Originally Posted by
TravellingChris
Couldn't Air Canada argue that it was also the victim of criminal activity in this circumstance alongside Brinks? The airline's name is being dragged through the mud around the world and is in the media for all the wrong reasons. Who would trust the company with a valuable shipment now?
The other issue is that past performance is no guarantee of future behaviour. There are plenty of people who pass background checks and meet all sorts of security requirements, only to suddenly do something awful, often because of outside circumstances in their lives that may have changed for the worse since they got the job. Consider security guard Travis Baumgartner, who passed all sorts of background checks at his employer until money problems led him to steal over $300,000 and kill several of his coworkers in Edmonton. Or pilot Andreas Lubitz, who had passed all his safety and health checks and yet still decided to kill himself and 149 other people by crashing his Germanwings aircraft into a mountainside.
Maybe they were a victim too, but at the end of the day they need to have checks in place to ensure this doesn't happen. And yes it goes beyond simple background checks like this. For instance, how could $20 million of Gold get out of the facility so easily by just showing one forged document to one employee? One would assume that if you use a secured delivery service like AC Secure, there would be additional checks involved. After all, we're talking about $20 million in Gold, not a consignment of lobsters. I think the instance with Andreas Lubitz also proves that if you leave everything down to one individual the Swiss cheese model of safety or security will fail. Lufthansa screwed up massively by allowing a single pilot to remain in the cockpit at all times where most airlines in the world require someone else to be there.
Originally Posted by
canadiancow
What do you mean?
But for the AC employees involved in this, there would have been no theft.
Is that AC's "fault"? Are you asking legally?
Was AC a victim? Sure. But paying the perpetrator and giving them access to the goods... "Who would trust the company with a valuable shipment now?"
Well I suppose the question is what standards are being used to assess fault here? Is it the most significant factor (as they use for flight delays/cancellations)? One thing is for certain, a $200 Air Canada e-coupon will not fix this mess. I am not a lawyer, but I suspect that companies cannot contract away their obligations to their agents. We saw this earlier this year when
Air Canada's chatbot incorrectly told a passenger they could retroactively claim bereavement fares. How is an employee working for Air Canada who decides to abscond with $20 million in loot any different? Yes the size of the damages are larger, make no mistake about that. But at the end of the day it was Air Canada who hired the individual and who set up the processes in place to handle dealing with such precious cargo. Going back to the Andreas Lubitz example, Lufthansa (or at least their insurer)
had to pay up hundreds of millions of Euros when their plane crashed. It did not matter who or what the cause was. It was a Lufthansa flight, with Lufthansa personnel so they were on the hook (I know technically it was GermanWings, but it's the same parent company).
-RooFlyer88