MOVING FROM ‘ME’ TO ‘WE’
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ENGINEERING DIMEMSIONS
PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERS ONTARIO
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A SELF – REGULATING PROFESSION
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PROFESSIONAL DISCIPLINE
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May 2016 George Comrie, P.Eng., FEC President’s Message
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Previously in this column I have written in defence of our unique Canadian model of professional self-regulation (Engineering Dimensions, July/August 2004, p. 3). In spite of a chorus of voices telling us that professional “guilds” are dying or dead, I remain convinced that the system we have here–of which PEO is a good example–represents the best value proposition for both the profession and the public it serves. And I would consider dilution or loss of our self-regulatory status to be a severe blow to the engineering profession. So that we can remain focused on what we need to do to preserve and strengthen that status, it may be useful to remind ourselves from time to time how this concept is supposed to work, and what it means (and doesn’t mean) for organizations like PEO and for their members/licensees.
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Let me begin by noting that professional self-regulation did not come about through the now-typical “downloading” of responsibilities from higher levels of government to lower ones. As former PEO President Peter DeVita, P.Eng., FEC, points out in his book A Search for Advocacy–Creating the Canadian Engineering Profession (www.g7books.com/search4.html), our forerunners at the beginning of the 20th century sought and secured from government the privilege of self-regulation. What they obtained in the various provincial statutes like Ontario’s Professional Engineers Act was essentially a contract with the public in which the profession secured the right to govern and regulate itself in exchange for committing to put the public interest first–ahead of any individual or collective self-interest (Engineering Dimensions, September/October 2004, p. 3). The contract was a win-win for both parties: the professionals gained status and substantial control over their own destiny as a profession, and the public gained assurances that competent professionals would be protecting their interests. When one considers the overall quality and reliability of engineering across all sectors in Canada in comparison to many other jurisdictions, I think it is fair to conclude that our profession has lived up to its part of the bargain substantively.
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Note that the profession and its members are not precluded from having any self-interest–just from putting that self-interest ahead of the public interest. The public will be best served by a strong, independent profession with a clear, self-regulatory mandate and exclusive rights to practise. And the fact that professional bodies like PEO operate at arm’s length of government means they are free to advocate for sound public policy within their spheres of expertise, even if their advice ends up at odds with government policy. However, to avoid any perception of conflict of interest, many professional regulators like PEO have created separate, independently governed organizations–in our case, the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE)–to advocate for the economic and professional self-interests of their members. Even then, the two professional organizations are not precluded from collaborating on activities in which there is no inherent conflict of interest, such as informing the public of the importance of the engineering profession to their economic prosperity, safety and quality of life.
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Professional self-regulation does not mean that individual members of the profession are free to decide when and how to regulate their own individual practices. Our contract with the public requires the profession to maintain an organization (PEO) that establishes and enforces consistent standards of admission, practice and professional conduct for the profession. Individual members of the profession are expected both to contribute (their time and expertise) to the establishment of those standards, and to adhere to them in their day-to-day work. So while members of the profession have the democratic right to participate in its governance and leadership, they are subject to its regulation in their practice, for the collective good of the profession and the public. They can also be expected to report to their regulatory body information on their scopes of professional practice, and on measures they are taking to maintain their currency and competence, and to mitigate risks to the public inherent in their practice. Such data is essential for the profession to maintain public confidence that it is, in fact, regulating itself in the public interest.
A former council colleague used to say that PEO is in the competence assurance business. Given the diversity of engineering practice, it may be difficult for anyone other than an individual practitioner to accurately determine his or her competence in a given situation. That is why professionals are expected to limit their practices to those areas for which they are properly prepared by education and experience. And that is why elements of good character, such as honesty, integrity, responsibility and judgment, are so important to professional practice. But that does not alleviate the requirement for the professional regulator to set standards of knowledge and skill for practitioners, as well as work product standards for various professional activities, and to assess practitioners and their work against them. Public confidence may require regulators to do more than just discipline those practitioners who are the subjects of legitimate complaints. Another crucial aspect of the contract between the profession and the public is that of exclusive rights to practise. It is widely believed that the percentage of professional engineers who require their licence to practise to earn their living is low (perhaps 30 per cent) compared to other senior professions, such as law and medicine. To make matters worse, the percentage of those with engineering education who are licensed to practise is also low (less than 50 per cent). The simple reason for this is a licence to practise professional engineering is not required–or not believed to be required–for much of the work that graduate engineers do. And while it is accepted that many graduate engineers enter or advance to careers where their work falls outside the definition of the practice of professional engineering in the Professional Engineers Act (section 1–Revised Statutes of Ontario, 1990), it is clear that much activity that falls within the definition is being performed with impunity by unlicensed individuals.
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This situation is highly undesirable from the perspectives of both the profession and the public. As originally drafted, the act precluded anyone without a licence from performing engineering work unless a licensed professional engineer assumed responsibility for that work. Unfortunately, this exclusivity was undermined in the 1984 revision of the act by what has come to be referred to as the industrial exception at section 12(3)(a), which permits those doing professional engineering in relation to machinery or equipment in their employers’ manufacturing facilities to be unlicensed. The current Ontario government agreed in 2010 to repeal the offending section of the act, but has since reneged on that commitment.
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The problem of the industrial exception is compounded by the fact that there is a prevalent belief in many industries that all their engineers are exempt from the requirement to be licensed. This leads to the untenable situation in which unlicensed and licensed co-workers are working side by side on the same engineering tasks that fall outside the exception. This constitutes a violation of the act, but PEO’s ability to enforce against this illegal practice is hampered by the difficulty of discovering, investigating and prosecuting such infractions. Further complicating the problem is the fact that much engineering work product is being imported from offshore and used in Canadian jurisdictions without the involvement of a licensed Canadian engineer. Relatively few scopes of engineering practice are subject to demand-side legislation that requires the signature and seal of a professional engineer before the engineering work product can be used.
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Our Canadian model of self-regulating professions is predicated on the regulated professionals having exclusive rights to practise in all areas where there is a public interest inherent in the work. I believe it is critical to the ability of our profession to regulate in the public interest that this untenable situation be corrected through a combination of elimination of the industrial exception, expansion of demand-side legislation to additional scopes of practice, and expansion of enforcement powers.
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Daniel H. Zwicker, CFP Blog: http://www.dzwicker.blogspot.com
FFCG Blog: http://www.dan-zwicker.blogspot.com
Beyond Risk Blog: http://www.beyondrisk.blogspot.com
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By Bruce E. Levine / AlterNet
March 18, 2012
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A preoccupation with money is nothing new in our culture, but have Americans become even more “money-centric,” and does this deaden us, making us incapable of resisting injustices?
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A money-centric society is one in which money is at the center of virtually all thoughts, decisions and activities. While capitalism certainly gives rise to money-centrism, any society in which individuals have little know-how and lack supportive community—and are thus totally dependent on money for their survival—will create a money-centric society. Such a society coerces even the non-greedy to focus on money at the expense of damn near everything else in order to survive.
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Have We Become More Money-Centric?
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Sociologist Robert Putnam reported in Bowling Alone (2000) that when American adults were asked in 1975 to identify the elements of “the good life,” 38 percent chose “a lot of money,” compared to 63 percent who chose “a lot of money” in 1996. Since then, from my experience, this focus on money has only increased. Both greed and fear make one more money-centric, and in recent years, it has become more socially acceptable to be greedy and increasingly commonplace to be financially insecure.
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When I began my clinical psychology private practice nearly three decades ago, my clients who worked for major Cincinnati corporations such as Procter and Gamble felt secure in their employment, but that security began disappearing two decades ago. Nowadays, nearly everybody, even teachers and postal workers, lacks job security. Today, I see money worries, more than anything else, triggering panic attacks, depression, and alcohol abuse. Money discussions have even come to dominate family counseling sessions, where high school students increasingly talk about their fear of becoming financial losers, and parents fear their children will ruin their lives by accumulating student-loan debt while pursuing fields where there are few decent-paying jobs. Between my clients and my own money preoccupations, the dead shit of money routinely deadens me, especially when I lose my sense of humor about it.
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It is difficult to maintain a sense of humor about all of this, so for most of us, having a stash of money feels increasingly important—and money accumulation has increasingly become the center of our lives.
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In 1900, only 1 percent of Americans was in the stock market; by 1950, this had increased to only 4 percent; but by 2000, more than 50 percent of Americans were in the stock market. While some of these people merely have pensions that own shares on their behalf, many Americans have in fact chosen to invest in the stock market. How many of those people are investing their money in companies whose products they believe in? Almost none.
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For those Americans not in the stock market and who are living from paycheck to paycheck or on public assistance, they also are assured by the state that it is quite okay to gamble where the odds are more stacked against them than in the stock market. Many state governments not only offer lotteries but advertise them heavily on television, radio, billboards, and with mass mailing coupons—and this today is socially acceptable.
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Younger generations are increasingly told they won’t have job security in their working years or Social Security later on. So, while many young people would rather be gaining life experiences, they feel pressure early on to accumulate a large pile of cash.
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When Did Greed Become Respectable?
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Money has always been a big deal in America, but through much of history, the money-centrism of the greedy has not had the social acceptability that it has recently gained. For the non-elite, greed was seen as the practice of villains such as Charles Dickens’ money-obsessed Scrooge, a psychologically and spiritually sick man in need of conversion. As late as 1936, a sitting president of the United States running for reelection knew that that it was quite popular to blast the greedy, selfish elite:
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We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.
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That was Franklin D. Roosevelt on Oct. 31, 1936. Contrast FDR’s speech with President Barack Obama’s response in an interview excerpted by Bloomberg Businessweek and the Wall Street Journal in February 2010. When asked about Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s $9 million bonus and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s $17 million bonus,
Obama responded:
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First of all, I know both those guys. They’re very savvy businessmen. And I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That’s part of the free market system. I do think that the compensation packages that we’ve seen over the last decade at least have not matched up always to performance…Listen, $17 million is an extraordinary amount of money. Of course, there are some baseball players who are making more than that who don’t get to the World Series either.
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How did greed come to be so respectable? What Paul of Tarsus, in the first century after the death of Jesus, was to the dissemination and legitimization of Christianity, Ayn Rand, in the last half of the 20th century, was to the dissemination and legitimization of money-centrism and greed. Rand ends her novel Atlas Shrugged with this image of its hero John Galt: “He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar.” Rand exhorted her followers to believe in what she called “radical capitalism,” and she lived—and even died—in radical money-centrism. At Rand’s funeral, in accordance with her specified arrangements, a six-foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign was placed near her casket.
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Money-centrism, of course, has been caused by many other forces and perpetuated by many other people.
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How Money-Centrism Deadens Us and Makes Us Incapable of Resistance
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When one cares only about money, one neglects everything else necessary to build and maintain self-respect. Neglecting other aspects of our humanity results in destroying our integrity, and integrity is necessary for strength. And when one is willing to do whatever it takes to make money, one assumes others are acting similarly, which destroys trust and makes it impossible to create the solidarity necessary to successfully challenge illegitimate authorities.
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Money-centrism is especially malevolent when it attacks societal forces that are potentially liberating. Much has been written about how spiritual revolts (such as those begun by Jesus and other rebels) eventually morph into organized religions, which are then driven by money and used by the elite as an “opiate of the masses.” The elite in religious hierarchies have routinely commercialized spirituality, and by so doing have reduced the power of spirituality as a potent force to take down the ruling elite.
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But spirituality is not the only potentially rebellious force that has been destroyed by money-centrism. Commercializing any powerful idea, belief or emotion deadens its power. Even the rebellion of folk/protest music and rock-and-roll has been increasingly commercialized, resulting in a dissipation of actual rebellious energy.
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In 1998, Bob Dylan and his son Jakob were paid $1 million to play for 15,000 employees of the Silicon Valley semiconductor company Applied Materials, and that’s not the only “corporate gig” on Dylan’s résumé. Next time you hear Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” how energizing will that be for you? And for quite some time, the aim of many rock-and-roll bands has been to exploit and commercialize the idea of rebellion. So, it should surprise no one that the Rolling Stones do corporate gigs, including one a decade ago in which they took in $2 million to entertain Pepsi bottlers in Hawaii.
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Equally widespread and probably even more responsible for dissipating rebellious energy is when songs of perceived rebellious artists are used as background music in commercials used to propagandize listeners into associating their rebellious urges with consumer products. Dylan’s “Times They Are a-Changin’” has been used by accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand and by the Bank of Montreal; and the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” has been used by Microsoft. Of course it is unfair to pick on only Dylan and the Rolling Stones, but it’s simply too depressing for me to go through the entire list.
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To defeat the elite, the rest of us need energy. Rebellion is a powerful idea, but when rebellion is used merely to attract an audience for financial profit, the idea itself becomes less powerful.
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So, whether it is spirituality, folk/protest music, or rock-and-roll, when rebellious energy is commercialized, that energy dissipates.
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Spirituality, music, theater, cinema, and other arts can be revolutionary forces, but the gross commercialization of these has deadened their capacity to energize rebellion. So now damn near everything—not just organized religion—has become an “opiate of the masses.”
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In a radically capitalist society that worships “one market under God” (as Thomas Frank called it), we are all forced to be somewhat money-centric in order to survive. No shame here. But since money is not alive, to the extent that we become radically money-centric and money is at the center of all of our thoughts, decisions, and activities, we are dead and incapable of any resistance to injustices.
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TIME TO RAISE THE PROFESSIONAL BAR
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https://beyondrisk.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/advocis-leads-in-professional-practice-by-raising-the-regulatory-bar-for-financial-advisors/