It will take months to determine exactly what led to the midflight blowout of a door on an Alaska Airlines plane last week. According to NBC News, investigators “have indicated an increasing focus” on the hardware of the aircraft, a Boeing 737 Max 9. Not only are bolts missing from the recovered door plug, both United Airlines and Alaska Airlines reported finding loose door plug bolts on a number of the now grounded Max 9s.
But it’s not too soon to consider another bigger and more systemic culprit: America’s corporate accountability crisis. From the 2008 financial crisis to the present, again and again corporations have treated their customers with complete impunity, and received nothing more than wrist slaps for extreme malfeasance. While massive scandals at corporations from Wells Fargo to Purdue Pharma fill the headlines, white-collar prosecutions have continued to decline.
Given this farcical excuse for accountability, it’s no surprise that the trouble didn’t stop for Boeing.
Boeing and its 737 are a textbook case. In October 2018 and March 2019, two crashes of an earlier version of the Max 737 killed 346 people, and grounded the planes for nearly two years. The disasters were ultimately traced to design failures in the model’s flight control software info that was not conveyed in its guidance to pilots, not to mention the Federal Aviation Administration, even though executives knew about it.
Yet repercussions were almost nonexistent. A midlevel functionary charged criminally was acquitted by a jury in a matter of hours. It took the better part of a year — and two embarrassing days of congressional testimony — for Boeing to fire then-CEO Dennis Muhlenberg. The Trump administration ultimately decided to fine Boeing $2.5 billion for not informing the FAA about software changes that contributed to the fatal airline crashes, while deferring a criminal charge against the company. For Boeing, the fine effectively amounted to a business expense. The government even declared the company’s failure and misconduct “not pervasive,” a huge favor to a company facing massive lawsuits from victims’ families.
Given this farcical excuse for accountability, it’s no surprise that the trouble didn’t stop for Boeing and the Max 737’s manufacturer, Spirit AeroSystems. The Lever reported Tuesday morning that a federal securities lawsuit filed last year against Spirit alleges “widespread and sustained quality failures,” including pressure on employees to downplay “defects.” And according to the Financial Times, last year Boeing itself flagged Spirit for improper installations and badly drilled holes on other 737s.
The issue is basic: Boeing, once famed for its meticulous attention to detail, increasingly became famed for its meticulous attention to the bottom line after merging with rival McDonnell Douglas in the 1990s. Shareholder returns became the top priority. Boeing relentlessly cuts costs — outsourcing everything from design to manufacturing even as it didn’t stint on stock buybacks in the years prior to the 737 Max crashes.
Even Spirit’s very existence reflects this change. Once a Boeing-owned parts plant, the company spun it off in 2004 in an attempt, not to increase manufacturing quality, but to increase Boeing’s Wall Street appeal. Spirit operates in the red — something that is almost certainly a factor in its quality control issues.
This to-the-bottom business model plays out throughout the economy. Last year, author Cory Doctorow outlined the life cycle of online platforms: “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” This arc, which Doctorow calls “ensh—ification,” can be applied to sites ranging from Amazon to TikTok to Facebook. But, if anything, Doctorow was too narrow in his focus. This to-the-bottom business model plays out throughout the economy. It’s encouraged by Wall Street, which values quarterly returns over almost everything else, and enabled by government regulators and cops, who are loath to punish wrongdoing in any way that would actually damage company finances. We see this play out over and over. The recent comeback of child labor is driven both by rampant Fortune 500 outsourcing and fines that tap out at $15,000 per violation. Federal food inspections seem like an afterthought, as does workplace safety. And then there is Silicon Valley, the subject of Doctorow’s ire, which all but embraced a “fake it till you make it” culture, encountering almost nothing in the way of legal or government pushback. No matter is too small to neglect. All of this is degrading, not just to business, but to the quality of American life itself. It’s not simply that one should not need to fear that a door on your plane will blow open midflight. It’s that the problem of corporations putting their customers last pervades our lives, even if the consequences aren’t always as dangerous as last week’s near catastrophe. Until companies — and their top executives — face meaningful accountability, this won’t change.
Helaine Olen
Helaine R. Olen is the author of "Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry" and a co-author of "The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn't Have to Be Complicated." She has been a columnist for The Washington Post and Slate, and her work has appeared in numerous other publications, including The New York Times and The Atlantic. She is managing editor of the American Economic Liberties Project. 
