Civil liberties
- Trend away from the "employment at will"
- Multinational businesses may have a responsibility to guarantee employee rights even in countries where they are not required to by law
- Companies that look beyond the bottom line in order to respect employee rights and ensure a fair workplace tend to outperform others
Personnel policies
- Have a huge impact on the lives and wellbeing of employees
- Have moral concerns surrounding hiring, promotions, firing, disciplinary and wage policies
- Fair policies = critireria that are : clear, job related and applied equaly
Hiring : screening
- pooling and ranking, getting it wrong undermines effective recruitment and invites injustice, getting it right involves complete and accurate job description and specification
- Wrongful discrimination occurs when candidates or employees receive preferential treatement on ground that are not directly related to their qualifications and performance
Hiring : testing
- Tests that lack validity or reliability are unfair
- Tests may also be unfair if they are culturally biased or skills measured are not related to job performance
Hiring : interviews
- Interviewers should free themselves from unconscious biases, stereotypes and preconceptions
- and treat candidates respectfully
Promotions
- What is a fair promotions policy ?
- Seniority - but what about talent and performance ?
- Inbreeding - but why prioritize insiders ?
- Finding a balance between regarding loyalty and merit raises challenging moral issues
- Nepotism is the practice of showing favouritism to relatives and close friends (can also affect hiring, wages)
- Perhaps not always morally problematic (in e.g. family business) but may affect managerial responsibilities, hurt morale, create resentment, or result in unfair treatment of other employees
Discipline and Discharge
- Two basic principles in the fair handling of disciplinary issues :
- Just cause requires that the reasons for disciplines and discharge relate to job performance
- Due process refers to the fairness of procedures used to impose sanctions on employees
- Employers have the right to fire employees who perform inadequately (but should provide warning)
Wages
What is a fair wage ?
- Law
- Industry
- Community wage level
- Nature of the job
- Secure ?
- Employer's financial capabilities
- Two other aspects :
- Employee's job performance
- Fairness of the wage agreement
Arguments :
- Utilitarian argument : overall happiness
- Ethics of duty : respect of autonomy
- Virtue ethics : what type of employer do you want to be ?
Employer Privacy
- Employee privacy refers to the employee’s ability to control information about themselves and the circumstances under which that information is shared, both inside and outside the workplace
- Organizational influence in our private lives
- Workplace surveillance
- Informed consent
- When businesses seek private information about their employees, they should obtain informed consent
- The notion of informed consent implies deliberation and free choice
- Deliberation : employees must be provided all key facts concerning the information gathering procedure and understand its consequences
- Free choice : the decision to participate must be voluntary and un-coerced
Working conditions
- Employers have a moral obligations not to expose workers to needless risks
- But not responsible for all workplace accdents caused by workers' negligence
- Voluntary assumption of risk implies informed consent
- Employees have a moral right to refuse dangerous work
Duty to avoid harm
- According to some business ethical thinkers, multinationals have a duty to promote minimally just social and political institutions where they operate if these do not exist
- This, they say, is because businesses have duty to avoid harm