The Consequences of Failure — Ken Block

The Consequences of Failure — Ken Block

A significant difference between accountability for failure in the real world and government work is the lack of consequences for failure in government work. Here in Rhode Island, political pressure and contractual giveaways of management rights conspire to make it extraordinarily difficult to hold workers accountable for their failures.

 

The most recent example of corporate accountability is the sacking of Hertz CEO Stephen Sherr, who bet big on electric vehicles only to have that gamble hugely backfire. His demise came swiftly from his costly mistake.

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Businesses remove managers and workers who make terrible mistakes, cause chaos in the workplace, or perform poorly relative to their peers on a daily basis. Businesses cannot afford to pay for substandard results in the real world. To do so impacts the bottom line and causes reputational harm.

 

Tremendous harm results from public employee mistakes, misfeasance, malfeasance, and underperformance. The harm is far greater than the mistakes that employees of businesses are most likely to make, which tend to impact business owners the most. As we now see with the westbound Washington Bridge disaster, public employee errors can endanger many lives and negatively impact hundreds of thousands of individuals and many businesses.

 

Governor Dan McKee’s reluctance to hold DOT Director Peter Alviti accountable for his agency’s unforgivable inability to determine that the bridge was in imminent danger of collapse is, at best, managerial negligence. Despite being under constant construction for decades and dumping tens of millions of dollars into it, the DOT jeopardized lives when their inspection processes failed to detect massive rot within the bridge.

 

The Governor has expressed confidence in Alviti’s ability to lead the quarter-billion-dollar effort to build a new bridge. Why? Wasn’t this failure sufficient evidence of dysfunction at the DOT to oust everyone in management? Alviti held a position in the laborer’s union for more than a decade, and the laborer’s union-backed McKee’s last gubernatorial campaign to the tune of a quarter-million dollars. McKee must be under pressure to leave Alviti alone. Would McKee have kept someone on the staff of his own small business who screwed up this badly? Most business owners would not.

 

It isn’t just management at the DOT who apparently enjoy protection from consequences for their errors. The unionized engineering staff at the DOT have a clause in their contracts that, get this, holds those employees harmless for any issues that arise due to their professional responsibilities. Yup. Design or inspect a bridge that falls down? No problem; your contract says you cannot be held accountable.

 

The same problem permeates Rhode Island state and municipal employment. Try to remove a teacher for any reason – contracts and state law make that process extremely difficult. For decades, there were Providence public school teachers who took every stinking Friday off. Every parent knows the teachers that they do not want to teach their children, yet those teachers continue to teach.  Results and accountability go hand in hand. Far too many of our school districts have subpar results and no mechanism to deal with underperforming teachers, which is only one reason of many why our school results disappoint.

 

The protections afforded to our government workers should be the same as those given to employees everywhere else. Dismissal for cause, including underperformance or horrific error, is the only reasonable way to manage employees.

 

It has been decades since I had to fire anyone for cause. The last time I had to do it was painful but necessary, as the person involved wasn’t getting the job done, and my customers noticed.

 

Accountability for performance is a necessary tool for employers to ensure they get the required work and effort from their employees. It makes no sense that Rhode Island’s government employees are largely exempt from the accountability that most private industry employees face daily. It also costs us dearly – to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars for just one negligently maintained and inspected bridge.

 

There is only one acceptable outcome for most Rhode Islanders regarding management at the DOT. They all have to go, and none should have a role in the new bridge project. It is just common sense.