Employees and Business Ethics

Management of human ‘resources’:

an ethical problem between rights and duties

• The term ‘human resource management’ and its

implications have been a subject of intense debate in
business ethics
• Humans treated as important and costly resource
• Consequently, employees are subject to a strict
managerial rationale of minimising costs and maximising
the efficiency of the ‘resource’

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Rights of employees as stakeholders
of the firm

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 Duties of employees as
stakeholders of the firm
Employee duties Issues involved
Duty to comply with labour Acceptable level of performance
contract Work quality
Loyalty to the firm
Duty to comply with the law Corruption

Duty to respect the employer’s Working time

property Unauthorized use of company
resources for private purposes
Fraud, theft, embezzlement

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 Discrimination
• Employees receive special (or less preferential) treatment
that are not directly related to their qualifications and
performance in the job
• Managing diversity prominent feature of contemporary
business
• Extensive legislation
• Institutional discrimination deeply embedded in business
 Sexual and racial harassment:
• Impose physical, verbal, or emotional harassment
• Companies increasingly introduced codes of practice and
diversity programmes

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Equal opportunities and affirmative action
• Equal opportunity programme
– Generally targeted at ensuring procedural justice is promoted
– Affirmative action (AA) programmes: deliberately
attempt to target those who might be currently under-
represented in the workforce
• Recruitment policies
• Fair job criteria
• Training programmes for discriminated minorities
• Promotion to senior positions

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 Reverse discrimination
• In some cases, people suffer reverse discrimination
because AA policies prefer certain minorities
• Stronger forms of reverse discrimination tend to be illegal
in many European countries
 Electronic privacy and data protection:
• Electronic ‘life’ becomes more important
• Usage of employee time for private reasons
• Time and space of work
• Data protection

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 Employee privacy
 Four different types of privacy we may want to protect
– Physical privacy
– Social privacy
– Informational privacy
– Psychological privacy

 Due process and lay-offs

– Right to know well ahead of the actual point of the
joblessness that their job is on the line
– Compensation packages employees receive when laid off

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 Employee participation and association
• Recognition that employees might be more than just human
‘resources’ but should also have a certain degree of influence
on their tasks, job environments, and company goals – right
to participation
• Financial participation – allows employee share in the
ownership or income of the corporation
• Operational participation can include a number of
dimensions:
– Delegation (job enlargement, job enrichment )
– Information (crucial decision)
– Consultation
– Co-determination (determine major decision)

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 Working conditions
• Right to healthy and safe working conditions one of the very
first ethical concerns for employees
• Dense network of health, safety and environmental (HSE)
regulation
• Main issue is enforcement and implementation
 Excessive working hours and presenteeism
– employee’s overall state of physical and mental health
– you should be at home due to illness or even just for rest and
recreation
 Flexible working patterns
– Part-time work, temporary work, self-employment and teleworking
– Poorer working conditions, Increased insecurity, Lower pay

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 Fair wages
• Fair wages is commonly the expectations placed on the
employee and their performance towards goals
• Problems of performance-related pay (PRP)
– Risk: salaries and benefits become less secure
– Representation: individualized bargaining
 The right to work:
• established in the Declaration of Human Rights
• every individual has a right to be employed
• every individual facing the same equal conditions in
exerting this right

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Employing people worldwide

The ethical challenges of

globalization
 National culture and moral values
• Different cultures will view employee rights and
responsibilities differently
• Raises the question of whether it is fair to treat people
differently on the basis of where they live
– Relativism vs. absolutism
• Absolutism: ethical principle must be applicable
everywhere
• Relativism: view of ethics must always be relative
to the historical, social and cultural context

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Migrant labour and illegal immigration
• Growing mobility of workers is a recent phenomenon of
globalization
– Typically north-south, can also be in other regions (e.g. UAE)
– Workers can also be attracted to particular industries in areas
where there is no local labour (e.g. mining)
• Numerous ethical issues here. Examples:
– Migrant labour often leads to questionable social phenomena (e.g.
drug use)
– Migrants are often from poor countries; willing to accept pay &
working conditions normally unacceptable in host country
– Migrant workers are often in a country illegally (but a record of
employment may later be the basis for legal residency)

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Towards sustainable employment
 Re-humanized workplaces
• ‘Alienation’ of the individual work in the era of industrialised
mass production
• Attempts to re-humanize the workplace
– ‘empowering’ the employee
– ‘job enlargement’
– ‘job enrichment’
• Success of such schemes contested
• Suggested that ‘humanized’ approach might be more
appropriate and effective in some cultures (e.g. Scandinavia)
than others

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 Wider employment
• Large numbers of unemployed people becomes the norm in
many countries due to mechanisation
• This threatens:
– Right to work
– Social fabric of particular communities
– New technologies herald the ‘end of work’? (Rifkin 1995)
• From sustainability perspective: ensure that what work exists
is shared out more equitably (meaningful work is available to all)

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 Green jobs
• ‘Green jobs’ are:
– In industries making environmentally-friendly products
– Workplace & organization of labour is also more environmentally
sustainable
• Gained attention in late 2000s; part of broader debate on
restructuring economies to be more sustainable
• Examples of specific measures:
– Car-pooling
– Paperless office
– Video-conferencing rather than business travel
– Home-based teleworking
• Potential benefits are social, economic and ecological

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