Major Cracks in Human Resources and Management in the American Grocery Industry Exposed during the Coronavirus Pandemic

For a certain personality-type, character, or mentality, it is easy to blame other people while remaining silent on one’s own mistakes (and mentality). This approach can be particularly harmful during a pandemic, for one’s own mistakes could be passing on the infectious illness. Such mistakes include refusing to maintain a physical distance from other people in public places and retail stores. As noxious as the blaming is, a more significant anthropological point may be that as a social and habitual animal, the human being may not be mentally advanced enough to keep a distance from other such animals even for self-preservation. I don’t think the instinctual urge for socializing exhausts the explanation, for the failure (and even refusal) to respect others enough to keep at a distance even when they ask surely involves weakness that manifests psychologically beyond merely having a bad attitude. Not even the artificial organizational-management systems our species has established are a match for the toxicity of a weakness that is even just passively aggressive toward other people. I contend that American management is susceptable to an even more severe weakness; one that foists organizational power as a club even on customers. 

The full essay is at "Human Resources and Management in the American Grocery Industry."

The FAA Deferred to Boeing on the 737 MAX Jet

After a misfiring-prone automatic stall-prevention device on the 737 MAX jet had caused two accidents in which 346 people died, an internal review at the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, a regulatory agency, found that the regulators had relied too much on Boeing employees to conduct the safety inspections of the planes. Incredibly, Congress expanded the industry-reliance practice of the agency in 2018. Both the FAA and Congress were admittedly motivated by the added efficiency that such “sub-contracting” could bring. However, to focus on the economic benefit while ignoring the inherent (and obvious) conflict of interest in “sub-contracting” to the very companies that are regulated by the FAA is itself a red flag. A subservient or over-reliant regulatory agency cannot be a check on a company’s claims of not having sacrificed safety or even safety checks in order to focus more on profitability.  Of course, the political influence of a large company such as Boeing may have played a role in the FAA’s “back-seat” approach, but in this case the government’s own interest in stretching the coverage of its human resources may have been dominant. That such an interest could involve minimizing or ignoring outright such a blatant conflict of interest may point to a wider culture in which institutional conflicts of interest are presumed to be innocuous or even benign rather than too toxic to permit even if they have not been actively exploited.  

The full essay is at "FAA Deferred to a Regulatee."

The Arrest of a Senator in Georgia’s Capitol: A Sign of a Growing Authoritarian Police-State in America?

Sen. Nikema Williams (D-Atlanta) of the Georgia Senate “was arrested along with more than a dozen other protesters” at the Georgia Capitol on November 14, 2018.[1] The demonstration asked Georgia’s government to count every vote in the gubernatorial election. As a civil rights advocate, Williams had organized domestic workers for Stacy Abrams when she was running for Governor. Protesters shouted, “Let her go!” as the Capitol police handcuffed Sen. Williams and led her from the rotunda. No sitting legislatures in Wisconsin had been arrested (as far as I know) when huge constituent protests erupted in the Wisconsin rotunda against Gov. Scott Walker’s successful effort to remove collective-bargaining from powers of public sector unions there. As odd it may be for the police of a Capitol building to arrest a sitting senator, the observations of another senator, who witnessed the arrest, are even more chilling concerning an ominous trend then well underway in American cities.

The full essay is at "Arrest of a Senator Protesting."

When an Unethical Corporate Culture Becomes Dangerous in a Primitive U.S. State: Uber’s Self-Driving Cars in Arizona

A company with a horrendous reputation for having an unethical, and harsh, company culture is likely to be attracted to places in which lax regulatory oversight exists. A governmental view that regulations should be minimized dovetails with such a company. The two are a match, though not exactly made in heaven. The nexus can be situated closer to the ground, in a desert in North America, in Arizona in particular. In the case of Uber, which was testing its self-driving cars there in 2018, the flashpoint came in March, when such a car hit a pedestrian who was crossing a street without a sustained sidewalk. Suddenly society took another look, a much more hesitant look, at self-driving technology. Missed, however, was the nexus between Uber’s squalid culture/mentality and Arizona—the culpability of both having led to a perfect storm.

The full essay is at "Uber in Arizona: A Perfect Storm"