What about BP’s employees?

Something you don’t hear enough – someone thinking about BP’s employees.

It is a sad aspect of politics that complex issues need to be boiled down to soundbites and in the case of the Deepwater Horizon disaster it has come down to “Let’s punish BP because it is all their fault”. I suspect there’s a lot of fault to spread around and such a simplistic conclusion is no doubt more than a little unfair – but it is also not at all helpful for getting the problem fixed.

If you worked for BP right now, I wonder how you’d feel about your company being the scapegoat. And what about the engineers working frantically to find a fix? Bet they love to read the papers in the morning watching Obama wanting to know “Whose ass to kick?”. And then when they finally get to spend time with their kids, I can just imagine the conversations (“Daddy, did the President kick your ass? Is that why you are never home?”).

This is one of those complex situations with many many contributing factors and we’re all in fact a little bit to blame. Perhaps those who enjoy vilifying BP so much should consider that they aren’t doing much to solve the problem – and if they really cared about fixing properly it the first thing they should do is quit driving their car so much…