Moral obligation to disclose pregnancy/parenthood to potential employers

Great Debates
61

[QUOTE=Acid Lamp]
No, I believe that you ought to have your financial cards in order before deciding to take on the addition burden of having children. To me at least, this means having one of the partner’s income be sufficient to pay all household neccesities and have a little left over.
[/QUOTE]

Well, we certainly won’t have to worry about the US becoming overpopulated. :rolleyes:

When we had kids, we could afford to have my wife stay home. That was because I had a PhD and a good job, but I don’t think being as lucky as me should be a prerequisite for having a family. I trust that with your position you support the living wage, right?

62

[QUOTE=Voyager]
When we had kids, we could afford to have my wife stay home. That was because I had a PhD and a good job, but I don’t think being as lucky as me should be a prerequisite for having a family. I trust that with your position you support the living wage, right?
[/QUOTE]

I don’t think you got your PhD through luck, did you? You got it through intelligence, motivation, good planning and a lot of hard work.

Now, if you had a crappy job, and your wife was just laid off, or was unemployed or otherwise job hunting, do you think that would be a good time to start your family? Wouldn’t you want to wait until things were more stable?

That’s called planning… as in “family planning.” When you’re talking about something as monumental as creating a new human being, I think some good planning is called for.

63

[QUOTE=Kalhoun]
There are a million things that can change that would endanger your family whether you’re pregnant or not. Are you saying no one should have children unless they have 21 years worth of money in the bank and a fully paid-off mortgage?
[/QUOTE]

Absolutely not, or I wouldn’t have my kids! But I do think one should have things like unemployment insurance (including on mortgages and credit cards) and “oh shit” plans. And sometimes people lose houses they can’t afford and have to downgrade. It sucks.

But, bottom line, is that doing something unethical is still unethical. Even if you really, really have to. Even if the other person is being unethical too. I may choose to do something unethical (and in the other thread, suggested the OP do so), but I don’t fool myself that it wasn’t unethical. It might be the best of the bad options I have. But it’s still unethical, which is what this thread is asking.

If I have $2 in my pocket and I’m really hungry and the only thing open is White Castle, I’m going to get some Sliders. But I’m not going to try and pass it off as health food because my options were limited.

64

I am not pretending it is ethical when it is not. It is ethical to not disclose your pregnancy when searching for a job. This is not a rule I made for myself out of convenience, but a rule that proceeds logically from my own understanding on ethics, as well as the ethical teaching of the company I work for.

I will start with the company’s teaching about ethics and making ethical decision. My company asks its employees to consider first what is right and wrong. If one of the choices is wrong, then your decision is easy, choose the right one. Secondly it tells its employees if the action they are considering is illegal; they must consider it wrong, at least wrong for the company. They back that up by giving its employees contact for getting advice so they can find out if legality is involved and other contact for reporting pressure to act in unethical/illegal ways. They make it very clear that taking actions on behalf of the company which are illegal is wrong. Asking others to do so is also wrong. Since I know that, and I know that my pregnancy cannot be legally considered in a decision to hire me, I know that reporting my pregnancy to hiring managers is not the ethical thing for me to do.

Now, let’s look at this from my personal view of ethics. I believe that corporations have an ethical obligation to abide by the law under which they operate. Their status is granted by the state and they benefit greatly from the state providing a relatively peaceful and well defined environment in which they may operate. I also believe that corporations are under an obligation not to expose themselves to risks which endanger shareholder value. Choosing to consider factors in hiring decisions which are not legal to consider puts the corporation and shareholder value at risk. It runs the risk not only of legal sanctions from the government directly, and lawsuits, but also damage to corporate and brand image. So choosing to consider factors in hiring which are illegal to consider is wrong because it exposes the company to unnecessary risk and is therefore ethically wrong.

Tempting someone to do wrong is also wrong in itself. Unnecessarily disclosing conditions to agents of potential employers which they may not legally consider in hiring decisions is tempting them to do wrong and therefore wrong in itself.

65

lee, I’m re-reading everything you write, and it still boils down to “it’s legal to omit the information, therefore it’s ethical.” I don’t believe ethics are derived from laws, period. I believe it’s logically and realistically possible to be unethical and legal, and that is the case we have here.

Yes, I agree that enticing an employer to break the law is in and of itself unethical. But that has nothing to do with whether the action of disclosure* absent a law* or the law itself are ethical or not. It also doesn’t help us to determine which of two potentially unethical roads to take.

My ethic is that adults should give informed consent in forming and maintaining all their relationships - sexual, romantic, platonic, corporate and employment. The moral that derives from this is that the employer needs to be informed of the job applicant’s intentions and known limitations.

What is your ethic and derived moral that differ?

66

The ethics here are not a problem for me. It’s not even my employer’s business what sex I am, as long as I can do the job. There are quite a few reasons aside from pregnancy that would render me unable to do the job effectively, and those aren’t any of my employer’s business either until the point at which they affect the job performance.

I don’t recall having an awful lot of doctor’s appointments during pregnancy, but then I didn’t have a lot of problems. But routine doctor’s appointments can be dealt with on my lunch hour (and I don’t work for people who don’t give me a lunch hour).

If you’re looking at a time when you’re not obviously pregnant, the employer will have months to get used to the idea that you’ll be taking leave. It almost seems like an advantage to have a short-timer in that situation, because as I said earlier in the thread, the last time this affected me I had three and a half months of various leave saved up, so my employer had to pay my leave plus the people who replaced me (one full-time paralegal, one part-time paralegal, and one part-time lawyer). If I’d been a new hire they’d only have been on the hook for a couple of weeks of leave, if any–it might all have been unpaid.

67

I have yet to see an argument for disclosure that does not boil down to the employer’s convenience outweighs the potential employee’s convenience. I fail to understand how that calculation is based on ethics at all.

68

[QUOTE=lee]
It is ethical to not disclose your pregnancy when searching for a job. This is not a rule I made for myself out of convenience, but a rule that proceeds logically from my own understanding on ethics, as well as the ethical teaching of the company I work for.

[/QUOTE]

So, then, what is that ethic and what is the rule (moral) that proceeds logically from it?

69

So what you’re doing here is a lot of justification. Being pregnant does affect your ability to do your job, not just through doctor appointments but things like morning sickness, restrictions on being able to lift items, etc. At the time you’re interviewing, you know that you will soon need more time off than your seniority in the company warrants, which will cause stress and strain for your coworkers (obviously they needed another person to handle all the work or they wouldn’t have been interviewing), but it’s all OK because that point (which you know is coming) is a couple of months away and besides this is some faceless corporation.

Which is absolutely impossible if your doctor’s office is a forty minute drive from where you work, as it is with someone I know. She’s also almost 40, so through the entire pregnancy it’s been doctor’s appointments every other week until the last two months when it’s every week. To every five days her coworkers are putting in, she’s working 4.5.

When instead they could’ve hired someone who wouldn’t be taking leave at all. Would it be better for them to hire someone who will definitely want leave in a short period of time, or someone who is very unlikely to want leave in a very short period of time? Most employers are going to go for the latter, but that mommy-lobby forces their hand.

70

[QUOTE=lee]
I have yet to see an argument for disclosure that does not boil down to the employer’s convenience outweighs the potential employee’s convenience. I fail to understand how that calculation is based on ethics at all.
[/QUOTE]

If *you *want to reduce it to convenience and calculations, you’re welcome to do so, but no one else has. But let’s play with your suggestion for a minute. If the employer is looking out for:

Herself.
Any number of employees.
Her business.
Her customers.

Then that outnumbers pregnant mom + fetus + nuclear family. By Aristotelean Ethics (and Spock’s Ethics, of course!) the needs of the many outnumber the needs of the few, period.

By Kantian ethics, if we Universalize the situation - if everyone was dishonest with their employers, then the cost of hiring and training employees would soon become prohibitively high. This would break down the social order and is therefore unethical. If it’s unethical at the Universal level, it’s unethical at the individual level.

John Locke teaches us that a just and ethical relationship is one entered into by consent - his most famous example being that of government.

And back to the law =/= ethical issue, Jean-Jacques Rousseau reminds us that once the law fails to act in a moral manner, it no longer holds true authority over the people. It is immoral to uphold an immoral law. Furthermore, the function of the state is to preserve freedom, above all. The freedom of an employer to make an informed choice in employees morally trumps the imagined “right to work” that a pregnant woman may or may not have.

So, OK, those are Ethics 101 cites. I don’t remember a whole lot after that.

71

In this case, though, your “moral calculus” is a bit skewed by the fact that the situation impacts the needs of the employer/employees/business/customers very differently from the needs of the pregnant applicant and her family.

If the employer hires a pregnant applicant who ends up taking maternity leave a few months later, then the employer, the business, and the other employees are somewhat inconvenienced and/or lose a bit of money because they have to get along without the new employee temporarily. The customers probably don’t even notice, but at the most they might have to put up with a temporary slight reduction in business hours or available services.

The pregnant employee’s paycheck, on the other hand, might mean the difference between survival and starvation to herself and her family, or at least the difference between prosperity and poverty. The utilitarian argument that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” only applies when the importance of the need on both sides is approximately equivalent, which isn’t true in this case.

Um, sez you. The employer has a right to make an “informed choice” about certain aspects of job applicants—e.g., their work experience, their apparent competence, whether or not they’re wanted by the police, etc. We as a society have decided that the employer does not have the right to include certain other aspects of applicants’ personal lives in the information upon which they base their hiring choices. And pregnancy is one of those off-limits aspects.

72

[QUOTE=nyctea scandiaca]
I don’t think you got your PhD through luck, did you? You got it through intelligence, motivation, good planning and a lot of hard work.

[/quote]

No, I was lucky. I got lucky genetically - I don’t think I’m smart because of any moral superiority. I got lucky that my parents could afford to send me to college and live in a neighborhood with a good school. I think I’m genetically averse to all sorts of nasty things.

The case we’re discussing is whether a woman already pregnant (and perhaps laid off from a previous job after she was pregnant) should be penalized. If you think she is wrong to be looking for a job, then how long should she wait after she gets a job not being pregnant to get pregnant? Same issue, really. Should an employer, besides asking if she is pregnant, require a no-pregnancy promise? hand out birth control pills? Fire her, or demand an abortion?

We weren’t talking about crappy jobs, but, since you brought it up, what’s the minimum income where you think someone having children is acceptable? Forget about welfare, we’re talking people with jobs.

I agree about the benefit of planning, but in today’s world it is impossible to know for sure you’ll have a job the next week.

73

[QUOTE=lee]
I have yet to see an argument for disclosure that does not boil down to the employer’s convenience outweighs the potential employee’s convenience. I fail to understand how that calculation is based on ethics at all.
[/QUOTE]

You have a better argument than that.

The law says that it is illegal to discriminate against an applicant on the basis of her pregnancy (not just that it is okay for her not to disclose it.) If she does disclose it, one of two things can happen.

  1. The company does not take it into account, as the law says. Thus, disclosing it has no impact on anything, and not disclosing it, in the same way, would have had not impact and thus be ethical.

  2. The company illegally does discriminate based on the information. As you said, the company has now laid itself open to lawsuits, and the hiring manager is acting illegally, which we assume the company does not approve of. Not disclosing the pregnancy in this case protects the company from the risk of harm, and removes the temptation of breaking the law and company rules from the manager. I fail to see how this would be unethical.

I suppose there might be some people so sure the law is wrong and the pregnant woman a cause of harm that they think the company’s civil disobedience through discrimination is a good thing.

74

[QUOTE=lee]
I have yet to see an argument for disclosure that does not boil down to the employer’s convenience outweighs the potential employee’s convenience. I fail to understand how that calculation is based on ethics at all.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think it’s about convenience as much as it is about expectation. When you’re hired onto a job, the employer has a default expectation that you will be continuously available to work for the near future. As an employee, you know that is their expectation and avoid the topic so that they don’t suspect until after you are hired. It’s deception by omission, you know that you will not fulfill their default expectations, but keep silent until their decision is made and they cannot legally change it.

As I said before, I think your obiligation to your own family trumps your employer obligation, so it’s not “wrong” to be deceptive, but that doesn’t eliminate your obligations to be truthful.

On the flip side, it’s like the employer hiring you for a job, knowing full well that the location will be closed in 6 months. Do they have a moral obligation to tell you this before hiring you? They’re not under any particular obligation to keep you on longer than 6 months regardless of the circumstance. Since the expectation is that the location will remain open, I think they have an obligation to ensure both sides are informed before decisions are made.

75

[QUOTE=nyctea scandiaca]
I don’t think you got your PhD through luck, did you? You got it through intelligence, motivation, good planning and a lot of hard work.

Now, if you had a crappy job, and your wife was just laid off, or was unemployed or otherwise job hunting, do you think that would be a good time to start your family? Wouldn’t you want to wait until things were more stable?

That’s called planning… as in “family planning.” When you’re talking about something as monumental as creating a new human being, I think some good planning is called for.
[/QUOTE]

How about answering the question about the living wage?

76

[QUOTE=Kalhoun]
If he’s qualified, sure.
[/QUOTE]

Okay, maybe not a good example. How’s this… I specifically want to find a job that is a weekend shift. But, I’m in the reserves (something like 1 weekend a month and 2 weeks a year that is required?). When I apply for the weekend job, I don’t divulge this information, until I’m hired and it’s time for me to do my service. Employer pissed, employees jealous and pissed. By law, they can’t fire me because I’m in the reserves.

Am I acting Moral? Ethical? Why or why not?

77

[QUOTE=ParentalAdvisory]
Okay, maybe not a good example. How’s this… I specifically want to find a job that is a weekend shift. But, I’m in the reserves (something like 1 weekend a month and 2 weeks a year that is required?). When I apply for the weekend job, I don’t divulge this information, until it’s time for me to do my service. Employer pissed, employees jealous and pissed. By law, they can’t fire me because I’m in the reserves.

Am I acting Moral? Ethical? Why or why not?
[/QUOTE]

The time off is much more in a reserves situation than a pregnancy situation, and it is ongoing, where a pregnancy situation is not. I work with a number of reservists and the company works around their duty schedules. However, as an ongoing absentee issue, I would let my employer know.

(Can an employer ask about reserve duty?)

(Can an employer fire you if you tell him you are signing up for the reserves?)

78

[QUOTE=lee]
I have yet to see an argument for disclosure that does not boil down to the employer’s convenience outweighs the potential employee’s convenience. I fail to understand how that calculation is based on ethics at all.
[/QUOTE]

A lot of the Dopers who post on these issues are employers or management who have gone far enough up the ladder that they identify with employers. They are simply doing what they do in real life: persuading people to accept conditions which are against their own interests and for corporate interests. On other threads you will read them arguing against raising the minimum wage, against universal health care (a dumb position in terms of corporate interests, but they’re not really all that smart as a group) for outsourcing and so on and so on. This is just another iteration of that series of arguments. I don’t know which persons posting in this thread are employers/managers, but I’m sure they’re here. Ethics as we understand it wouldn’t play into their logic at all.

79

[QUOTE=catsix]
Most employers are going to go for the latter, but that mommy-lobby forces their hand.
[/QUOTE]

Oh, that horrible, horrible mommy lobby, ignoring the convenience of corporations in their relentless drive to continue the human race.

Oh, you are so far from the right side of this argument that you don’t even see it.

80

[QUOTE=WhyNot]
If *you *want to reduce it to convenience and calculations, you’re welcome to do so, but no one else has. But let’s play with your suggestion for a minute. If the employer is looking out for:

Herself.
Any number of employees.
Her business.
Her customers.

Then that outnumbers pregnant mom + fetus + nuclear family. By Aristotelean Ethics (and Spock’s Ethics, of course!) the needs of the many outnumber the needs of the few, period.

By Kantian ethics, if we Universalize the situation - if everyone was dishonest with their employers, then the cost of hiring and training employees would soon become prohibitively high. This would break down the social order and is therefore unethical. If it’s unethical at the Universal level, it’s unethical at the individual level.

John Locke teaches us that a just and ethical relationship is one entered into by consent - his most famous example being that of government.

And back to the law =/= ethical issue, Jean-Jacques Rousseau reminds us that once the law fails to act in a moral manner, it no longer holds true authority over the people. It is immoral to uphold an immoral law. Furthermore, the function of the state is to preserve freedom, above all. The freedom of an employer to make an informed choice in employees morally trumps the imagined “right to work” that a pregnant woman may or may not have.

So, OK, those are Ethics 101 cites. I don’t remember a whole lot after that.
[/QUOTE]

A nice but deeply flawed series of arguments. You keep ignoring the central point of the argument, to my mind: that the interest in continuing the human race far outstrips the financial interests of potential employers. There is NOTHING that ANY corporation does or has EVER done that is even REMOTELY close to the importance of continuing the human race. Their interests are miniscule by comparison, and should be given appropriate consideration.

Flip that Kantian Universalization around for a moment: if no pregnant woman can obtain a job, then women don’t become pregnant because doing so weighs so heavily against their interests, then no human race in fairly short order. Now, that’s what I call counterproductive.