lists ranking countries by corruption, one on globalcitizen.org and one on factsinstitute.com, not three. The second one provides excerpts from the top and bottom of the list before giving the full list, but it's still a single list.
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You misread the list. It's saying the USA is the 27th least corrupt country in the world. The numbers in the right column are "transparency scores", where higher transparency is supposed to indicate lower corruption. I stand by my other comment saying your reading comprehension isn't great.
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No, you said, literally as I quoted, "Though according to: https://factsinstitute.com/ran... [factsinstitute.com], the USA does rank as 27th most corrupt nation in the world". That is not true. According to the list at https://factsinstitute.com/ran... [factsinstitute.com] the USA is the 27th least corrupt country in the world, not the 27th most corrupt country in the world as you stated. You counted down from the top of the full list, apparently assuming that the list placed more corrupt countries higher when the opposite is true.
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You read that wrong. It was the 27th LEAST corrupt country in the world. It is currently the 24th least corrupt, out of 180 countries. Not great, but not horrible.
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See the post above yours, https://yro.slashdot.org/comme... [slashdot.org]
From the outside looking in, it seems a lot of your corruption is legal, eg bribes are called campaign contributions. Someone paying 100's of millions of dollars to a campaign would be considered corrupt in most advanced countries, same with giving prizes of a million dollars to sign up to a party, even if it is in lottery form.
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Ref: https://tradingeconomics.com/c... [tradingeconomics.com]
So the implication here is that the USA is not even listed within the list of 150 of corrupt nations
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The US ranks as one of the most corrupt of all of the advanced nations, with an obvious desire to increase that level of corruption.
Certainly our last presidential election seems like a desire to increase corruption...
So, to be blunt, it doesn't shock me.
It doesn't shock me either, but not because of corruption. The U.S. government is one of the least corrupt governments in the world, contrary to what you're getting from right-wing news. The U.S. government is, however, remarkably poor at executing efficiently, and the bureaucratic parts are rather good at not doing things that require effort. So hearing that complaints just sit there and never go anywhere isn't surpris
Should be easy to solve. It needs will. (Score:2, Flamebait)
Is this so complex? The person who gave the information to the manager that was responsible has breached the confidentiality. If they weren't told not to, then the previous person who gave them the information without telling them that it was whistleblower information is responsible for the breach. This is not complex with military secrets. Everyone knows that if you give them away you are supposed to go to prison. Same thing should apply here. Once the majority of Boeing senior management is in prison ther
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Where I work they basically tell you that they're going to tell the person being reported.
It's weak language, and probably doesn't apply to if a low level is reported, but the policy says "we will try to protect the identity of the reporter, but it often is not possible to do so and investigate".
It leads me to believe any report would lead to an investigation that goes like this:
"You've been observed doing this be Bob, you didn't do that in front of Bob did you?"
"No"
"Cool cool, here's the report, Bob is pro
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I do know that retaliation can take many forms and that it is indeed almost impossible to completely guard aga
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managers appear to focus so much on the short term gain
You've just encapsulated almost the entire management class in the Untied States.
Corruption (Score:5, Insightful)
No corporation is too big to fail once infected with corruption. The best example is the Soviet Union which collapsed under the weight of it's own corruption, even though that was a government there are plenty of corporate examples like Worldcom/MCI come to mind. How did the USSR treat whistleblowers?
The pattern keeps repeating so that no one will bother anymore because it means blowing up their life. Even working in an environment that has corruption going on in it produces a toxic work environment for people just doing their job as I recently found out. Yet companies expect ordinary people to show up for the stress of the cognitive dissonance that it produces. It's not enough to drink the Kool Aid anymore, it's got to flow through your veins and if you actually care about what you do, like people who know the stakes when building aircraft, then you are right royally fucked.
After twenty plus years of lobbying government on issues such as freedom of speech, protecting privacy, reading and analyzing hundreds, possibly thousands of pages of law I know the effort it takes. If you want to understand what the cost of freedom is, how much effort it takes to be vigilant go read a proposed act of law that will affect you, write to politicians on both sides and frame your arguments for their political objectives and then you get an idea of how thankless it is without the added stress whistleblowers have to go through with a company that has no qualms about absolutely destroying you.
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How did the USSR treat whistleblowers?
If a worker filed a formal complaint about a manager, then that was a real problem for the manager.
If a person complained about the communist system in general, then that was a problem for the complainer.
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Ignoring risks for a claimed dangerous issue might just be inherent in human nature. The engineers that raised objections to the Challenger taking off in cold temperatures w
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No corporation is too big to fail once infected with corruption. The best example is the Soviet Union which collapsed under the weight of it's own corruption, even though that was a government
Well, you almost had it.
No government is too big to fail once infected with corporatism.
The best example so far has been the Soviet Union which collapsed under the weight of its oligarchs (who looted the treasury - even under alleged communism the owners of their MIC were getting rich off the cold war that bankrupted the nation) but here comes the USA to show them how far you can really fall. Now that the government is going openly fascist here in the USA (hard right authoritarianism, check; "Strong" man l
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No corporation is too big to fail once infected with corruption. The best example is the Soviet Union which collapsed under the weight of it's own corruption, even though that was a government
Well, you almost had it. No government is too big to fail once infected with corporatism.
I think corruption is the "getting away with it" part of the journey into corporatism which, like communism, converts democracies and capitalism into the long stagnation of feudalism, the impact of which is present in many people's last name, for example Baker, Smith, Clark, Mason and so on. Communistic belief is that capitalistic democracies will collapse under the weight of their own corruption and here we are proving them right.
I like many people wonder what it would be like without America as the do
Document everything (Score:3)
Wrong on a lot of levels (Score:3)
Not surprising given the self-regulation (Score:2)
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Actually the FAA had no choice, it was mandated by Congress under the absurd LiberTARDian fantasy that if left alone corporations will improve safety and service out of fear of their army of phantasmagorical honest lawyers, uncorruptable judges, and juries with the wisdom of Solomon.
Newt Gingrich's moment of brilliance was when he realized that he didn't need to eliminate regulatory agencies that his financial backers hated like the FAA, EPA, IRS, etc. He just made their enforcement budget a separate line
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Right, it started under Clinton and accelerated under Shrub. By 2004 people were being let go in regulatory agencies across the government.
This is gonna make people mad (Score:3)
Usually these people are on their way out the door, but guess what they’re gonna do while they leave? They’re gonna pull up the whistleblower site and vent on every little imagined thing they don’t like about the place. And it all gets mixed in with the small numbers of legit whistleblowers (the sincere ones in their right minds) who have seen something truly wrong that needs correcting.
Sorting through that mishmash? I’m not surprised that 90% would be ignored. I would have guessed more like 99%.
I’ve seen this firsthand. I work for a large organization which has a “click here to send a complaint straight up the executive chain”. Most of what goes in there are messages from truly irrational people who think they discovered a space alien cabal intent on dragging them down and ruining their life. Ok, that’s an exaggeration, but only a little bit. Most of the complaints have no basis in fact.
well the ones that go somewhere at Boeing have (Score:2)
Where is the FBI? (Score:2)