Neil Oatsvall: "2020 as a 'Normal Accident'”
2020 as a “Normal Accident”
Neil Oatsvall, Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts
Our latest installment in our series of web-based essays applies Charles Perrow’s concept of a “normal accident” to the multiple crises of 2020. The author, Neil Oatsvall, is Chair of the Arts and Humanities Department and Humanities Instructor at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts. We welcome essays that apply the stories and methodologies of our allied fields to the issues that currently affect our daily lives. If you are interested in contributing, please contact Adrienne Petty at ampetty@wm.edu.
It should be cited as: Neil Oatsvall, “2020 as a ‘Normal Accident,’” The Short Rows, November 19, 2020. https://www.aghistorysociety.org/ahs-blog/oatsvall-2020-as-a-normal-accident
In 1984, Charles Perrow proposed the idea of a “normal accident.” As he explained, “Most high-risk systems have some special characteristics, beyond their toxic or explosive or genetic dangers, that make accidents in them inevitable, even ‘normal.’ This has to do with the way failures can interact and the way the system is tied together.” In particular, he cited groupings of complex technologies with significant human inputs (like nuclear power plants) where tightly coupled processes “happen very fast and can’t be turned off, the failed parts cannot be isolated from other parts, or there is no other way to keep the production going safely” (4). At some point, Perrow argued, we cannot blame accidents involving complex technologies on just one cause like user error or environmental catastrophe. Instead, systems with interactive complexity and tight coupling are simply prone to failure.
I have been thinking lately about how Perrow’s ideas can inform our current historical moment, especially the tripartite societal crises currently plaguing the United States: a crisis of health (COVID-19), a crisis of democracy (the Trump presidency and the 2020 election), and a crisis of social justice (epitomized by the Black Lives Matter movement). While some might argue that there is a fourth crisis related to economic failure that merits inclusion in this list, in my opinion, the current economic crisis is a result of the big three crises I listed above and not a cause on its own. Moreover, the rural working class of all races and ethnicities has dealt with low wages and economic vulnerability for decades, and the crisis of democracy we face today in some ways represents the culmination of negative political forces they have faced for generations.
Agricultural systems, taken as the interwoven assemblage of humans, environments, capital, businesses, and government that help produce the majority of our food, are bound up in each of these three overlapping crises. At the same time, agricultural workers—disproportionately persons of color and the economically vulnerable—have born a high cost for keeping our agricultural systems functioning “normally.” One U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study found that, when they could determine the race or ethnicity of food manufacturing and agricultural workers who had contracted COVID-19, 83.2% of cases occurred among workers who were identified as racial or ethnic minorities. (For comparison, about half of total COVID-19 cases in the U.S. have been among non-white Americans, despite them constituting less than 40% of our total population.)
Let me be clear: I am arguing that the United States has extremely complex social and agricultural systems that are highly coupled with each other, and those systems have grown more complex over time. Yet U.S. political leaders have removed safeguards and resiliency measures (the analogs of safety features in Perrow’s complex technology). In doing so, we should not be surprised that we end up in an historical moment that is, in many ways, unprecedented. Perrow’s technological systems undoubtedly are underpinned by the social interactions involved with them as much as the technologies themselves, redounding one upon another. This means his ideas have great utility even when not surrounding complex, high-risk technologies. As Jesse Eisinger cheekily tweeted on 19 March 2020, “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live through the Great Depression and the Spanish Flu at the same time. With Andrew Johnson as president.”
The U.S. agricultural system is reliant on rural spaces that have become overwhelmingly conservative, Republican spaces. A county-by-county view of the 2016 presidential election shows much, much more Republican red in the country than Democrat blue. Yes, that map is misleading, because people vote in our elections, not land masses. But it serves as a reminder that people in these conservative-controlled rural spaces produce most of our food. Voters who would cozy up to a president unable to condemn white supremacy are also employing a disproportionately non-white workforce to keep our food system going. Headlines like this one from Politico thus come as no surprise: “Trump deems farmworkers ‘essential’ but not safety rules for them. That could threaten the food supply.” In this instance, rural conservative politics on a local level dovetail nicely into national conservative political considerations that prioritize the concerns of agribusinesses over those of farm laborers.
The timing of COVID-19 may have been unpredictable, but it is reasonable to expect that epidemic diseases will develop from time to time. And yet, the Trump administration scrapped a “pandemic playbook” left for them by the Obama administration. The insistence on decreasing governmental spending on non-military services, when combined with a consistent anti-intellectual assault on expertise, has been a hallmark of conservative policies for decades. Thus, while a potential epidemic disease developing is not surprising in many ways (think Ebola or SARS), a decreased governmental capacity to handle that disease is linked to conservative ideas of what constitutes best (read: lack of) governance. It should have been anticipated, then, when a lack of health oversight at meatpacking plants—intentionally created by an executive order declaring meatpacking workers to be “essential” workers “to ensure a continued supply of protein for Americans”—created conditions for meatpacking plants to become some of the most significant early hot spots for viral outbreak. How do policies that make some of the most vulnerable members of our society, disproportionately people of color, end up becoming so common?
One answer is that decades of voter suppression has made our democratic processes weaker and more unstable. As historian Kevin M. Kruse has written,“In the early 20th century, several states instituted new measures for counting votes in state elections, measures that exaggerated the political influence of older rural areas at the expense of newer urban ones.” For example, Georgia’s “county unit” voting system from 1917-1962 functioned as a semi-electoral college that invested rural counties with a disproportionately greater influence in state politics than their populations would have accorded. As Kruse explains, one vote in the smallest Georgia county might have counted for ninety-nine in one of the larger ones. (And the practice was combined with significant discrimination of black voters in those rural areas to ensure that rural whites held political control of the state.) For more modern examples, in July 2016, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared that the North Carolina legislature had, in a series of laws starting in 2013, targeted Black votes with “almost surgical precision.” And according to a 2017 study by Hajnal et al, voter ID laws do have the real effect of lowering voter participation among racial minorities. The end result is that rural agricultural spaces, overwhelmingly white-controlled, have thus been given a disproportionate control of our federal government, especially within the U.S. Senate, and it has come at the expense of people of color and those in urban areas. To wit, in the 2018 U.S. Senate election, Democrats collected a little over 52 million votes, while Republicans netted under 35 million. The result? Republicans gained two seats in the Senate, solidifying their majority.
It is clear that rural minorities have seen their political power intentionally lessened (or perhaps denied all along) so that whites—rural whites in agricultural communities in particular—have seen their relative political power grow. Such a phenomenon is not new, by the way, and has historically cut across the political spectrum. For example, the Grange and Populism movements of the nineteenth century are popularly remembered as a moment when rural peoples, especially farmers, attempted to assert their political control and regain power stripped of them by urban and eastern elites. However, those movements had a distinctly anti-Black tinge, so much so that the white-only Southern Farmers’ Alliance was known to intentionally seek to economically disenfranchise the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, refuse to deliver its Alliance Advocate by mail, and threaten violence against anyone who stood in their way of enacting those terrors.
Later on, the original 1935 Social Security Act excluded farm workers, a significant percentage of whom were Black. While some have argued that such a decision was merely due to administrative feasibility and not about pacifying racist southern whites, the end result was discrimination against rural Black workers and more money for rural whites who already controlled a vast majority of the land and power. And just a few years later, the United States signed the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement with Mexico, popularly known as the Bracero program (bracero is Spanish for “manual laborer”). With the U.S. labor supply in rural areas decimated due to World War II, the government looked to cheaper Mexican laborers to fill the gaps. But the program was fraught from the beginning. White farmers controlled the hours, low pay, and living conditions of the Bracero workers, setting up a dynamic of continued discrimination against migrant laborers working on rural farms. The end result of such policies is that disfranchised and economically disadvantaged racial minorities, and the labor they produce, have become so essential to the functioning and eating of the United States—as specifically declared by President Trump’s executive order—that threatening the health of those bodies threatens the integrity of our very food system.
To return to Perrow, we have created increasingly complex social systems in this country and reduced their capacity for resilience. The COVID-19 pandemic is ravaging the country, having killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. A president, who lost the popular vote in 2016 but won with white votes in key states, is making decisions that threaten our very democratic institutions—such as contesting a clear loss in the 2020 election with spurious complaints—while supporting white supremacy. (And a Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy study found, “white supremacy culture narratives function to reinforce systemic inequity across the food system in the United States.”) Concurrently, social systems that actively harm Black and brown bodies, even going so far as to use forced hysterectomies as a tool to control immigration of Latinx peoples, have led to an explosion of protests across the country. Each of these systems is, by its very nature, complex, volatile, and has the capacity to harm a great many people.
Moreover, all three crises—health, democracy, and social justice—are more tightly coupled than often acknowledged, especially as agricultural systems thread through each of them. But such problems are unsurprising given our national history, especially as it relates to rural agriculture. The United States as a whole has long relied on racial minorities to perform labor that many whites were unwilling to perform, from the country’s original sin of slavery to the Bracero program to the present. As our food production and distribution have become increasingly complex over time (and here I think of the work of Shane Hamilton), U.S. society must acknowledge that agricultural systems are intrinsically tied to many other aspects of society. As those agricultural systems have grown more complex, encompassing not just fields and feed lots but also processing and manufacturing facilities and distribution, politically-motivated decisions have made those agricultural systems less resilient in and of themselves, with tighter couplings, meaning that a disruption in one—agriculture, health, democracy, or social justice—is likely to cause disruptions in another.
I think about the old clichéd signs in industrial manufacturing plants that proudly proclaimed, “This plant has worked XX days without a lost time accident.” (Hat tip to our dear AHS president Adrienne Petty for mentioning this connection to me.) While the goal is, of course, to avoid accidents that hurt individuals or the group, those accidents, in the context of these highly complex, tightly-coupled social systems, are probably inevitable and even “normal,” in some ways.
Lest you think this essay a doom and gloom screed, let me propose a silver lining or a way forward. Perrow points out that there are several ways to prevent some of these “normal” or “system” accidents. One is to stop using the technologies that bring the greatest complexities and risks, which probably does not apply in our case. The other is, just as poor organizational structures and bad management certainly can contribute to failures in systems, proper organization and management can also play a factor in reducing some of these accidents (even if such accidents cannot be completely prevented). Proper management in this sense includes a greater understanding of the interconnectedness of different systems so that the weak points common to each can be strengthened and made more durable.
How can we do that here? We need to build much greater resiliency into our social and agricultural systems. We need to protect the political rights and bodily health of all societal members, starting with greater governmental protections. (Changes in social attitudes would probably achieve these changes more fully, but changing de facto social structures is more difficult than changing de jure ones.) And we also need to think about how we can leverage local food supply connections in ways that take power away from large agricultural producers and give it back to workers. None of those things are easy. But, the consequences of not doing so, as we see right now, end in multiple crises that rend the fabric of society and the Republic.
While the tripartite calamity we currently find ourselves in may be somewhat inevitable, even “normal,” because of choices made in the United States, that does not mean that we cannot arrange our society in different ways that make the next set of crises smaller and more manageable.
Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1984)