E T H I C S &

E C O N O M Y

Presented by: Katrina Faye Guzman & Christian

Abadiano "Ganda"
 1. Explain that economics is more than just a
profit-making activity;

2. Identify the ethical implications of economic

policies and practices;

Learning 3. Discuss how labor and economy are not

ethically neutral context;
Outcomes 4. Examine the role of the state in promoting a
healthy ethical climate alongside economic
growth; and

5. Develop awareness of alienation as an ethical

fact
Introduction
Tina is a cashier in one of the big malls in the country. Over the last five years, she
has worked as a crew in a fast food restaurant, a sales-lady in a department store, a
promotional girl of a cigarette brand, and a team member in an event-organizing
outfit. Her stint as a cashier is but one of the many job experiences listed in her
resume. Despite her extensive experience, Tina cannot find a permanent work due
to the prevailing practice of "endo" by most companies in the Philippines.
 Endo

Is a term familiar to thousands of job seekers in the country. It is an abbreviated form of the/
phrase "end of contract" which happens when a contractual employee finishes her employment
term which is usually five months. Reports place the number of Filipino workers who are
employed without regular position at over a million. This represents roughly 29.9 percent of
around 4.472 million members of the Filipino workforce.
The Labor Code of
the Philippines
mandates that an individual may be a regular employee once he or she
is able to complete the mandatory probationary period of six months.
To avoid being bound by this provision, most companies hire
employees on contractual basis but terminate them before they reach
their six months. The terminated employees are then replaced by
another batch of job hunters who are also poised to suffer the same
fate.Different sectors, however, think differently on the matter has to be
pursued. To do so,
 Business owners Human Managers

is tantamount to economic suicide as the regularization of the entire labor force will surely lead to a massive number of
companies closing down given the huge expense that such a move entails. It is ironic, so they claim, that the measure
envisioned to fix the labor problem in the country can also be the very same thing that will cause hundreds of thousands
to lose their jobs if the critics of endo will have their way

In between these two opposing opinions-the anti- endo and the pro-endo-there are moderates who see the possibility of
maintaining some form of legal arrangement that could protect the workers' basic labor rights while preserving
businesses' interest to keep them afloat.
 This might be the inspiration behind Order No. 174 of the Department of Labor and
Employment (DOLE) which seeks to prohibit companies from engaging in blatant unfair
labor contracting but allows them nonetheless to continue employing people on a contractual
basis. Militant groups, however, reject this initiative from DOLE. They consider it as

Ethics watered-down version of the promises made by the President Duterte during the campaign.
Businessmen, on the other hand, are the opinion that the DOLE's order is a welcome move
to evenly balance what is due to either employer are employees. Despite all these, there
remains a strand of public opinion which looks at endo as yet another item of a long list of
campaign promises left unfulfilled; that despite the fierce rhetoric against contractualization
and other unfair labor practices, endo as an employment policy continues to be enforced by
corporate organizations all over the country.
 A. THE ETHICAL ASPECT
OF ECONOMY
Contractualization of labor, which result in the so called endo, is the part of larger picture introduced by a
capitalist economy. As early 19th century, an intellectual by the name of Karl Marx had/ already pointed out the
dehumanizing effect of capitalism. The aggressive rise of capital inflow ushered in the age industrialization
which made the manufacturing of goods significantly efficient. The installation of machines in factories as well
as the introduction of assembly line-style of production contributed to the faster and more efficient labor
process. Through these modern technologies, what use to be done manually by a hundred people can now be
easily handled by a single machine for a much shorter time, at a much cheaper cost, and a lot greater in output
volume.
The Negative
Consequences
However, of this new manufacturing technique was the further
devaluation of human work and the displacement of the laborer from
the whole production scheme. Marx summed up this disheartening
human cost in one word: alienation. From Hegel, Marx inherited the
theory of dialectics which suggests/ that the contact of one thing
(thesis) with another different entity (antithesis) will eventually
produce a new reality (synthesis), the combination being different from
the two previous forms.
 From Feuerbach, he learned that the human person becomes the individual that one wants as a result of interaction with
the environment which include the socio-political and economic aspects. As Marx explained in "Alienated Labor", an
essay in the book Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1884, the human person is a species-being because he or she
possesses the ability to reproduce or objectify himself or herself through the product of labor. Simply stated, the output
becomes an item whose primary determinant is no longer its intrinsic value but the value that it acquires from the
economic practices of selling and buying.

Marx did not stop here. In his reading, the human creative activity, his species being, was not only casualty of the
modern capitalist economy. The new system, said Marx detached a person from both nature and his or her fellow human
beings. This idea suggests that labor has become a sheer + mechanical process and the laborer a dispensable cog of the
machine: the laborer can no longer claim what he or she is doing as his or hers.
 A worker tasked with checking computer chips before they are installed in cars or smart
phones may last a decade doing this routine, but at end of the day, he or she knows that his
or her job does speak at all of who he or she is. One wishes that labor becomes genuinely

Ethics liberative so that it is possible for the worker, in the words of Marx, to "become
accomplished in any branch he wishes... and thus makes it possible... to do one thing today
and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the
evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind without ever becoming hunter,
fisherman, herdsman or critic."