Desjardins5e ppt ch6

CHAPTER SIX: MORAL RIGHTS IN THE WORKPLACE
Copyright © 2014 by McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.

 Introduce the concept of moral rights
 Distinguish moral rights from legal and contractual rights
 Explain and examine various meanings of a right to work
 Examine arguments supporting an employee right to due process
 Distinguish due process from the legal doctrine of employment at will
 Examine arguments supporting an employee right to participation
 Examine arguments supporting an employee right to workplace health
and safety
 Examine arguments supporting an employee right to privacy
Copyright © 2014 by McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. 6-2

 Is it reasonable that an employer tracks your
trips via GPS?
 Is it reasonable that your employer or
potential employer asks for your password to
review your Facebook page?
 What are your rights?
 What is your expectation of privacy?

 The Jeff Quon case (police officer)
 The Dawnmarie Souza case (ambulance company
employee)
 The Kevin Colvin case (intern)
 The Dan Leone case (stadium worker)

Three senses of employee rights are common in
business:
- There are legal rights granted on the basis of
legal/judicial rulings
- There rights based on contractual agreements
with employers
- There rights that exist as entitlements, resulting
from our status as humans

If work is necessary to secure such central primary
goods as food, clothing and shelter, a right to
work seems a likely candidate for being a moral
right.

 There are various understandings of the right to
work
 Refers to a right to work without having to join a
union
 Refers to employees right to a job
 Rationale 1: the instrumental value of work, providing
means to acquire food and shelter, etc.
 Rationale 2: work is the expression of a meaningful life

 Critics distinguish between rights and desirable
states of affairs
 Rights imply responsibility on the part of others to
provide what is claimed by that right
 But does this perspective place an undue burden on
private employers?
 If so, place the burden upon government to provide
incentives and subsidies

 But should government be placed in the position
of providing jobs to any citizen who desires one?
 Wouldn’t placing government in this position
produce too much inefficiency, thus creating
economic and political turmoil?

 What if government supplied protection for jobs,
rather than jobs?
The belief seems to be that governments have a
responsibility to encourage private sector
employment for all its citizens. As a last resort,
the government has a duty to supply jobs.

 There is another sense to a right to work: the
right, once hired, to hold that job with some
degree of security.
 This becomes a right to due process.

 Historically courts have been loath to recognize
obligations other than those explicitly agreed to
by the parties concerned (contracts)
 An “at will” contract is one that exists only so
long as both parties consent or, conversely, can
be broken at the discretion of either party

“all may dismiss their employee(s) at will, be they
many or few, for good cause, for no cause, or
even for cause morally wrong”

 Within the United States the legal doctrine of
employment at will is limited
 From the beginning applied only to the private sector
 Applied only to noncontract employees
 Employees are protected from firing on the basis of
sex and race, disability, safety complaints, and union
support

 The courts have recently ruled on
 Public policy exemption
 Implied contract exemption
 Implied covenant of good faith
Yet, the legal burden of proof, of wrongful termination,
rests with employees. Absent such proof, employers
may fire at will

Due Process (per legem terrae: by the law of the
land)
In the workplace due process refers to employees’
right to be protected from the arbitrary use of
managerial authority.
Procedures must be established to ensure that
dismissal is not arbitrary.

 What are the acceptable reasons for dismissal?
(just cause)
 What is the process that an employer must go
through to discharge an employee?
 Who is responsible for making these policies
known?

The strongest defense of an employee’s right to
due process appeals to the fundamental ethical
concepts of respect and fairness.
Due Process rights establish the criteria for the
justification of dismissal by outlining just cause
conditions or by creating procedural safeguards

There are four counterarguments to the right of
due process:
- Due process involves an illegitimate restriction
on the freedom of individuals to establish the
conditions of their own work
- If employees are free to quit for any reason,
then employers should be free to fire employees
for any reason

There are four counterarguments to the right of
due process:
- Due process is an illegitimate restriction on the
property rights of business owners
- Without fear of dismissal as motivation,
workers will likely become inefficient and
unproductive

Patricia Werhane responds to the first two
arguments by pointing out the significant
inequality between employees and employers
Werhane points out, in response to the third
argument, that property rights in the workplace
do not include employees

With regards to the final argument against due
process
- If the cost of economic efficiency is the violation of
employee rights to respect, autonomy and fairness,
then we must conclude that efficiency be sacrificed
- Due process does not guarantee an unqualified
right to a job
- Workers provided with job security and due
process can be more productive than those without

Does managerial authority rest upon the consent
of employees?
Is workplace democracy justifiable?

John McCall offers five argument to defend the
claim that employees have a right to participate
in managerial decision making:
- The fundamental right to be treated with
respect
- The impartial promotion of human welfare

John McCall’s five argument continued:
- Creating conditions of employee self-respect
- Creating conditions to prevent mental and
physical harm
- Creating an environment that will foster
political participation

There are three objectives to McCall’s proposals
 Employer property rights
 Managerial expertise
 Conditions of efficiency

 Protecting employee health and safety is one of
business’ major ethical responsibilities
 This is a complicated issue:
 Health and safety have instrumental as well as
intrinsic value
 Acceptable risks need to be defined

Several problems
 Paternalistic attitudes towards employees
 Assumption that health and safety are preferences
that can be traded off
 Assumptions that workplace risks and other types of
risks are equivalent
 A free market approach is based on the faulty
assumption that markets are perfectly competitive
and free

Several problems (continued)
 Employees seldom possess perfect information
required by markets
 Individual considerations ignore social justice and
public policy

Occupational Safety and Health Administration
(1970)
 Technological feasibility
 Economic feasibility
But does this approach go far enough? Does OSHA
sacrifice employee health and safety?

 From the perspective of OSHA, industries that
cannot operate without harming the health and
safety of its employees should be closed
 From the perspective of OSHA, even if a standard
is technologically and economically feasible, it
would still be unreasonable and unfair if the
benefits did not outweigh the costs

 Cost-benefit analysis
 Cost-effective strategies
Employees have a legitimate ethical claim on
mandatory health and safety standards within
the workplace.

Two meanings to Privacy
 Privacy: the right to be let alone within a
personal zone of solitude (Warren & Brandeis,
1890)
 Privacy: the right to control information about
oneself

 Is the definition of Privacy as the right to be let
alone too broad?
 If so, then the clearest definition of privacy
involves the control of personal information
 But what if this definition is too broad?

 George Brenkert argues that informational
privacy involves a relationship between two
parties and information about a third
 Privacy is violated only when one of the people
in the relationship comes to know the third
party, while the other party does not

With regards to the control of personal
information, a violation of privacy exists only
between those having a personal relationship
What are the implications of this control of
information for the workplace?

 What is the nature of the relationship between
employer and employee?
 Employee privacy is violated when
 Employers infringe upon personal decisions irrelevant to the
employment contract
 When personal information irrelevant to the contract is
collected, stored or used without the informed consent of the
employee

 Consider two cases from the beginning of the
chapter:
 A police chief read officers’ personal text messages
on their city-issued pagers, even though the officers
paid for overage fees related to those text messages
 An interviewee was no longer considered for a job
after he refused to give the interviewer the password
to his Facebook page so that she could review it

Desjardins5e ppt ch6

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Desjardins5e ppt ch6