Arizona’s Dysfunctional Business and Governmental Culture Creates a Crisis in the Coronavirus Pandemic

On January 15, 2021, the New York Times reported that Arizona had the highest 7-day daily average per capita of deaths and new cases of the new coronavirus, covid-19.[1] On one day, Arizona had 11,324 new cases.[2] “We’re the hottest spot in the U.S. and among the hottest spots in the entire world,” said Keith Frey, the chief medical officer for Dignity Health’s Arizona division.[3] “If we don’t slow this down over the course of the next days and weeks, then we will be fully into that crisis zone,” he added.[4] It would be a crisis of the state’s own making, and thus preventable but for the local culture at least in the Phoenix metro area. In other words, the crisis did not happen to Arizona; rather, the crisis was in large part homemade, and can thus be used as a window into a dysfunctional culture in the United States.

In spite of county and municipal laws and company policies on wearing masks in stores and on public transportation (buses and the light rail), many stores and the mass-transit company forbid employees from even asking incoming customers to wear a mask (or wear one correctly over the nose and mouth). Grocery stores were particularly problematic, with even their own employees walking around with impunity without masks on (properly). “We don’t enforce that requirement,” a grocery-store director told me. How, then, can the policy be considered to be a requirement? “It just is,” a store manager told me. That wearing masks was not only a company requirement, but also a city and county law was of no interest to the manager. “We don’t enforce the law,” he quipped. “But you are violating it by letting people in who are not wearing masks,” I retorted. This was not his concern.

The Phoenix metropolitan mass-transit company, and thus its two subcontracted bus-operating companies, also had a policy forbidding employees from enforcing the company’s own requirement and the local law. Some bus drivers would even not wear a mask or wear one without covering their noses and mouths! Some light-rail security employees subcontracted by the mass-transit company wore their masks over their chins too, as did a significant proportion of the rail passengers. Some security employees asked passengers to wear their masks correctly, while most of those employees did not. The notion that masks were required on the trains was a farce, and yet notwithstanding this, the company’s representatives had no problem defying logic itself by insisting that masks were required.  It was as if the company policy and the county law mandating masks on public transportation simply did not exist, and yet they did. “It’s not really a law,” a customer-service employee told me. Why? Because the county doesn’t have a legislature and only one of them can pass laws. The county board was apparently extra-governmental in nature.

Both retail and the mass transit were exploiting an exception, that of medical exceptions, to invalidate the rule. Incredibly, the stores and mass-transit company used this exception to justify refusing even to ask customers and passengers, respectively, to cover the nose and mouth area with an existing mask. People with medical conditions exempting them from wearing masks would not have masks on. The absurdity of allowing an exception (e.g., a medical condition) to condemn a requirement was permitted in the dysfunctional culture and amid a lack of accountability by regulators.

The problem was exacerbated by the political extremism that was salient in the state. A steadfast refusal to obey the law on wearing masks had a significant role in the number of people not wearing masks in stores and on public transportation. Such people could easily exploit the managerial incompetence both in retail and mass transit. It does not take long to realize that an intentionally-unenforced requirement is not a requirement, even if this point is not grasped by company managers. Yet the managerial dysfunction enabled this condition to go on for almost a year as of January, 2021. In such a political culture wherein a significant proportion of residents believe they are justified in breaking the law and ignoring company policies, it can be reckoned as inexcusable for companies to follow the invalid logic that the existence of an exception invalidates a rule (or requirement). In other words, it is negligence pure and simple. The lack of accountability, which was well-ensconced in the culture within companies as well as between businesses and local and state government, enabled the corruption that gave the virus the upper hand. It was as if the locals could not help themselves.

Moreover, the local culture wherein political extremism was salient allowed for the erroneous belief that the public good is simply the aggregate of individual wills. Where enough wills decide not to wear masks indoors in public and on public transit, the aggregate public good falls short of being above the ability of the virus to spread. The public good as merely the aggregate of individual wills thus is not good enough; it falls short of what the public good actually is (e.g., being greater than the ability of the virus to spread). The understatement of the public good can be understood too as the belief that the general will (e.g., Rousseau) is reducible to the aggregation of private wills.

The good of the whole, I submit, is more than the sum of the individual parts because some parts may even detract from the public good and thus understate it if it is taken to be merely the aggregation of individual wills. That the market value of a product is determined by the aggregate supply and demand does not mean that the public good is likewise determined. For one thing, the market value of a product is in a closed system (the aggregate supply and demand) whereas the public good is open-ended. In other words, the public good can be higher than the aggregate of the individual wills would have it because enough private-benefit-only wills can detract appreciably from what is the good of the whole. If enough people refuse to wear masks indoors in public places, and stores and even governments look the other way, the result is significantly below the good of the whole, which in this case is stopping the coronavirus. By its self-inflicted crisis, Arizona was functioning well below its own good, and a highly dysfunctional local mentality is to blame.

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1. Jordan Allen et al, “Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count,” The New York Times, January 15, 2021.

2. Alicia Caldwell and Ian Lovett, “Arizona Is America’s Covid-19 Hot Spot and on the Brink of Crisis,” The Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2021.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

Ethical Human Resources Management

Ethics applied to human resource management is typically thought to boil down to treating subordinates well. Kant’s categorical imperative, treat other rational beings not just as means, but also as ends in themselves, applies to this sense of ethical HR management. Specifically, human beings are not only cogs in a machine; they have lives outside of work that should not be expected to reduce to serving the interests of the employer. Another side of HR management also exists, however, that concerns the handling of unethical employees. Such handling can be ethical or unethical.

Front-line employees who deal with customers whether in person or at a call center are especially subject to customer complaints. The choices that such employees make on how to deal with customer complaints regarding themselves can be ethical or unethical. For instance, an employee who resists a customer’s request to speak to the employee’s supervisor acts unethically by exploiting the conflict of interest. The conflict lies in the employee putting his or her own vocational interest above the interests of the customer and even the company. Gate-keeping refers to an employee’s efforts in getting the customer to say why he or she wants to speak with a manager so if the reason reflects badly on the employee, he or she can lie about a supervisor being available or insist that the customer speak only to the employee about the issue. Such an employee is operating at a primitive level—that of self-preservation—rather than as a duty-bound agent of a principal (e.g., a company).

I contend that a company’s management that does not have adequate safeguards against such an exploitation of a conflict of interest operates unethically with respect to its human resources. Should a customer inform a supervisor of a specific employee who is exploiting the conflict of interest and yet the supervisor does not set negative consequences for the employee and notify middle-management that the company’s safeguards against such exploitation are not sufficient acts unethically too. Safeguards are possible beyond relying on individual customer complaints. The latter strategy is flawed because the complaints that actually reach a supervisor are reduced in conditions in which employees can get away with exploiting the conflict of interest. Put another way, a company is unethical in relying on individual complaints to willow out problematic employees as a safeguard because it is hampered by the exploitation itself. Interestingly, whereas exploitation of employees is a common refrain, an employee’s exploitation of customers is less commonly known.

Stronger safeguards are ethical where their efficacy cannot be compromised by an employee’s exploitation of customers. Concerning phone calls, for example, the greeting could include the following: “At any time while speaking with a representative of the company, you can press 5 should you like to report a problem you are having with the representative.” The call could go to a designated manager who acts as a safeguard. In a store, a designated desk could be identified as the place where customers can go if they have had a problem with an employee. Unlike a typically customer-service desk, the person taking the complaints should hold a rank higher than that of the entry-level employees. Unfortunately, entry-level employees may tend to cover for each other, and thus extend the conflict of interest rather than curtail it.

Internal audit departments could definitely add assessing weak as well as presumably strong safeguards. Calls to respective customer-service departments could be made, and verification could be applied not only to those calls, but also on real complaints. Problems may be difficult to detect. As a case in point, the customer service process used by the regional transit authority in Phoenix, Arizona begins with an employee in Metro Valley’s customer-service department. Complaints on bus drivers are sent to their respective supervisors, yet they are known to cover for their respective drivers rather than provide accountability. Also, drivers circumventing company policies, including those regarding the coronavirus pandemic, has also been a major problem. Bad driving, such as braking too hard, and, relatedly, driving fast to accrue enough time to take smoking breaks, have also been endemic and beyond the reach the process of accountability. Aggravating the matter of accountability, the driver-supervisors work for the sub-contracted bus-operating companies; at least one of which dismissed videos of bad braking in 2018. In short, the customer-service department’s process of handling complaints and feedback is grossly inadequate, given the behavior of enough drivers and their supervisors. An audit would ideally uncover the corruption and come up with a process that takes the problematic drivers and supervisors (i.e., the dysfunctional culture) into account. Accountability is indeed difficult in such organizations in which employees regularly flaunt company policies and the immediate supervisors enable such behavior by refusing to enforce the policies even where unsafe driving and passenger health are concerned.