A proposal to support the ethical engineer

An important function of an engineering society should be to encourage engineers to act ethically ih their work. However, in many cases, the employee engineer finds that such action will bring him into conflict with his employer. He is then faced with the possibility of severe reprisals that may extend as far as summary discharge and even blacklisting; a flagrant example of this is the BART case¹. Such discharge, bad enough in itself, becomes even more serious where the loss of substantial accumulated pension credits may also be involved.