AC 351 Business Ethics

1. AC 351Business Ethics Lecture 6 (Week 7)Ethics and the employment relationship Tom Vine Essex Business School 2008/9

2. Context This week we continue the theme set out in last week�s lecture. Moving away from the ethical theories themselves, we begin to look at application of business ethics At the broadest level, both the design and implementation of the employment relationship are fundamental in this respect

3. The Employment Relationship The employment relationship can be defined as: �A legal or evaluative notion to describe the working arrangements between employee and employer, in which the employee undertakes specified work in return for remuneration. In this way the employment relationship pertains to both the rights and duties of the employee� (Source: lecturer)

4. Employee relations revisited� As third years, most of you will have studied AC 219 Employee Relations. Broadly, you will have examined three perspectives to the employment relationship: Unitarism (conducive to the capitalist system) Pluralism (conducive to the capitalist system) Marxism (critical of the capitalist system) On AC 219, these perspectives were explored as both prescriptive and descriptive of the employment relationship. However, you will not yet have explored � formally � employee relations in the context of business ethics

5. The employment relationship and power (1) The employment relationship is fundamentally structured around relations of power and control (e.g. Knights and Roberts 1982; Linstead et al 2004) ��(management) cannot but fail to involve moral issues for, in large part, the effectiveness of a manager�s day to day practice depends upon his or her ability to manipulate other human beings into compliant modes of behaviour� (Roberts 1984: 288, emphasis added, see also Roberts 2007)

6. The employment relationship and power (2) This lecture, then, explores the ethical responses to these power relations in terms of: (1) Ethics within the employment relationship (2) Ethics of the employment relationship

7. Ethics within the employment relationship (1) [Video clip: http://reebok.com.edgesuite.net/lastexit_terrys_world_dsl.wmv] This area of academic inquiry� is chiefly the concern of mainstream business ethicists tends to accept the prevailing capitalist economic system, and accepts the prevailing power relations inherent to this system. It assumes that the employment relationship is in principle ethical, and to consider only the ethics of those aspects that seem to breach what one might regard reasonable or fair in its enforcement is associated with unitarist or pluralist employee relation perspectives

8. Ethics within the employment relationship (2) Ethical issues then come to be explored only in terms of those occasions when �legitimate� employment practices are breached: Employees breaching trust: overselling, stealing, giving information to competitors, giving or accepting bribes, etc. Employers going beyond the boundaries of their legitimate �right to manage�

9. Ethics within the employment relationship (3) Employee Rights: Right to work Right to freedom from discrimination Right to privacy Right to participation/association Right to healthy and safe working conditions Right to fair wages Right to freedom of conscience and speech Employee Duties: Duty to comply with labour contract Duty to comply with law Duty to respect employer�s property