Sci-Fi Corporation: A Mirror Image

¶ … Sci-Fi Corporation: A Mirror Image

Last week General Motors announced it would lay off 40,000 workers in Michigan. A corporation has no conscience. It is part of the capitalist system, a system with only one goal -- to make a profit. GM doesn't care about what is going to happen to the 40,000 workers and their families, or what effects the lay-offs will have on the community in which they live. It is not the corporation's function to care about human beings. It functions to make money.

Flint, a large city in Michigan, was ruined fifteen years ago when GM moved its plants to Mexico where the corporation could hire cheap labor and not have to pay taxes. GM has never taken any responsibility at all for what happened to Flint. So it is not hard to believe Bujold's portrayal of GalacTec in Falling Free. GalacTec is just like corporations that exist today. GM pays their third-world country workers something ($30 a week is a very good job in a developing nation). GalacTec's Quaddies got nothing, but in both cases, workers are exploited.

When Graf first arrives on Rodeo, he gives a lesson to the Quaddies on integrity and shows them how inspections, if falsified can lead to the deaths of many people:

... A falsified inspection report. Worse, it's one of a series. A certain sub-contractor of GalacTec supplying thruster propulsion chambers for Jump ships found its profit margin endangered by a high volume of its work being rejected -- after it had been placed in the systems. So, instead of tearing the work apart and doing it right, they chose to lean on the quality control inspectors (p. 34).

I don't see how this differs from Merck's response when they learned several years ago that their drug Vioxx doubled a user's risk of heart attack and stroke. Last year Merck sold $2.5 billion worth of it, and they knew. There is evidence now that they suppressed reports about the dangers because the drug was so profitable.

Sometimes corporate decisions are made by individuals far from the site who don't know enough about what's happening to be responsible for a moral decision -- or even that it is a moral decision. For example, towards the end of Falling Free Van Atta finds an old memo in his e-mail with orders to kill the Quaddies: "Item: Post-fetal experimental tissue cultures. Quantity: 1,000. Disposition: cremation by IGS standard biolab rules" (p. 293). Van Atta notices that the order came from "General Accounting and Inventory Control" and was signed by "some unknown middle manager in the GA& IC back on Earth." Van Atta says, "I don't think this twit even knows what Quaddies are." Similarly, non-sensical orders come down all the time in the military, which is organized along corporate lines, from people who know nothing about local situations.