THE BART CASE

Whistleblowing - The BART Case

Whistleblowing - The BART Case

Introduction

Whistleblowing can be defined as an act of any employee who believes that disclosing unethical or illegal action or behavior to higher authority of the organization and any other external authority (Grant, 2002). The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) incident explains about the Whistleblowing of three ethical engineers who believed that their managers are not responsible and they should disclose technical flaws of the Automatic Train Control or ATC system. In fact, they believed whatever they are doing is in the benefit of public as the ATC system is part of BRAT and has been designed for public service. However, their concerns were listened by the management but rejected immediately and these three engineers lost their jobs.

This incident also initiated a debate over ethical, legal and social obligation of employees who work for different organizations. No doubt, engineers or any employee of an organization are part of society and have social obligations (Friedlander, 1973a). However, companies only accept their code of conducts as morality, ethics and social obligations which they expect from their employees to be obeyed. It is also important to know that three BART engineers adopted an official way to present their concerns before the board where they explained about the flaws of BART's ATC system (Grant, 2002). This means, the way engineers adopted cannot be identified as improper or illegal but the management considered this act as improper. This paper aims to critically discuss about the incident and ethical, legitimate elements behind the firing of engineers in this case.

Background

The government 1n 1940s laid the foundation of a mass transit system for the San Francisco bay area that ultimately started with the name of bay Area Rapid Transit or BART system. There is no doubt about the fact that BART was a large scale high-tech project and the vision of this project was to serve different communities living in the San Francisco Bay region (Alford, 2007). The project aimed to use latest technologies in order to provide complete automatic control system for transits in the bay area. In addition, the Automatic Train Control or ATC system was designed as main part of the BART project and the ATC used innovative technology and techniques to manage speed of trains and their reach to train stations (Grant, 2002). It is also essential to discuss that automatic train control technology is usually preferred by the train drivers as they receive instructions from through radio communication and also read signals installed on tracks. However, BART was designed to offer onboard automatic sensors that can be used to find the position of train and receive instruction from control tower to know location of other traffic on the track. It is also interesting to point out that these technologies were not previously tested in a commuting-based rail system. In addition, Westinghouse was the main company that was responsible to design this automatic system for BART and the company started work on it in 1967 (Friedlander, ...