Baltimore, Boeing: Who Suffers When Infrastructure Fails
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
For those of you who haven’t already heard, early this morning, Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge was hit by a container ship that lost power. It collapsed. Thanks to a timely warning by the crew, the bridge was emptier than it could have been, but it seems a number of vehicles were on the bridge, as well as a construction team performing repairs.
We have a playbook for public discourse about accidents and disasters in America. I suspect in the coming days, coverage of this is going to emphasize three things:
1.) The casualties. We will get names, faces, and heartbreaking stories, as we should.
2.) Detailed explanation of the events leading up to the collapse. This will probably focus on immediate causes– electrical failures– more than any structural implications– the error probability created by our just-in-time infrastructure, in this country and around the globe.
Consider the Rust shooting death in which Alec Baldwin was involved: only rarely did any coverage mention that this was the result of a broader trend of bad management and cost-cutting on labor. If it weren’t for Alex Press’s reporting on the matter I wouldn’t have known this, and while I hope it was relayed elsewhere or similar work was done by other journalists, I didn’t see that in the general public conversation.
Coverage of the ongoing Boeing scandal has made similar errors: we learn about door mechanics but not (again, in most media and most public discourse) the background economic conditions or management-by-consultant or financialization that helped lead to it. Some of this is myopia. Some of this is incentives: me shouting that the problem is capitalism is more controversial, and seemingly less objective, than descriptions of engineering failures or an account of a change in CEO.
“Boeing is having a management shake-up” is easier to write and more palatable to a wider audience than “short-termism driven by these broader political and economic factors has lead to widespread mismanagement across the airline industry.” This in turn influences what’s produced, what’s recommended to us, and ultimately what we can and what we are likely to see.
This is anecdotal obviously, but here’s a screenshot from the first page of a Google News search for “Boeing” that I just did:
3.) Economic disruptions and implications, from delayed Amazon packages to stock price movements. Financial news outlets in particular can always be counted on to produce ghoulish“what does this horrible series of deaths mean for your 401(k)” headline in the aftermath of a tragedy. What makes financial news like this easy is that it’s purely descriptive (X is) rather than normative (X ought be). “Company A’s Stock Price Plummets 5%” is, like narrow forensic accounts of accidents as compared to deep analysis of their causes, easier to write, less threatening to industries or actors involved, and more accessible to readers short on time and attention than “How Thirty Years of Regulatory Change Caused Company A to Kill People.” Similar incentives drive “horse race” coverage of elections: who will win rather than who wants what. You are as likely to see headlines today on Joe Biden’s polling as you are about the reality that supposedly motivates it.
All of this is true before we get into any kind of human intent, by the way. Media ownership is dominated by the wealthy, which does have a concrete impact on coverage, but much of the problem with political journalism is a result of political economy rather than scheming billionaire owners. One thing I like about the newsletter format is the way it allows for building on themes and knowledge over time, so if you haven’t read it yet, this might be a useful time to check out my earlier post on the ethics of capitalism, which is not so much ill intent as hostility to intent.
The first of these is necessary. The second is a start, but not enough. The third strikes me as grotesque. Let’s talk about infrastructure failure, very broadly— physical as well as institutional or social infrastructure. Examples after the obligatory subscribe button in case you’re new here—
Yesterday I was writing about a man named William Spavens, who didn’t get money owed him by the British Royal Navy in the 1750s, and ended up having to make a 24 mile trek with thirty other men in order to demand payment. 27 of them had no shoes. After personally securing an audience with an admiral, they managed to secure promises of payment, but ended up receiving only one-sixth of what they were due. This was an infrastructure failure, produced by a combination of cost-cutting, incompetence, and misfortune.
It wasn’t the product of either malice or misfortune– just a power architecture. Prize agents (the men who helped distribute prize money) had some financial incentives to hold onto prize money. The Royal Navy prioritized military operations over pay, especially when cash was tight and administrators were stretched thin. In any organization with fixed first-order priorities and a shortage of resources, get this done now, patch this and maybe return to it later becomes the response to any second-order problems.
Back to the present: right now the sentiment “nothing works” comes up frequently when we deal with technology or institutional infrastructure. Cory Doctorow’s term for the worsening of tech, “enshittification,” has become increasingly ubiquitous. Beyond tech, our roads and bridges are in disrepair, our public transit systems underfunded, our medical system in constant rolling crisis.
I don’t know about your healthcare provider, but mine has such a loose idea of the timeframe for a sick visit that if it were a serious issue I’d be better off asking if the doctor could make a house call to the cemetery. The healthcare conglomerate’s implicit demand: go to an urgent care. Get this done now, patch this and maybe return to it later.
It’s easy to think of these “nothing works” problems as minor nuisances. From the consumer side, they often are. But from other positions they can be something else entirely. The electronic payment system crashing at CVS is a minor annoyance to you, but potentially a day-ruining catastrophe to the two workers struggling to handle the constant flow of pharmacy orders. The bridge collapse in Baltimore will mean delayed Amazon packages for purchasers, but for some construction workers’ families it will mean an incalculable loss. Healthcare delays, which might only be episodic problems for those of us who don’t frequently need appointments, are a manifestation of outrageous overwork that staff constantly bear. Focusing on workers’ difficulties is not only preferable to narrowly thinking about the consumer endpoint— this focus is necessary to understand and address infrastructure failures large and small.
Without going into too much detail on what’s meant to be a short post, many of both our catastrophic infrastructure failures and our constant minor infrastructural or institutional problems are connected. There is not one single answer here: it wouldn’t be hard to give an account of neoliberalism or financialization that helps explain them, but each individual industry and even case would have its own particular contours. But some shared causes: a narrow focus on financial markets as opposed to business practices or concrete reality, management by a rotating executive-financial class with no meaningful ties to the business or its workers, deregulation. I don’t know now whether any of these will have something to do with the power failure on the ship that hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge, but I can guess.
Early in the 20th century, General Motors executive Alfred Sloan complained that William Durant misunderstood the purpose of the company: as he put it later, describing his shift in management, “the primary object of the corporation . . . was to make money, not just to make motor cars.” A simple enough statement, but one that contains a philosophy. Money is the purpose of a firm. Its actual practices are only a vessel to this, and if they can be compromised in order to make money, they will be. Equally importantly, if concerns other than immediate financial impact can be simply deprioritized, they will be.
If the primary object of Maersk (the shipping company involved here) is to make money, not operate ships– if the primary purpose of Boeing is to make money, not operate safe plans– if the primary purpose of CVS is to make money, not deliver prescriptions– you get the idea.
Predictably then, yes, the villain here is capitalism. The markets we have built our political economy around inevitably result in firms like this, which necessarily outcompete others– nobody wants to invest their retirement funds in a charity operation. But “replace capitalism,” while a laudable goal in my mind, is not a policy proposal.
For now, we have to consider how we can minimize these disasters, and how we can approach the “nothing works” problem in a way that addresses harms to workers rather than irritations to consumers. Don’t complain that “nobody wants to work” if your prescription isn’t getting filled– consider that CVS doesn’t want to pay them enough or hire enough workers. Why does this perspective shift matter? Because “consumers first” is both the political and economic logic of the market. It is part of how we got here. Focusing on consumer problems might allow us to address certain symptoms, but not the underlying causes of infrastructural and institutional failure. Thinking about work and workers demands an attention to process, and with it, root causes.
We owe this to the workers on that collapsing bridge. A lot of large-scale accidents aren’t really accidents. They aren’t intentional errors either. They’re the result of systemic problems, architectures we have made and can unmake. Whatever we hear in the next few days, let’s think about those workers, and talk about how to prevent this kind of “accident” from happening again. If there’s useful media coverage to that end in the coming weeks, I’ll share a roundup of it here, and if not I’ll try to find the time to do some reporting and write a bit of it myself.