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John Tozer is a surfer as well as an engineer. When he began campaigning
against a proposed sewage outfall near his favourite surfing spot on the
coast of northern New South Wales, he never expected to find himself on
the receiving end of the wrath of Australia’s biggest engineering society.
Nor did Richard Herraman when he wrote a short letter to his local paper
in Adelaide complaining that the electricity company was using unrealistic
estimates for the cost of installing underground power lines. However, both
men received a public dressing-down from the Institution of Engineers,
Australia, for behaving unethically.

Codes of ethics are the hallmark of professions. Like many professional
bodies around the world, the IEAust has a code of ethics to ensure that
its members act with integrity and put public interests ahead of their own
. The code, it says, is part of a long-standing agree-ment the engineering
profession has with the community. ‘Its terms are that engineers will put
the health, welfare and safety of the community before all other considerations:
and the quid pro quo is, and should continue to be, that the community allows
us to regulate the profession ourselves.’

As part of its side of the deal, the institution has just revised its
code of ethics and introduced new codes of practice to ensure that engineers
keep the public interest in mind when carrying out their professional duties.
But are formal codes of ethics an effective means of protecting the public?
Bob Beatty, an engineer and editor of the electrical industry newsletter
Electricity Week, has been active in lobbying the IEAust on ethics issues.
‘The code of ethics is very much a hollow show,’ he claims. ‘For 70 years
the institution never once investigated a case where an engineer failed
to put the public interest first.’ Like other critics, he argues that members
of the engineering profession are using the codes to protect their own interests
rather than to protect the public interest – as Tozer and Herraman discovered.

Tozer is a structural engineer with his own consultancy. In 1989 he
became involved in a campaign against a sewage outfall that the council
at Coffs Harbour, some 400 kilometres north of Sydney, wanted to build at
Look-At-Me-Now headland. The beaches next to the headland are popular with
surfers and local residents alike, and the unique marine life attracts
many tourists. The public were dismayed, says Tozer, when the council’s
engineers said there was no alternative to pumping the sewage into the sea
at this spot. He felt it was ‘my duty to the community to inform them that
there were engineers who believed the problem was solvable’. Tozer made
various statements to the media in which he criticised council engineers
for presenting a distorted view of the environmental consequences of the
outfall, and for not fully investigating alternative options.

Six of the council engineers accused him of breaching the engineering
code in that he had harmed their reputations with their employer and made
statements about viable alternatives based on inadequate knowledge. The
complaint was investigated by the Association of Consulting Engineers Australia
(ACEA), of which Tozer had been a member for almost two years. It has the
same code of ethics as the IEAust, and found that Tozer had breached the
code ‘in that he did intemperately and publicly criticise the complainants’.
The ACEA resolved that Tozer be censured, and refused to renew his membership
because his behaviour was deemed to be not of a standard expected from a
member.

This meant Tozer could no longer expect to get consultancy contracts
from the government or other clients who insist on membership of the appropriate
professional body before hiring engineers. But he decided to continue the
campaign, not least because of ‘the public’s perception that was developing
of the engineering profession as being incapable of responding to community
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Last year he was again found guilty of breaching the code of ethics,
this time by the IEAust of which he was still a member. The disciplinary
board found that ‘language used by him in his correspondence to the (state)
premier was intemperate’. In this letter, Tozer had criticised the project
as a ‘folly’, which only an ‘idiot would advocate’, and that the ‘obvious
stupidity (of the outfall) makes a laughing stock’ of its proponents. The
institution ruled that Tozer had acted in a way that diminished the honour,
integrity and dignity of the profession, and in December 1992 published
his name and offence in its magazine, Engineers Australia, together with
a public reprimand.

The board, however, did not comment on the substance of Tozer’s criticisms.
The chief executive of the institution at the time, John Enfield, said it
was not the criticism as such that was at issue, but ‘the manner and nature
of criticism’. Engineers may comment as private individuals in any manner
they please, he explained, but if there is any inference that the engineer
is giving a professional view, then the comment must ‘withstand ethical
scrutiny by the institution if a complaint is lodged against that member’.

A year earlier, Herraman found himself in a similar plight. Herraman
is a civil engineer who works for the Department of Road Transport of South
Australia. He was dismayed at the tree lopping being carried out by the
local electricity company, and believed a better way to eliminate the risk
of fire from overhead power lines in an area prone to bushfires was to use
underground lines. In April 1990 he wrote a let-ter to the Adelaide Advertiser
commenting on a newspaper report that the Electricity Trust of South Australia
had grossly exaggerated the costs of underground lines so as to justify
its continued use of overhead lines. Herraman suggested that ETSA engineers
might be breaching the code by disseminating ‘highly unrealistic cost estimates’
to the public that prevented a balanced consideration of the issue.

Some of the ETSA engineers lodged a complaint with the IEAust, which
found that Herraman, ‘by signing a letter as a member of the institution
and referring to its code of ethics, set himself up as arbiter of the code
of ethics and implicitly cast aspersion on other members of the Institution
of Engineers, Australia’. In so doing, he had breached the engineering code.
In November 1991, his name too was published in Engineers Australia. The
panel did not offer any opinion on costing data provided by Herraman.

A retrograde step

Following the admonishment, several engineers wrote to Engineers Australia
expressing their astonishment. Robert Care, a senior member of the institution,
asked how else members should act in the public interest if they see untruths
printed. Another engineer, G. E. Powell writing from Hong Kong, said that
the decision was ‘a retrograde step whose only ‘benefit’ will be to make
other professional engineers less willing to take a public stance where
they consider that the interests of the community have not been uppermost
in the minds of other engineers’.

Others expressed concern that the code was being used by engineers to
try to silence their critics. Before the official complaint was made, Herraman
received a letter from an ETSA official saying that if he did not publish
a retraction of his comments by a set date, then ‘on behalf of the professional
engineers in ETSA, I will commence action which will affect your professional
standing’. And Tozer recalls that one of the Coffs Harbour Council engineers
offered to withdraw his complaint of breach of ethics if he would sign a
media release retracting his criticisms of the engineers.

Today, Herraman is still somewhat bemused by the whole affair. He wonders
why the institution never concerned itself with the possibility that engineers
working for ETSA had breached the code of ethics. However, despite the threat
made by the ETSA official, his career did not suffer. His employers did
not mind his speaking out and his colleagues were supportive: ‘If anything,
people were approving of what I did.’ He will, though, be more careful what
he says in public in future.

Tozer, too, is undeterred. He continues to campaign and make public
statements – although as a private citizen rather than as an engineer now.
‘I know that what I am doing is right,’ he says. ‘The thing that saddens
me most is my diminishing respect for my fellow engineers and the engineering
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Critics like Beatty are questioning why there is gap between what the
code is supposed to be there for – protecting the public interest – and
how it is applied in practice. Gavan McDonell, an engineer who teaches at
the University of New South Wales and advises the European Commission on
energy and environmental policies, points out that the code is ambiguous.
‘Although tenet 1 says an engineer should put the public interest first,
tenet 5 says members should apply their skill and knowledge in the interest
of their employer. The code doesn’t make it clear which tenet should have
priority or what should happen if there is a clash between the two,’ he
says.

Stephen Johnston, head of mechanical engineering at the University of
Technology, Sydney, believes that part of the problem arises because the
code dates from the early part of this century, when ‘loyalty to the club
was more important than appropriate behaviour towards the public’. Traditionally,
he says, the code was about being ‘all good fellows together’.

The first engineering society to adopt a code of ethics was the Institution
of Civil Engineers in Britain in 1910. The following year the American Institute
of Consulting Engineers used the British code as the basis for one of its
own, and other engineering societies quickly followed. Samuel Florman, an
American engineer best known for his books such as The Existential Pleasures
of Engineering and Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scapegoats,
agrees with Johnston that codes of ethics ‘traditionally stressed gentlemanly
conduct rather than concern for the public welfare’. The codes were really
no more than a mixture of moral values and rules of business etiquette
governing how engineers should relate to each other in their business dealings.

In the US, for example, many of the codes deliberately precluded competing
for engineering work on the basis of price. Eventually the Department of
Justice began taking engineering societies to court, and in 1978 the Supreme
Court ruled that restrictions on competitive bidding were unconstitutional
and inappropriate because they unfairly restrained free trade. The engineering
societies had been caught out using the codes in a self-serving way.

Statements about protecting public interest began to appear in engineering
codes in the late 1940s, but societies continued to concern themselves mostly
with members who had broken contracts, not acted in a client’s best interest
or been found guilty by the courts of some offence. It was not until the
1970s that any engineering society openly supported members who found themselves
in trouble after putting the public interest first in performing their professional
duties.

The turning point came when the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE) in the US defended three engineers who had been working
on the Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART) in California. BART introduced
innovative methods for controlling individual trains automatically. In particular,
it replaced fail-safe features, which simply stop a train if something breaks
down, with redundancy features, which try to keep trains running by switching
from faulty components to alternate ones.

Holger Hjortsvang, Max Blankenzee and Robert Bruder were dismissed by
BART in 1972 after they blew the whistle on what they considered to be safety
problems associated with the automatic train control system. Their immediate
superiors had failed to act on their warnings, so the three engineers spelt
out their concerns, and the fact that was nothing being done, to the board
of directors, one of whom gave the story to the press.

Failed to stop

The BART service started later that year and, within three weeks, the
automatic control system failed and a train overran the station, injuring
several passengers. Numerous technical problems emerged: doors suddenly
opened while trains were speeding along the track, trains failed to stop
at stations, brakes did not work properly and sensors detected ‘phantom
trains’ on the track, causing real trains to stop.

The three engineers sued BART for damages for breach of contract and
deprivation of constitutional rights. They were assisted in the case by
the IEEE, which informed the court that it is a part of each engineer’s
professional duty to promote the public welfare, as stated in the IEEE’s
code of ethics. BART finally settled out of court, and in 1978 the IEEE
presented the engineers with its new Award for Outstanding Service in the
Public Interest for ‘courageously adhering to the letter and spirit of the
IEEE code of ethics’.

Such actions are seen as courageous because while most engineering
codes unambiguously dictate that engineers should place the public interest
above that of their employer, almost every other material consideration
steers individual engineers in the opposite direction. The vast majority
of engineers are employees and work for large industrial organisations,
local public bodies and government departments – the ‘modern princes of
the realm’ in the words of Roger Keey, an engineer from the University of
Canterbury in New Zealand. As employees their career prospects, salaries
and professional status are determined by their employers rather than by
members of the engineering profession.

Weak moral power

Michael Dack, director of public affairs of the IEAust, admits that
the code of ethics has a ‘very weak moral power’ compared to the employer
who has the ‘power of economic life and death over an employee’. Despite
this, the institution believes the code ensures engineers will generally
act with integrity and protect the public interest, even when there is a
conflict between the public interest and the employer’s. Beatty, however,
disagrees. ‘The institution does not push for engineers to routinely ask
whether what they are doing is in the community interest.’

He believes one of the areas where the codes are breached most commonly
is in preparing environmental impact statements – objective assessments
of the impact a proposed project, such as a road, chemicals plant or sewage
treatment works, will have on the environment. But the company or consortium
submitting the plans commissions the EIS from consultants, who therefore
find themselves in the employ of a party whose interests may differ in significant
ways from the public interest.

The employer wants to get approval for the project, and is unlikely
to place further work with consultants who they think will present an EIS
that jeopardises this. Beatty points out that engineers can leave out important
issues or change or omit aspects of subconsultants’ reports when they put
the final report together. ‘Engineers routinely censor themselves,’ he says.
‘Unfortunately they often do this in the interest of career advancement
and commercial advantage rather than in the public interest.’

A particularly controversial EIS was the one prepared in 1989 for the
proposal to run a road tunnel beneath Sydney Harbour to ease traffic jams
that built up around the bridge. The North Sydney Municipal Council opposed
the building of the tunnel, and commissioned John Gerofi, a consulting engineer
specialising in urban transport, to head an inquiry into it. In his report,
Gerofi stated that he could ‘find no rational explanation as to why competent
and respected consultants employing professional engineers and other qualified
staff would have produced an EIS with so many questionable assumptions which
favoured the project, and with so many deficiencies’.

The council complained to the IEAust that the consultancy firm involved
in preparing the EIS had overestimated the benefits and underestimated
the environmental costs of the tunnel. The institution, however, never proceeded
with an investigation of the consultants.

Bill Rourke, chief executive at the time, said this was because it had
not been given any evidence that constituted a prima facie case against
an individual member. This was a surprise to the council as the code did
not make it clear that complaints must be against individuals and not companies.
Gerofi later stated in a letter to Engineers Australia that ‘the defamation
laws, plus a lack of resources and a reluctance to ac-cuse individuals will
prevent all but the most blatant ethical transgressions from being raised’
if the institution continues to confine its attention to individuals.

Roger Hopkins, the institution’s director of member affairs, admits
that there is some validity to criticisms that the code is professional
window dressing. He says, however, that during the past year the institution
has taken several steps to ‘strengthen the commitment of the engineering
workforce to community welfare’. In November, it revised the code and added
a new rule – ‘Members shall not assist, induce or be involved in a breach
of the tenets by another member’ – to reinforce ‘the ob-ligations of members
to report apparent breaches of the code by fellow members’. However, as
the cases of Tozer and Herraman show, it is often not those with the public
interest in mind who have reported apparent breaches, but those trying to
silence engineers who are acting in the public interest.

The revised codes now also states that ‘members acting in accordance
with this code will have the support of the institution in a manner and
to an extent determined by the council (of the institution) in each case’.
The sort of support that might be offered is unclear, but Dack suggests
that the IEAust would be willing to apply pressure on an employer to ensure
that an engineer acting in the public interest is not penalised. To date
this declared willingness to support members has not been put to the test.
But McDonell believes that for the code to be more effective ‘will require
structures and mechanisms to be put in place to resolve the conflicts such
as those between loyalty to employer or client and to the community’.

The IEEE in the US has certainly gone much further. As well as instituting
awards for ethical engineers, it has set up procedures for investigating
cases where employers have acted improperly towards engineers, established
funds to defend ethical engineers in the courts and published ratings of
employers on the basis of whether they encourage ethical behaviour.

The IEAust prefers to take an educative approach. ‘We want to focus
attention on ethics rather than use the disciplinary regulations as a whip,’
says Hopkins. He says the institution is now attempting to ensure that all
its members know and adhere to ‘the norms, practices and values of the profession
of engineering’ of which the code of ethics is central. As from January,
knowledge of the code will be part of the assessment for anyone applying
to become a Chartered Professional Engineer.

The institution is also establishing an ethics forum to stimulate awareness
of the code and its implications. This will involve running a series of
articles on hypothetical case studies in Engineering Times, the newspaper
put together by the institution’s public affairs office. Hopkins hopes that
these moves will generate discussion among engineers and therefore more
thought about ethics. ‘Ultimately,’ he points out, ‘ethical behaviour stems
from the individual; it should come from within.’

Johnston believes the IEAust is moving away from the idea of a code
for members of an exclusive club, towards a code that exhorts ethical behaviour
in engineers generally, not just members. While this is ‘an appropriate
reflection of the fact that engineers display a lot of altruism and pride
in their work’, he believes the code is ‘a pretty blunt instrument’ as a
sanction against inappropriate behaviour. McDonell notes that other professions
are increasingly regulated from outside. Unless the IEAust can show its
code to be an effective means of protecting the public, he thinks it is
only a matter of time before engineers, too, are subject to external review.

Although the institution’s intention is to educate engineers to put
the public interest first, its published admonitions are sending engineers
a very different message – one about not speaking up in the public interest
if it involves criticising other engineers. For Tozer, however, the public
disapproval of the ACEA and IEAust seem to have done his career little harm.
‘More people are coming to me,’ he says, ‘because they feel they can trust
me and rely on me. They see me as having more integrity than other consultants.

Sharon Beder is a Chartered Professional Engineer and a lecturer in
science and technology studies at the University of Wollongong, New South
Wales.

* * *

Code of Ethics

Six out of ten engineers in Australia are members of the Institution
of Engineers, Australia. The 63 000 members – which includes 9500 students
and 3700 associates and affiliates – are drawn from all branches of engineering.
The other bodies, such as the Association of Consulting Engineers Australia
(ACEA) and the Institution for Chemical Engineering (ICE), represent subsections
of the engineering profession.

Engineers meeting the IEAust requirements are entitled to call themselves
Chartered Professional Engineers. As well as being allowed to put the letters
CPEng after their names, members have access to the IEAust’s journals, news
magazines, meetings and conferences. The institution also lobbies government
on behalf of the profession. In Australia, however, membership of the IEAust
or any other engineering society is not a prerequisite for working as an
engineer. Job advertisements often state requirements in terms of ‘qualifications
equivalent to those required for IEAust membership’.

The IEAust first adopted a code of ethics in 1926, based on codes used
in Britain and the US, but it contained no reference to the public welfare.
A clause making an engineer’s responsibility to the public paramount was
first discussed in 1948, and was included in the code in 1959.

Other Australian engineering associations, such as the ACEA and the
engin-eering branch of the Association of Professional Engineers and ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s
Australia, which functions as a trade union, have also adopted the code.

Code of ethics 1993

1. The responsibility of members for the welfare, health and safety
of the community shall at all times come before their responsibility to
sectional or private interests, or to other members.

2. Members shall act so as to uphold and enhance the honour, integrity
and dignity of the membership and the profession.

3. Members shall perform work only in their areas of competence.

4. Members shall build their reputation on merit and shall not compete
unfairly.

5. Members shall apply their skill and knowledge in the interest of
their employer or client for whom they shall act as faithful agents or advisers.

6. Members shall give evidence, express opinions or make statements
in an objective and truthful manner and on the basis of adequate knowledge.

7. Members shall continue the development of their knowledge, skill
and expertise throughout their careers and shall actively assist and encourage
those under their direction to do likewise.

8. Members shall not assist, induce or be involved in a breach of these
tenets by another member.