Cape Safety, Inc. - Still Standing: Danger Dogs Series, #4

By Richard Hughes

Follow the adventures of the CSI consultants as they battle 21st-century problems like artificial intelligence, environmental issues, and the ethics of gene editing, among other new matters. Investigate the ramifications of letting AI decide loan applications, prison sentences, and drone targets; if a computer is doing it, what could go wrong? Why has architecture become hostile? Cow burps really are more damaging to the planet than you thought. Whales are better for the planet than you thought. Rat snakes aren't the bad guys anymore. Dickens characters were among the first recyclers. A filled diaper is loaded with plastics. Cobalt mining – the next frontier. Why our Outer Space Treaty is starting to mean something. Armadillos have migrated as far north as North Carolina; will they soon be in your backyard? Attack of the Stinkbugs – a modern-day horror tale. All the above and more are tackled by our CSI heroes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Waquoit Wordsmith Press
• Release date: Feb 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201804619

Richard Hughes

Richard Hughes closed his 24-seat safety training center on Cape Cod to become a retired student of modern worldwide shipping operations. He graduated from Massachusetts Maritime Academy with a B.S. in Marine Transportation then obtained a Masters Degree in Business from Lesley University. While at MMA, he sailed on the Bay State, the Lightning, and the Mobil Lube. His books include the Cape Safety, Inc. – Danger Dogs Series—a collection of 9 novels detailing the exciting lives of a top-notch bi-coastal safety consulting firm. His popular non-fiction Deep Sea Decisions is an expose of maritime tragedies. He and his wife, Lavinia M. Hughes, have co-authored Newtucket Island, Training Ship, and Cape Car Blues. He lives and writes in the seaside village of Waquoit, MA, with his wife.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

The crunching sound of a car on a seashell parking lot broke through the noise of two seagulls squawking over a single clam. Bob Guard was driving his Chevy Bolt into the parking lot of Cape Safety, Inc. and picked a space alongside several identical vehicles. After engaging one of the string of rechargers mounted at the end of each parking space, he hustled into the building. Hustling in the manner any seventy-plus-year-old man would, of course.

Already this morning Bob had, in his own mind at least, lost a minor skirmish with his 40-year nemesis, technology for technologies sake, when it took him 14 minutes to enter a new McDonald’s, tap a senior coffee with two creams into an 8-foot high touch screen kiosk, go through the chip-card reader dance, take a hard plastic numbered tent, get in line behind five similar customers—the only other five persons he could see—then shuffle slowly ahead as one order after another appeared several minutes apart under a Plexiglas partition.

How this was superior service to walking in the door, getting greeted by a clerk in a paper hat, handing him a buck and two quarters, and in mere seconds and within arm's-length, the same clerk filling up a disposable coffee with two creams and handing it over to you, was simply unfathomable to Bob.

Ray Kroc, with his chalked parking lot efficiency drills would, Bob was sure, be rolling in his grave watching how 2021 technology had mesmerized but also bastardized his fast-food service in the name of modernization.

During  Bob’s 14-minute wait he was at least savvy enough to have a traditional newspaper tucked under his arm so that he could read the latest headlines. Ironically, the total newspaper seemed to contain fewer words than his McDonald's receipt for that one coffee.

Today’s paper led with the news that Facebook had reached a settlement with the US government to pay as much as $14.3 million, acknowledging that it discriminated against domestic American workers by reserving thousands of positions for foreigners with temporary H-1B visas.

Ironically, a week later a Sunnyvale personnel recruiter and CEO of four Silicon Valley Technical Skills recruiting agencies was sentenced to 15 months in prison for H-1B visa fraud, convicted of charging thousands of dollars each to more than 100 foreign workers for non-existent jobs.

No word on whether the two culprits were aware of each other's needs.

These workers were far easier to take advantage of in a myriad of ways. Essentially, indentured servants were legally bound to their sponsoring employer with no legal rights to organize, or to demand safety, health, ADA, or other common rights that American workers could initiate.

Bob was also keenly aware that although $14.3 million sounded like a big penalty amount, it actually represented just slightly over an hour of Facebook’s revenue.

FACEBOOK, newly rebranded as META, wasn’t alone in America’s new wave of Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Pullmans, and other robber barons. The 2021 equivalents just had slicker publicists, remarketing modern exploiters like Jeff Bezos of Amazon (net worth $197 billion) as a trailblazing astronaut and Mark Zuckerberg of FACEBOOK ($124 billion) as merely a pioneer of friendly social networking. 

CEO pay over the past twenty years or so hadn't correlated, even remotely, to the compensation given to all those in the same company who made his or her success possible. Examples abounded like Chipotle's CEO being paid $38 million; Burger King/Popeye's being paid $20 million; Starbucks' being paid $14.7 million; Pizza Hut/Taco Bell's being paid $14.6 million; McDonald's being paid $10.8 million; and Wendy's being paid $7.2 million.

In 1991, restaurant workers had a minimum wage of $2.13 plus tips. Today, in 2021, restaurant workers still have a minimum wage of $2.13 plus tips. In 1991 average rent was $600 a month. Today in 2021, it's $1,600 and landlords routinely demand three month's rent in advance. Couldn't this be part of the explanation for why restaurants were having a tough time finding workers in the fall of 2021, instead of ambition deficits?

And it was just amazing, thought Bob, how no one ever says, raising the CEO's pay will make prices go up. United Parcel Service (UPS) for one was unionized (Teamsters), paid their drivers well, treated their drivers respectfully, and were experiencing no shortage of job candidates.

Few Americans realized, or wanted to acknowledge, what was really behind the ease of pushbutton purchasing and door-to-door Amazon Prime delivery in blue vans with their phallic logo. Like maybe the ability of Amazon warehouse workers to pee in actual rest rooms not in plastic bottles hidden at their workstations.

As Bob hung up his jacket. the Amazon thought reminded him to inquire as to the status of a bill pending that would deal with this matter. Glancing at the incoming news on the Communications Center’s holographic control board he called out, News Jeannie - In My Office, Please.

The smartboard instantly sent a life-sized holographic image of a cute blonde haired reporter named Jeannie to the corner of Bob’s office, not unlike a visiting co-worker.

Good morning Bob, announced the hologram announcer. Yesterday, the California State Senate voted 26-11 to pass bill AB 701, a bill aimed squarely at Amazon and other warehousing companies that hyper-track worker productivity. The bill will prevent employers from counting health and safety law compliance – including bathroom breaks – against workers’ productive time, which is increasingly governed by algorithms.

It was the first bill in the nation to address the future of algorithmic work, its insidious rigidity, ridiculously strict measurements, and associated worker penalizations for excessive TOT or time-off-task.

Thanks Jeannie, I’ll call you later for more, and the holographic image instantly disappeared.

Earlier in the week Bob had met with an employee outside of Amazon's Rialto, California, Fulfillment Center. She had been terminated a couple of days prior for just such an offense. Seriously injured at her conveyor belt when her dropped scanning gun struck her eye, she was then ordered to immediately return to her scanning job with only an aspirin and a wet towel as medical intervention.

Her slightly slower scanning numbers for the balance of her shift were tracked by Amazon's newest technological productivity algorithm that then simultaneously targeted her for low-productivity termination. More than five minutes without a scan - at any point in the shift - set off the algorithm, whether for bathroom needs, swiping clean a workstation, talking with a manager, or any other possible reason.

The passage of this bill would change the game for workers like this, forcing the company to divulge parameters of performance and penalization; prohibit companies from measuring time for necessary breaks, like sanitizing workstations, stretching, and the like, as TOT and provide a system for employee defense against such company enforcement attempts.

With the cavernous size of most of these warehouses, the simple logistics of going to the nearest bathroom and getting back can take up 10 - 15 minutes, completely unaccounted for in existing algorithm measurements.

Additionally, OSHA's own statistics showed that Amazon warehouse workers were seriously injured at nearly twice the rate of similar workers in non-Amazon warehouses. But, frighteningly, managements at many of these other warehouses were clamoring to emulate Amazon's employment practices instead of Amazon clamoring to emulate them.

Bob hoped that the California's bill passage would send a salvo across the bow of all of these warehouses, fulfillment centers, distribution hubs, or whatever they were each calling themselves that workers weren't the same as their robots and they all needed to be treated with far more dignity. It was a battle he had been waging his long career.

Bob Guard and his founding partner Gene Wing had been retired for a few years now, but Bob continued to visit the firm regularly and serve on their Board of Directors. Each still had a modest office but had gladly given over their expansive corner offices to Mike and Lars, their safety and industrial hygiene protégés and new co-owners of Cape Safety, Inc.

The company had experienced many changes in the past two decades but their essence as the danger dogs, as singer Sting had once called them all, hadn't changed.

The Woods Hole, Massachusetts-based company remained the first place that A team clients, domestically and internationally, thought of to make safety, health, and environmental problems perish. Problems worldwide in these three areas certainly hadn't decreased, but the human commitment to problem-solving had caused somewhat of a slowdown that, so far, attrition had been the answer to.

Rocky, an ex-Marine, diver, and munitions specialist, had retired a year or two before Bob and Gene. He and his bomb-sniffing English Springer Spaniel Bonnie had been lost to the firm, too. Bob knew that the University of Washington had something up their sleeves to better safeguard puppies from this dangerous work anyway. He hoped to catch up with that soon.

Bob Heavy, the genius behind the Communications Center and its web of worldwide contacts, had died of heart failure after the loss of his wife. Most of the staff and his friends felt that her death was what broke it. Upon Bill’s death, Sam and Megan had taken over all MIS (Management Information Systems) responsibilities, which were considerable. So far, so good. Sandra, Heidi, Maggie, William, and Sue were all key consultants with various specialties.

So with two fewer safety & health wizards, Mike and Lars took over the firm at an expertise handicap and in need of some retooling. Claus was their first mutual hire, a numbers wiz bang. So far the firm's work had been successfully handled by this highly ambitious consulting crew. Fingers were crossed for the future.

Snake Irwin and Candace Dew, two Senior Consultants hired two decades earlier, were already immersed in a deep discussion in one of the headquarters’ many conference rooms. This room featured a Charlie Brown and Lucy holding the football poster, with a talk bubble coming from Lucy that said, C'mon, you don't need a union if you keep working hard and put the company's interest before your own. Then the company will share its prosperity with you.

Charlie appears quite unconvinced.  

The poster had particular significance since they were the co-company representatives of Cape Safety, Inc.'s employee union, something begun a decade earlier by prior owners Bob & Gene. It was Gene who decided that it would be hypocritical for the firm to strongly encourage collective voices in other organizations without adopting the same internal structure themselves. They were probably in the vanguard of firms that voluntarily self-unionized by management, but typical of the type of leaders they both had been.

Big shoes for Mike and Lars to fill.

Snake and Candy were throwing around issues relating to AI (artificial Intelligence), the evolution of the simple robots that manifested as, in a sense, the antagonists of the earliest decades of Cape Safety's involvement with the workers of the world. The earliest history of the premier Safety, Health & Environmental consulting firm in the world, was one of dealing with corporate NAFTA zealots who championed globalization at the expense of western workers and values.

The firm had cut their teeth, challenging the many forces, governmental, corporate, and media that encouraged well safeguarded manufacturing jobs in developed countries to migrate south, over the wall into the Maquiladora Zone of Mexico where no worker or environmental protections existed and wages were ridiculously low. 

And as soon as these Mexican workers realized how they were being exploited, the same jobs were then relocated to even poorer countries like Korea, China, Indonesia, and staggeringly poor Asian Island States. About this time, capitalism turned to the developing technology of robotics as a way to eliminate even that marginal labor cost, and the self-explanatory, lights-out factories became commonplace.

Now robotics and AI were emerging as brothers in the worldwide quest to put all workers on the sidelines, or at least those workers who formerly made things, grew things, sailed things, transported things, and the list grew daily.

It's not like AI is intrinsically evil, it isn't, and it can do things a whole team of people couldn't, said Candy, sipping at a coffee that she had purchased at a humans-free drive-through kiosk (a Swedish Company) in Woods Hole. Swipe your card, talk in your request, drive forward, and the robot in a T-Shirt with his  name on it, named Hans Free (subtle) handed you your perfect coffee. Bye, Bye, Baristas!

"No, I agree, but nobody is making plans for the thousands, maybe millions of workers who are being or about to be displaced by these technologies and systems. Andrew Yang wrote about the universal basic income idea in a good book he called, The War on Normal People, but then he was crushed in the Presidential Primary," said Snake.

He was even crushed in the New York mayoral primary, and that's a place that should have been at least receptive to the general idea of economic survivability, Candy responded.

I think people don't want to know what's coming sometimes, but that won't keep the future from happening, said Snake.

Companies worldwide were galloping ahead to incorporate AI into their operations, but so far there wasn't a ton of evidence that it would be a game changer for them. Wal-Mart, for instance, was using AI virtual reality helmets to provide an inexpensive way to train workers in job skills but those jobs were never loaded with complexity to begin with. Some NFL quarterbacks, likewise, were using VR to practice field command skills without being tackled and hurt.

I know one company, DHL Shipping, who is beginning to use AI to their advantage with a program that makes sure pallets will load safely into planes with computer vision and an algorithm that judges whether it can be stacked with other pallets or it's too awkward to fit, said Candy.

Snake laughed, I think they also use it to route deliveries, control robots, even control a robot that picks and sorts. But overall, companies don't seem to be getting the ROI, return-on-investment, they thought they'd be getting. Just replacing the work humans were doing doesn't seem to be where the big AI payoffs are. The companies that are really making money with AI are those that are finding ways to do what humans never did.

"Yeah, early on, for robotics to work without glitching it seems to take a robot and a human expert working together to generate success. But as the algorithm screw ups are routinely corrected by the human, the algorithmic robot starts to get it right every time. Then, as  you would imagine, the system is off and running, forever accurate without the human trainer. Sometimes the systems are so slick they run a complex operation like oil drilling then simultaneously contact potential customers as product is being identified and pumped.

But the brainiacs who write this AI (artificial intelligence) are finding that the collateral information the algorithms simultaneously collect is really the most valuable stuff of all. Measurements that humans couldn't make, or would be too time consuming for them to ever make. Interesting stuff. What can I tell you, Snake, chicks dig AI."

Like compared to real intelligence? he mocked.

A new statistician, Claus, a German acquisition from Yale via Princeton and prior winner of three awards, the Loeve Prize, Rollo Davidson Prize, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences medal specializing in Combinatorics, Discrete Geometry, Probability, and Statistical Mechanics, innocently walked in on their conversation.

Sorry folks, just looking for a pen I left here yesterday, said Claus.

Snake glanced around and spotted it. Here 'tis Mr. Math, we were just talking about the early days around here. Consider even the evolution of  communications in this tiny company. Can you believe that Heidi started here way, way, back as a receptionist?

What is a receptionist? asked Claus.

"There used to be like a separate area in the Comm. Center I think where external messages, they even called them 'phone calls' came in, like they show in the old movies. Heidi, and then William and Sue, who also did it for a time, would just sit there receiving these messages, err calls, then forward them to whoever's desk it was for. Talk about primitive."

What a waste. They could have been out solving problems instead of just sitting there like lumps of coal, gee.

They all laughed, envisioning what the olden days may have been like.

CHAPTER TWO

Gene Wing, retired Industrial Hygienist and co-founder of Cape Safety, Inc ., back before water was wet as he liked to say, was far less of a routine presence in the company than Bob, but he wasn't unavailable. More than a couple of times each week Lars would still find Gene's advice necessary or at least important and therefore they still spoke often. Consultant Heidi Holdgate also made routine use of Gene's still encyclopedic brain and photographic memory.

Today Gene was scheduled to return to headquarters for the monthly meeting and to deliver a brief talk at Mike’s request. In fact, Mike was flying Gene up from his retirement home in Stock Island, Florida - nearly the tip of the Florida Keys, that very moment.

Mike's had recently enhanced his home at the Falmouth Airpark by installing a turntable floor in his private hanger that allowed him to readily use any of his three aircraft, this Beechcraft Premier, a Black Fly personal aerial vehicle, or his helicopter. Gene was giving Mike a preview of his talk on the flight north.

He was particularly interested in getting the consultants to agree with his latest concern, the increase in hostile architecture, better known as anti-homeless architecture. The trend was mean spirited, effectively a redesign of public architecture to prevent homeless folks from anti-social behaviors.

I get angry when I see this stuff and I'm seeing more and more of it, said Gene. "Slanted benches that are uncomfortable for everyone to sit on, made that way just so no one could ever sleep on it. And now no one, homeless or not, can balance a coffee cup on one, no one can sit and tie a shoelace on one, place a lunch down on one, comfortably sit there and read a book, W. T. F.? Why have a bench at all? These architects should be ashamed of themselves. Other crap designs too, like retrofitted armrests to break up a long seat, imprints and