The Ethics of Punishment

We were discussing the case (now familiar to anybody on the Internet who has been paying attention for the past week) of the musician who had to resort to recording and posting a song on YouTube to get United Airlines to pay for the damage they did to his guitar (and then refused to make good on) last year, when the question of what to do about it came up. Not what to do about the incident itself; the dust is finally starting to settle, and unless someone at United Airlines has a time machine parked out behind the barn there’s not much they can do about it now, anyway. The question is, what do you do to the employees who created the situation in the first place? Because I can almost guarantee you that it’s more complicated than it looks…

First up, there’s the baggage handlers themselves. These are usually the lowest-paid members of the ground crew, and certainly the worst-compensated employees relative to how demanding their jobs are. There’s no question that enormous pressure is put on these individuals to move bags (and guitar cases) on and off of the aircraft as quickly as possible, and also very little question that the issue of damage to the bags is given a much lower priority by their employers. If the baggage handlers involved in this case were exhorted to move baggage as quickly as possible and told to pay no attention to potential damage (either because the company would deal with it or because of all of the disclaimers the passenger agrees to when they purchase their ticket), can we really blame them for the outcome? More to the point, can we ethically dismiss them for just doing what they were told, especially considering that their orders were neither illegal nor unethical (just really stupid)?

Then we have the counter personnel, ramp personnel, and call center personnel, all of whom apparently kept saying there was nothing they could do, and passing the case (and the now irate customer) on to someone else. Certainly, it would have been nice if someone along the chain of command had taken responsibility for the problem and used a discretionary budget to solve it. But suppose that none of these personnel had the authority to take responsibility for such a claim, or the budget to make things right. Can we punish them for the results? What if they really didn’t know how to handle such a claim (if the company had never provided them with training on how to do so or the information on where to refer such a case? If these were simply line employees, doing exactly what the company told them to do, can the company then fire them because those orders were not correct for the circumstances and the employees down on the pointy end were not given any discretion?

Then there’s the claims manager who eventually decided that the case did not conform to corporate regulations for damage compensation, and decided to deny the claim (not realizing the firestorm of negative PR this would create. Should she have known better, or has the company made it her job to serve as the gatekeeper, and present aggravated passengers from soaking the company from large sums of money just because they can cause a huge PR firestorm? That is, if there was a real reason contained in the company’s policy that curtailed settling the case and compensating the customer for his loss, not just some petty regulation over time of day, day of the week, time since the damage occurred, or some similar triviality, can the company fire her for just following the written policy they had evolved?

Of course, it does go without saying that anyone who was rude, unhelpful, hostile or insulting to the customer should be fired at once, before they create more such firestorms just because they are miserable little people. And anyone who could have resolved the case and didn’t (because it would cost too much or take too long or just require them to exert themselves for a few moments), or anyone who decided against settling the case over some trivial regulation should be fired immediately if not sooner. But if all of the United personnel in this story did exactly what their employer was requiring them to do, can the company hold them responsible for the ultimate crisis, and punish them, either with termination or some other sanction?

It’s worth thinking about…