Barack Obama has been talking recently about lifting corners of the regulatory blanket that smothers American business (nytimes). Let’s see how it would work in aviation.
Due to a train crash that was blamed on a marijuana-smoking driver, the federal government in 1991 imposed mandatory drug and alcohol testing requirements on transportation workers. Though no commercial airplane crash has ever been attributed to illegal drugs, every airline in the U.S. is required to do the following:
- train all managers to recognize when employees are on drugs and to learn the cool street names for cocaine, PCP, etc.
- train all employees to learn about how their employer might catch them via a random drug test
- request records from previous employers to make sure that the potential employee hadn’t tested positive in the past
- send the prospective employee for an initial drug screening
- surprise the employee every now and then and drag him or her off for an on-the-job drug test, then argue about the results and maybe send the employee into rehab or tell him to lay off the poppy-seed cake or whatever
[spelled out in detail at http://www.dot.gov/ost/dapc/NEW_DOCS/part40.html ]
For United Airlines, this isn’t an enormous cost and, since no stoner pilots have crashed Boeing 757s, the system is obviously working (let’s ignore the fact that no stoner pilots crashed Boeing 757s prior to 1991 either).*
How does it work for Joe Barnstormer, who gives biplane rides from underneath a shade tree next to a grass runway? Whose passengers meet Joe face to face prior to flight and could decide for themselves whether or not he inspires confidence? The government’s rules for Joe are … exactly the same as for United Airlines.
- Joe must take U.S. DOT-approved training to learn how to recognize when his employees (in this case, just himself) are on drugs.
- Joe must take U.S. DOT-approved training to learn how to recognize when his boss (i.e., himself) can catch him with a surprise drug test.
- Joe must send letters to his former employers to see if he failed any of the previous drug tests that he took
- Before he hires himself, Joe must take a pre-employment drug test to see if he has fooled his potential new employer (himself) into thinking that he is clean.
- Joe must pay a fee to a random selection service that will email him when it is time for a drug test. When the email shows up, Joe is supposed to wait for the next convenient time that Joe shows up to work, then surprise himself by sending himself to the drug testing lab.
Could any politician or bureaucrat revisit this rule? How would they respond to “Isn’t an American who takes a biplane ride entitled to the same level of protection from drug abuse as an American who buys a ticket on United?”
The only argument against imposing the same regulations on a small business as on a multi-national are that the cost will put the small company at a disadvantage or push it into insolvency. Government almost by definition does not consider the costs it imposes on individuals and companies. The big companies with lobbying budgets may not object to regulations that are onerous for their small competitors to comply with.
Almost every government regulation makes at least as much sense as having the single-pilot sightseeing operator surprise himself with a random drug test. It sounded sensible when it was drafted and presumably still sounds like something that keeps the public safe. How could we ever give it up?
*[The logic of the airlines being kept safe by the complex drug testing regulation is similar to that of the man who goes into a psychiatrist’s office with a duck on his head. Psychiatrist: “Why do you keep a duck on your head?” Man: “It keeps the lions away.” Psychiatrist: “But there are no lions in Manhattan.” Man: “See! It works!”]
This really makes me wonder about the potheads in Cali trying to legalize marijuana (meh), thoughts?
Al: Alcohol is legal in the U.S., but illegal to use while flying an airplane (private or commercial), so I don’t think legalization of marijuana would change anything (except maybe they’d have to augment the 8- and 12-hour rules for alcohol to add a “cannot have smoked marijuana, medical or otherwise, within the preceding 12 hours”).
> “train crash that was mistakenly blamed on a marijuana-smoking driver”
Were you referring to this?
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/1987_Maryland_train_collision
I could be mistaken, but it sounds an awful lot like the crash was entirely the freight crew’s fault and the entire freight crew was smoking marijuana at the time of the crash. (Or were you suggesting that it was Conrail and Amtrak’s fault for not installing hardware to stop trains that missed signals, or the Federal Railroad Administration’s fault for not forcing them to?)
Not necessarily the best evidence for your opinion. Americans have been hysterical about drugs at least since prohibition; no argument, rational, or emotional, is likely to change that in the near future. Perhaps
the story of Gordon Clark ( http://www.surfermag.com/features/clarkfoamletter/ ) is more apt.
J: Thanks for that link. I had heard about the train crash, but I didn’t know which one it was, and heard that eventually the conclusion was that marijuana wasn’t the primary factor. I’ll edit the text above. It is sad that when I use Google about 50% of the things that I “know” turn out to be false!
I used to work at a national laboratory. The active (i.e., non-management) research staff had a saying:
“If one person gets cancer, they’ll make us all undergo chemo.”
Most of this stuff seems like confirmation bias to the extreme: if it succeeds, regulation wins, if it fails, more regulation!
I am curios to know few things related to your article.
Does the same kind of regulation works for a meat and dairy farms? Is it biased towards big industry?
How difficult for a farmer having 10-100 cows to sell milk in his neighborhood?
This issue really is a huge problem and a catch 22 situation. People are mad about corporate abuse. So the nanny-state government introduces legislation to curb said abuse. It forces all companies to hire lawyers, enforcers, HR people ect ect to deal with said regulations therefore creating a barrier to entry. This then further entrenches said large corporation and stifles/eliminates any possible competition thus exacerbating the problem.
A small example:
Take the example of my aquaintances employer. In Alberta where I live there are complicated Occupational Health and Safety laws…the manual is 100’s of pages. He worked for a family that owned a small business (20 employees) that sandblasted and applied specialized coatings to machine and equipment parts. In brief the law states you have to pay overtime for the hours in a week that exceed 8 hours a day or 44 hrs per week(whichever is greater). This employer didn’t do enough research and was working his employees for nearly 15 years for 45 hours a week without paying them any overtime pay. Now, one of the employees learned his rights shortly after he quit and found out he could make a claim for his “unpaid overtime”. His claim (based on an average $23 per hour over 4 years) worked out to be $16,000. However, all other employees there subsequently got informed of their rights and made their own claims. This amounted to a total of over $345,000. The old man running the business had a heart attack during the process and died and his son got stuck with the bill which bankrupted the company. The funny thing is, if you ask any one of those workers who filed that claim whether or not they would have chosen to a) Work the extra 5 hours at straight time or b) Not get the hours at all. To a man, they all would have worked the extra 5 hours for the extra money.
How many hidden gems like this one lie in wait for entrepreneurs? How as a society can we really have much innovation or competition when we stifle it so badly with vast amounts of regulations and legislation.
Take the Alberta Oilsands where I work. A company recently installed some bollards (metal safety poles you see that protect firehydrants and driveway doors and the like). The cost was $8,000 per bollard. I thought this was just a crime against humanity and started trying to think of how I could get into this business. I mean the materials are around $1500(which is also outrageous)……..I then starting trying to think of the kind of safety program a person would have to have before they even stepped on a site like this. I can’t even go figure what that would cost…it’s a trickle down effect of government regulation. They regulate minute details of what is and isn’t allowed with no room for innovation which essentially means that in order to comply you need to hire 10 people to keep up on and protect your liability on this code. I think it is even worse in the US where a coffee provider can get sued for 100X the lifetime earnings of an individual for that individual burning themselves on your “hot coffee”.
Sambaiah: You asked about meat and dairy farms… the regulations for processing meat make it almost impossible to sell in the U.S. unless processed by a big slaughterhouse. http://www.realmilk.com/happening.html lays out some of the regulations for milk. My own state pays government workers to harass a woman who distributes raw milk to three co-owners in a cow (“On August 6, the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture and Resources (MDAR) mailed Sandisfield dairy farmer Brigitte Ruthman an “order to cease and desist the distribution of raw milk.” Ruthman operates a one-cow shareholder dairy and distributes raw milk to the three people that have invested in the cow.”).
People want to live in a safe, protective world.
There is no such thing.
Loki