Sarah Gregson

Slow to Learn: Regulatory Oversight of the Safety of Outsourced Aircraft Maintenance in the USA

Abstract Aircraft maintenance outsourcing and offshoring is now prevalent in the airline industry. In the USA, the safety implications of this shift in work organisation have aroused serious concerns — concerns magnified by six serious incidents between 1995 and 2009. Subsequent investigations, audits and reviews of outsourced maintenance activities identified significant failures in regulatory oversight. However, the air safety enforcement agency — the Federal Aviation Administration — was slow to respond to these shortcomings, despite sustained criticism from other US government agencies responsible for transport safety and governance. This paper provides a case study of regulatory failure and the difficulty of reshaping regulatory regimes in the context of rapid changes to work organisation. It highlights challenges in regulating outsourcing and subcontracting — challenges not confined to the USA — as well as problems in reshaping enforcement regimes.

It all started on the mines? The 1934 Kalgoorlie race riots revisited.

Previous studies of the 1934 anti-southern European riots in Kalgoorlie have predictably focused upon racial division. This article will address the other side of the story examples of solidarity across perceived ethnic boundaries. While competitive labour relations in Kalgoorlies goldmining industry undoubtedly created rifts, some attention should be given to the fashion in which the mines cohered a multi-ethnic workforce, sharing similar living and working conditions. It is suggested that this environment created as much basis for unity as it did for division. The article also contends that the Returned Services League played an ideological and practical role in fanning the outburst.

Supply chains, maintenance and safety in the Australian airline industry

This article examines potential regulatory and safety problems arising from the outsourcing and offshoring of heavy aircraft maintenance. We raise questions about the advisability of using increasingly complex supply chains in the aircraft maintenance industry where safety standards are paramount. Greater disarticulation of maintenance work makes regulatory oversight more convoluted and expensive to do thoroughly and transparently. Using a Pressure, Disorganisation and Regulatory Failure model, the article highlights how new work arrangements involving increased use of supply chains are developing more quickly than adequate airline, union and regulator responses to the safety problems engendered by those changes. In often heated industrial debates between licensed aircraft maintenance engineers (LAMEs) and airline managers about business needs and safety, we urge that more attention be paid to LAME concerns about outsourcing.

Titanic ‘down under’: ideology, myth and memorialization

On 15 April 1912 RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and sank, killing almost 1500 people. Without doubt, it was a horrifying tragedy which caused incalculable suffering to the victims, their families and friends. However, given the catastrophes that have pockmarked the twentieth century, it seems a little extraordinary that the Titanic’s story has defied categorization as just another distressing shipwreck, instead retaining, perhaps even magnifying, its power and vitality. Almost three decades afterwards George Orwell admitted being more deeply moved by the sinking than by the full carnage of the First World War, commenting that, ‘[t]his comparatively petty disaster shocked the whole world, and the shock has not quite died away even yet. . . . It gave me a sinking sensation in the belly which I can still all but feel.’ Not long before his death, nonagenarian economist, J. K. Galbraith, recalled that Titanic’s foundering,

Book Review: Hello Laziness (Bonjour Paresse)

Review(s) of: Hello Laziness (Bonjour Paresse), by Corinne Maier, translation by. D. Watson, Orion Books, London, 2005.137pp. ISBN 0752871862. Also published by Pantheon Books (translation by Sophie Hawkes). ISBN 0375423737.