That’s an interesting take on it. I’d say they were being stupid, not unethical, and that society had decided to limit the consequences of their stupidity after seeing that debtor’s prisons don’t work out very well.
Now a business strategy which seems to involve walking out on debts as some orange real estate developers have used could be called unethical. Same goes for deliberately maxing out debt and then going bankrupt. But that’s not what drives most bankruptcies in the US.
It’s unethical because they were failing in their duty to maximise stakeholder returns. If a corporation starts just handing money to some other business that they have no obligation to, you can bet the next board meeting will call the execs to task, and very well might sue or press charges against them.
Again, I don’t see how that’s unethical in the least. The credit card companies have had highly paid lawyers, analysts, and lobbiests working to create their contracts, policies, and influence the laws they work under. If the deal that they offered is a bad one, then someone in their employ failed at their duty to guard stakeholder value, and is the one with an ethical breach. The person accepting the deal that they offered and willingly paying the costs involved is not the one with a failure of ethics, it’s the highly paid lawyers and analysts who are taking money for their expertise but failing to execute their duty to stakeholders.
Companies that have crappy low-level jobs (especially retail) actually do tend to continuously hire people and then ditch those who preform less well. They often ditch people by cutting their hours or giving them bad schedules instead of directly firing them, but it’s certainly a general pattern. They also will do do things like hire a lot of people during a rush time (like Christmas), then only retain the people that they want after the rush. So yes, it is commonly done and accepted on the employer side, and I’ve never seen a case made that it somehow violates business ethics.
So no, I don’t agree at all that an employee who looks for a better job is acting unethically. As I’ve said before, if anything he actually has an ethical obligation to look for a better job in an attempt to maximize stakeholder returns.
I thought you were referring to personal bankruptcies, not corporate ones. For that it depends on the context. If you go bankrupt due to changing business decisions or a bet that didn’t work out, that surely isn’t unethical. If you go bankrupt because you funnel money into the pockets of the execs, or because you get loans under false pretenses, then it is.
Many stakeholders accept risks, and get increased return from it if it works out. A risky proposition, like a startup, which fails is not an ethical breach assuming full disclosure of the risks.
Christmas and summer jobs are known in advance to be short term, so I don’t think they are good examples.
I agree. And companies can control this to some extent by their pay policies. If they screw over employees, they should expect that the employees they screw over are looking for other jobs. If they lowball starting salaries they should expect that some hirees will leave right away. If they lie about working conditions, same thing. I’ve heard cases where someone who said they can’t travel much gets hired, and then is told they have to spend four days a week on the road. Nothing unethical about quitting in that situation.
The problem here is that you could be conflating multiple people’s viewpoints into one and then calling them inconsistent, when it really is more multiple people having different viewpoints that are in conflict.
The point that Fotheringay-Phipps made is that some people DO consider some of what you consider “normal business ethics” to be unethical - eg. Hiring someone with full intention of continuing to look for a better candidate. They may be a significant minority of respondents, but if they hold this POV then it is consistent with considering it unethical to accept a job while planning to leave for another job. There ARE people who consider doing everything possible to maximizing shareholder returns as being an unethical principle even if it is generally accepted by the majority of people.
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Pantastic is being somewhat vague in describing his examples, but I believe in the employer situation analogous to the one he presented in the OP on the employee side, that the vast majority of the population would consider the employer to be acting unethically.
In the situation described in the OP, “you take a crappy job but are applying for good jobs”, and you’re obviously going to quit "the “crappy job” if you find a good job. The analogous situation on the employer side is the one I raised, of “a company hiring someone with the specific intention of continuing to search for a better hire, and with the intention of sacking the first hire as soon as they get someone better”, and I believe most people would consider that too unethical.
Situations where employers hire lots of workers with the intention of weeding out the poor performers are not the same thing, as long as the employers don’t know in advance that “so-and-so is a poor performer and we intend to sack him as soon as we can get someone better”. If they just know in a general sense that some percentage of new hires won’t work out and will need to be sacked, then that’s analogous to someone taking a job with the knowledge that there’s a chance that it won’t work out and they’ll quit, which no one would have a problem with.
The basic idea is that as long as both sides understand the true state of affairs then it’s fine, even though the true state of affairs is that “this may not work out and if so I/we may terminate the employment”. But if either side is relying on the common understanding that the other side too thinks it looks like a promising long-term arrangement while in reality the other side is looking at it as a stopgap measure and already expects to terminate the employment at first opportunity, then I think most people would regard it as unethical, whether it’s the employer or the employee.
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IOW you are doing exactly what I said in denying doing so. ‘What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’ may be an attractive concept to you but it’s not ethics.
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And as continued in this silly sarcasm, which further illustrates that what you’re saying is the employee is freed from any obligation to act ethically toward the company as long as the employee claims the company in question won’t act ethically to them (it’s not even tit for tat for something the company actually did to them, which isn’t ethical either). And the same concept is easily generalized to ‘most people are shits, they’ll screw me if they have the chance, so I’ll screw them first (unless maybe they first prove they will treat me well, then I’ll treat them well)’. That’s the way a lot of people operate, but it’s not a system of ethics.
Your theme is basically why ethics are BS, not just ‘business ethics’, because other people might not be ethical to you, and where would that leave you?
Though again back to the discussions spawning this one, it could be ethical or not to accept a job then leave almost immediately. It could be ethical or not how/if people are laid off. Depends on the details, but one unethical act doesn’t make ethical another unethical act. Two wrongs don’t make a right, simply.
The manager gives you a pink slip during this round of layoffs. You are not fired for cause. How long do you have to pack up? Don’t you keep your salary for a couple weeks at least? Plus unemployment benefits from the state.
~Max
I would think it’s a bit more complex than that. Because if something is notionally unethical but is so widely practiced and accepted that it becomes the expectation, then it can become ethical. (I emphasize “can” because it applies to things which are expectation-dependent, like terms of employment and the like which we’re discussing here, and does not apply to things like outright robbery.) And that’s where the goose-gander issue becomes relevant. Because if there’s a clear expectation on one side of the equation and the other side is more ambiguous, then you can use the one side to determine the other.
Sorry if the above is a bit convoluted. But bottom line is that I think that if there’s widespread acceptance that a given employer offering a job might be planning to sack the guy at first notice, then I think that can be used to inform what expectations should be from the employee side as well. Not that I agree in the specific instance that the OP is discussing, as I’ve posted earlier, but I think the underlying logic of the argument can be supported along these lines.
ISTM, then, that if a given action is governed by a set of ethics - for instance, maximizing returns for stake holders - then it is just as ethical for an employee to take a job but quit as soon as he got a better offer as it is to hire an employee, and fire him as soon as they find a better employee. It’s a different set of stake holders, but the principle is the same because the ethical system is the same.
If either side is supposed to consider the interest of the other side’s stake holders, then both firing an employee because they found someone better, and quitting a job because they found one that was better, are equally unethical.
“Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” and “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” are not the same principle, but if you make either the basis for your ethics, either should apply consistently.
Regards,
Shodan
Not necessarily. That one-sided agreement might be, and often is, the best possible choice.
~Max
Ethics doesn’t mean putting someone else’s interests ahead of yours. It means doing what you said you were going to do. Society is better off when people honor business transactions without preying on one another. If we don’t do that, then we can’t have useful social innovations like credit, banking, insurance, not without enormous costs.
To give an example, when you strategically default on a debt, you’re exploiting good faith built up by others and turning it to your own advantage. It harms everyone.
It’s wrong when a person does that, and it’s wrong for a company to do that.
Some people will argue that banks are huge institutions that have tons of money and issue unfair terms. I am sympathetic to this point of view, but when you enter into an agreement with them, you agree to these terms. The bank can’t break those terms and you shouldn’t either. If we don’t like how banks work, we should change the law. (I support this wholeheartedly).
Well…also presuming what you said you were going to do has a net benefit to humanity or is not inherently unethical. I mean Hitler did a pretty good job of doing what he said he would do.
IMHO, business ethics falls under several categories:
The business is providing a service that is legitimate and legal. That is to say, the business is not a scam, front or “racket”. Bernie Madoff is an example of a business that failed this sort of ethical test. So was Theranos. These companies never provided a legitimate product.
The firm is conducting business in a manner that not intentionally corrupt, misleading, harmful or predatory. This can get a little fuzzy as companies can have an advantage due to technology, economies of scale or superior business models that allows them to outcompete other firms without being inherently “unethical”.
The company has an ethical culture. Plenty of legitimate businesses have toxic or abusive cultures, which can then cast a shadow on their entire business. It’s hard to find a company where this category doesn’t go hand in hand with the other two.