And where did those laws come from?
Employee initiatives, once known as the labor movement.
Do you think any corporation in the 20’s had enough collective guts to stand up to it’s greediest exec.? No. They all looked the other way as coal miners were killed with unnecessary dust and cave-ins. Etc.
All companies are like packs of dogs. Each is ok on its own, but when one decides to snarl they all do it, and the courage lets them all strike anything that nears them.
Don’t be ridiculous. Corporations are nothing other than large groups of people, all of whom have the same ethical responsibilities of any other citizen (whether or not they live up to them). You don’t abdicate your status as an ethical agent by going to work, no matter how much you may want to.
My ex-employer owes me an apology.
I used to work at a Hollywood Video. My boss, Duane, was an anal jerk. I had a nervous breakdown one day, and I didn’t go to work because of it. I explained to him that I had a few problems in my non-work life, and he wouldn’t hear of it. I asked for fewer hours because of it, he put me on more. I wasn’t sleeping. Finally, I quit. I did it over the phone, because I was scared of him. A friend of mine said that he just said it was because I “didn’t have the skills to cope.” Fuck you Duane.
Half an hour after I quit my girlfriend broke up with me, I fell down some stairs, and thought it best to kill myself. Nearly did too.
Thea, I say the individual worker is in the best position to define productivity in the manner that is best for him in any given situation, cognizant of signals sent by the employer.
For example, in your factory example, you do not mention bonuses or piece-rate pay. It is standard for employers to play quality off against quantity. However, in my limited experience quantity is much more easily, er, quantified. So it is. How much could you have dropped your quality rating, and raised your quantity? How much were the quarterly hymns of praise worth to you?
I have a somewhat similar situation in my present job. A co-worker interprets his religious obligations as requiring that he expend his best effort at work. But, our office has a very plain quantifiable category of production. However good your quality, that is hard to evaluate, and every performance review is begun with a listing of your average quantity of production compared to co-workers. Moreover, our office’s written policy seems to clearly contrast with the unwritten policy governing our day to day jobs. So if you do what you believe the written policy clearly requires, you keep butting heads with management who are pursuing a different, unwritten agenda. This guy experiences a great deal of stress, because what he thinks is doing the BEST job (and I tend to agree with him as to how our job SHOULD be done) doesn’t look all that good the way things are quantified in our office. Tough situation for him. Me, I make sure I look good on paper FIRST, before trying to decide what is the right" thing to do. Who is right, and who is wrong?
In your order checking example, the cost-benefit is clear. Each employer must weigh for themself. Your co-workers got bonuses for a short while while doing easier work. You enjoyed your work, and continued employment. (Tho you suggest the co-workers’ firings were due to them being assholes, not due to their shoddy work.)
In both situations,it seems your employers were pretty stupid in identifying and rewarding employee conduct that was in their best interest. They chose, instead, to evaluate employees by whatever factor was most easily counted. In such a case, why do you owe it to your employer to be wiser than he? Especially if you will not be rewarded, and may even be punished, for doing what you consider right?
Poly and JTC, you sized up the issues in a manner that makes sense to me. Thanks. I would not be troubled by a debate over “what should be” regarding category 1.
It seems obvious that I could argue category 3 along the lines of “all ethics are economics”, but I don’t know that I am up to mounting a spirited defense of that position right now, and it would be unfair to you guys to simply toss it out superficially and impose upon you the burden of both developing and countering it. (Oops! Isn’t that what I just did?)
Well, I think we can easily come up with a situation wherein “ethics” doesn’t equal “economics.”
Suppose that you promise someone minimum wage, but then decide to pay them less. Let’s also suppose that this person can be quickly replace because labor is abundant and the job does not require significant skills. There would be a clear economic advantage to shrifting this fellow. If you live someplace where minimum wage laws are not enforced (e.g. some poorly run Third World country), then you can most likely get away with this.
In such situations, there is an economic advantage to shrifting the employee – but it wouldn’t be ethical.
We can think of many other situations. For example, it may be economically advantageous to dismiss an employee for some misdeed without giving him due process, or perhaps based on some trumped up charges. With enough legal maneuvering, you can even get away with it (I’ve seen it happen). That may be economical, but it wouldn’t be ethical.
Having said that, I do believe that ethical treatment often translates to better morale and greater productivity – but it’s not always the case.
JT, what I was suggesting is the line of thought that the only reason anyone acts “ethically” is because they derive some benefit from it. “Economics” not being limited to money. The extreme argument would posit that there is no such thing as a truly humanitarian, self-sacrificing action. Semantic twaddle? Perhaps.
Again, I readily acknowledge that it is kinda scummy of me to toss this out here in this half-assed manner without championing one side or the other.
Obligations between groups are different from obligations between individuals. If you’re trying to insinuate that I don’t help out co-workers in a jam, you’re barking up the wrong tree. But that doesn’t mean that my department has an ethical obligation to carry a different department that hasn’t been profitable this year.
Getting back to the OP, I interpret “owe” pretty narrowly. You owe that which it is legally or contractually required that you do (keeping in mind that contracts need not be in writing). Many corporations have policies that go beyond that which they are legally required to do for economic reasons (keeping employees happy, making charitable contributions, etc. increase value to the stockholders). I doubt that many make these types of decisions without the conviction that they inure to the long-term benefit of the stockholders in some way, although a few may.
A rather cynical view, then? Besides which, I really don’t see how one could extrapolate that from your specific verbiage.
More importantly, I pointed out some situations wherein the employer would benefit more from UNethical conduct that from ethical conduct. Sometimes the only benefit from behaving ethically is the knowledge that you’ve done the right thing.
I’ve worked at companies where the employees were exploited. I’ve also worked at a company where they were treated well, even though management derived no clear benefit from such action. Perhaps some people only follow ethics when it’s in their own best interest, but that doesn’t mean that everyone does.
Besides, even if your statement were correct, it would only describe how people DO behave. The original question was about how employers SHOULD behave – that is, what they truly owe unto the employees.
Come now. Nobody’s suggesting that the company must carry the department under such circumstances, so I don’t see the point of that specific example.
Matt_mcl is correct; corporations are still bound by ethics. In this situation, the company isn’t obligated to carry that department, but they are ethically obligated to treat the employees correctly. Among other things, this means that the company shouldn’t drum up false charges against the employees, so that they can be conveniently dismissed. It also means they should conduct a fair and equitable investigation as to why that department was not profitable, instead of going on a wild witch hunt.
Corporations are bound by ethical rules, even if those rules aren’t exactly the same as the ones for individuals. As matt_mcl said, corporations are essentially groups of individuals, and these individuals must behave decently. The ethical rules for a corporation are derived in part from the ethical rules for treating individuals. Ultimately, their goal is to ensure that the employees are treated humanely, while allowing the company to pursue its goals.
The point is that it’s the parallel to one person helping out another that’s in a tough spot - one department helping out another that’s had problems this year.
Anyway, I don’t disagree that corporations should do all the good stuff you guys are suggesting, just that they owe it. I happen to think that treating employees well has huge long-term benefits for a company, and that a lot of them are missing the boat.
I don’t think it’s a parallel at all, for one simple reason.
Individuals are not always ethically required to help out other employees who are in tough spots. It depends on the situation. Sometimes it’s an ethical obligation, at other times, it isn’t. By the same token, companies are not always required to do the same.
Additionally, I don’t think anyone’s arguing that ALL ethical rules which apply to individuals also apply to corporations. (For example, there are ethical rules governing parent-child and sibling-sibling relationships which don’t seem to have any analogues in the corporate world.) All we’re saying is that there are ethical principles which DO govern corporations, and these are ultimately derived from person-to-person ethical principles – for example, treating other people as human beings with inherent dignity and worth.
I admit that the use of the word “owe” here can be confusing. Employees certainly aren’t “owed” ethical treatment in the sense that a financial debt is owed. However, it is owed to them insofar as it’s something they deserve to get – partly due to their inherent human worth, and partly because of the commensal relationship which the employer and employee have entered into. It’s not owed in exchange for something, but it’s owed nonetheless.
Upon further reflection, I’d like to amend that statement. It is a parallel, but it’s predicated upon a flawed premise (whether individuals are always ethically obligated to help struggling, non-profitable employees).
Also, please remember that matt_mcl and I were responding to the specific statement, “I’m not sure ethical rules apply to corporations….” This is different from the question of what is truly “owed.” The two issues are related, but only tangentially so.
Dinsdale-
In my factory job, there was no piecework pay, it was flat hourly. You started at minimum wage, and got a ten cent per hour raise every four months. When I started work there, mimimum wage was $3.35 per hour, five years later, when I left, I was making $4.75. Annual bonus around Thanksgiving time was based on company profits, not individual performance. A lot of people would calculate what their rate was, make rate for the hour, and go into the bathroom to smoke.
I don’t know what the job market in my old hometown is like now, but when I left there it was tight enough that employers pretty much demanded the maximum effort an employee was able to give, and in return give the minimum pay and benefits they could get away with. (Insurance with extremely high deductibles and co-payments, low wages, extremely bad working conditions- I still have back problems from the factory job, and I left it a decade ago)