Would Licensed Engineers Make Workplaces Safer?

Joe Carson is a licensed professional engineer (PE) with three decades of experience as a federal employee whose job involved responsibility for nuclear safety.  He is also an activist and whistleblower who has devoted much of his time in recent years to problems with safety and accountability in the engineering profession.  Joe recently sent me a couple of articles that, taken together, raise an interesting question:  if engineers working in U. S. industries had to have PE licenses, could they raise the level of workplace safety?

The first article reports that the U. S. government's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recently levied $1.7 million in fines against Ashley Furniture for numerous safety violations and injuries in its large plant in Arcadia, Wisconsin.  OSHA says about 4,500 people are employed at the facility, making it probably one of the largest furniture factories in the U. S.  But Ashley's Arcadia plant doesn't seem to be a safe place to work.  OSHA says that Ashley's plant workers have suffered over 1,000 injuries in three and a half years, and have placed the firm in its Severe Violator Enforcement Program.  A spokesman for Ashley disputes the allegations and calls the fines "grossly inappropriate and overzealous." 

In some countries, engineers cannot work in their profession at all without obtaining a PE license or equivalent from a government agency.  In turn, the government can hold licensed engineers responsible for ethics-related performance, such as the safety of products manufactured, and even for the safety of employees who work at a plant under the engineer's supervision, broadly defined.  There is an entire specialty called manufacturing engineering which is devoted to the efficient—and safe—design of manufacturing facilities.  If U. S. manufacturing engineers had to have PE licenses in order to work in private industries, and the terms of their licenses spelled out minimum safety standards that facilities they designed had to meet, it stands to reason that with their jobs on the line, manufacturing engineers would pay a lot of attention to workplace safety in facilities they were responsible for.

So why isn't that the case in the U. S.?  Because of a little-known set of laws collectively known as the "industrial exemption."  Back in the 1930s when engineering societies began to lobby state legislatures to enact PE licensing laws, corporate manufacturing and industrial interests got wind of this and inserted industrial exemptions into the laws in many states.  The effect of these exemptions is to exempt firms that are basically big enough to look out for themselves from having to hire only licensed engineers.  Some states without industrial exemptions nevertheless do not enforce the licensing of all engineers.  The history of PE licensing and regulation is complicated, but the results are simple enough to summarize:  unless you practice engineering as a direct service to the general public (as in a consulting firm), or work for a government agency engaged in public works such as roads and bridges, you generally do not have to hold a PE license to work in the engineering field.

In his fair-minded way, Joe also sent me another article, this one on the question of whether state licensing laws have gone too far.  The recent rise of unlicensed taxi-equivalent private services such as Uber has raised the issue of whether we really need to license professions such as hair-braiding and interior decorating.  The arguments in favor of professional licensing made by trade groups usually start from the premise that the public needs protection from untrained amateurs who don't know what they're doing.  Consequently, the state has an interest in licensing X profession, and the licensing process typically requires a minimum amount of training and certification for the licensee.  With such training, the public can now rest assured that a licensed practitioner of X knows what he or she is doing, and certain dire consequences, ranging from mis-braided hair to clashing colors in your living room, can be avoided.

I let myself go a little there at the end of that paragraph, but the basic point is sound in some cases.  Everyone wants licensing for highly trained professionals in life-critical jobs such as surgeons and airline pilots, because the negative consequences of error in these professions are so obvious.  Critics of state licensing laws counter that while licensing can raise the standards of performance in a profession, it can also restrict entry and create a seller's market for the profession's services.  This lets licensed members of the profession make more money, but arguably leads to more expensive services that are not always better, as numerous studies comparing services in states with and without particular licensing laws have shown.

If the industrial exemptions went away and states began aggressively enforcing PE licensing for all engineers, we would certainly see a spike in engineering salaries for licensed engineers.  There would also be a rush to get PE licenses, which usually take years to obtain for undergraduate engineers, who can only get "EIT" (Engineer In Training) status immediately after passing an initial exam, and then must accumulate some years of experience before applying for a full license. 

As to whether products and workplaces would be safer, that would depend on whether safety requirements were built into the licensing laws, as I described above.  Currently, that is not the case, although as a matter of principle, engineers at facilities such as Ashley Furniture ought to consider workplace safety more than they apparently do at present, license or no license.  If no engineer would work for a firm out of fear of losing his or her license, it would apply a novel kind of pressure that would encourage such organizations to clean up their act safety-wise.  But it would also turn licensed engineers into a sort of government agent, a role that many might find uncomfortable, to say the least.

I thank Joe Carson for bringing this issue to my attention, and I hope that engineers responsible for workplace safety, including those at Ashley Furniture, will follow Joe's example of holding safety paramount above profit, promotion, and even one's job, whether or not licensing laws are changed.

Sources:  Joe Carson sent me notice of the New York Times articles "OSHA Cites Ashley Furniture Over Dozens of Safety Violations" at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/business/osha-cites-ashley-furniture-for-dozens-of-safety-violations.html

and "Job Licenses in Spotlight as Uber Rises" at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/business/economy/ubers-success-casts-doubt-on-many-job-licenses.html.  You can read more about Joe Carson and his work at http://www.carsonversusdoe.com.  For the history of PE licensing, I referred to an article by Neil Norman on the National Society of Professional Engineers website at http://www.nspe.org/sites/default/files/resources/pdfs/blog/industry_exemptions-neil_norman.pdf.  I last blogged about PE licensing on April 13, 2013 at

http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/should-engineers-be-licensed.html.

Minding the Nuclear Store

Most Americans my age experienced the 1960s “duck-and-cover” drills in elementary schools, when the notion of getting blown up in a nuclear holocaust was just a part of everyday life.  The fact that the U. S., Russia, and a lengthening list of other countries still have the ability to vaporize millions with nuclear weapons has gradually faded from the public’s consciousness over the years, as the Cold War wound down following the collapse of the old Soviet Union in 1991.  Most of the college students I teach were born after the end of that era, so it’s not surprising.

But there are a few folks who haven’t forgotten.  Notable among them is a team of two U. S. war veterans and a Roman Catholic nun in her eighties who gathered in the pre-dawn hours of July 28, 2012 outside the Y-12 nuclear material complex near Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  This high-security facility is one of the main storehouses for the nation’s nuclear-weapons material:  highly enriched uranium, mainly, which is used in the fission “triggers” of thermonuclear (fusion or “hydrogen”) bombs.  The Wikipedia article on Y-12 says that we also keep enriched uranium there for other countries that don’t want to bother with storing it themselves.  Needless to say, a terrorist outfit that managed to steal some of this uranium would be in a good position to make their own nuclear weapon, so the bunker-style storage buildings with watchtowers on the ends are surrounded by several security perimeters:  barbed wire, fences, and the usual security cameras and sensors.

The three anti-nuclear protesters (for that is what they were) took bolt-cutters to the outer fence and climbed inside with the rest of their equipment, which they say consisted of “a Bible, hammers, candles, bread, white roses and blood.”  They surprised themselves by getting close enough to one of the main buildings to smear blood on its white walls, and spray-painted words on it: “The fruit of justice is peace” and “Plowshares please Isaiah.”  The latter is a reference to the famed “swords into plowshares” passage of the second chapter of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. 

Evidently, the guards in charge of preventing this sort of thing initially believed that the noises their sensors picked up were wild animals, which occasionally cause false alarms.  Eventually, however, someone went down to check and discovered the intrusion.  The three were duly arrested, jailed (this was not a new experience for Sister Megan Rice, who has been arrested more than thirty times and served two previous jail sentences), and on May 8-9, 2013, were convicted of felony charges in federal court in relation to the break-in.  They are in jail awaiting the sentencing phase to come in September.

Whatever one thinks of the rightness or wrongness of nuclear weapons, I think most people can agree that as long as a government cares to deal with such things, it is that government’s responsibility to make sure that no unauthorized persons can steal the weapons, or nuclear material that can be used to make a weapon.  Other things being equal, I would probably rather live in a world without nuclear weapons, but that is not the world we live in now, and as with so many other things in politics, the problem lies in how we get from here—with nuclear stockpiles around the world—to a point where nobody has any. 

Nuclear protesters such as Sister Rice clearly see their roles as prophetic.  The Old Testament prophets had hard jobs:  God told them to say unpopular things that usually got them thrown in jail, or worse.  But the real prophets­, as opposed to the popular and successful false prophets, were under a compulsion to bring God’s message to the people. 

I learned of this incident via Joe Carson, a long-time Department of Energy safety officer who has his own prophetic role that his Christian faith has impelled him to play.  He has found that many areas of the U. S. government’s civil service are infected by incompetence, carelessness, and neglect of duty.  What is worse, those such as Mr. Carson who attempt to right such wrongs are often punished by their superiors for rocking the boat (going outside the organization, or “whistleblowing”), and even so-called whistleblowing defense organizations can fall victim to corruption and self-serving activities as well.  The breach of security by the protesters at the Y-12 facility revealed how vulnerable the nuclear storehouse is to attackers armed with nothing more than bolt cutters and hammers.  One wonders whether the vigor with which they were prosecuted arose more from embarrassment than from a genuine concern for national security.  Making powerful officials look bad can get you in more trouble than almost anything else.

Sr. Rice and her compatriots broke laws, it is true, but they are in a long and honorable tradition of civil disobedience that goes back at least to Martin Luther King and ultimately to the Old Testament prophets themselves.  They knew they would probably go to jail, and they did.  When convicted, Sr. Rice was quoted as saying “I regret I didn’t do this 70 years ago.” 

70 years ago, she would have been about 13, almost old enough to work in what was then a top-secret World War II uranium processing facility devoted to making the first nuclear weapons.  In Y-12’s cavernous hallways, teenage girls fresh from the surrounding Tennessee hills were hired by the dozen to sit at control panels all day, turning knobs to keep meter needles at a certain value.  The girls knew only that they got paid well and were somehow contributing to the effort to win World War II. 

Sr. Rice would have indeed had to be a prophet to have protested effectively against the U. S. effort to make the world’s first nuclear weapon with the Manhattan Project.  Almost from the beginning of the program, some of those involved harbored doubts that it was a good thing to do.  Ever since the end of the war, a small but dedicated number of people have worked to rid the world of nuclear weapons, but so far they have fought an uphill battle.  I can both wish for them to succeed, and also hope that until they do, we can keep better watch over our nuclear store than we have been doing lately. 

Sources:  I referred to several articles on various aspects of the July 28, 2012 incident:  a Knoxville News-Sentinel editorial at

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2012/aug/10/editorial-doe-must-repair-y-12-security-and/

an article from an alternative newspaper on the trial at

http://duluthreader.com/articles/2013/05/17/1702_kabuki_dance_in_federal_court_equates_radical,

some photos of the scene of the event posted at

http://www.nukeresister.org/2012/10/22/photos-of-transform-now-plowshares-action/

and the Wikipedia articles on Y-12 and Megan Rice.  Thanks to Joe Carson for bringing this incident to my attention.