The Business Ethics Blog

Canadian readers of this blog are likely already familiar with this sad story.

Brigitte Serre, 17, was killed while working the night shift at a Shell gas station in the north end of Montreal last Wednesday. Several suspects are already in custody.

As Andrew over at Rebel Sell has pointed out, it remains unanswered just what a teenage girl was doing working alone at a gas station on a school night.

This story from the Toronto Sun raises the issue of employee safety, but suggests that a number of safeguards were in place. Why they didn’t work is left unclear.

Louis-Philippe Gariepy, a spokesman for Shell Canada which owns and operates the station, said the teen had been working the dayshift for several months but it was her first time on at night.

Gariepy said there was a surveillance system at the station and there should have been $50 or less in the till.

Safety measures vary from station to station, he said, but the north end location was supposed to be locked during the night shift.

“No one goes in except the cashier and all transactions are processed through a transaction window much like a drive-through,” he said in an interview.

“No one is supposed to enter the site,” he said.

In addition:

Gariepy said shifts are determined by employee availability, operational needs and willingness to work, he said, and the company does not discriminate due to gender or age.

“Minimum legal age in Quebec is 16-years-old,” he said.

Gariepy said employees received extensive safety training and that safety of employees is their top priority.

“As a parent myself, I have to tell you I am very concerned but we have to look at the overall picture,” Gariepy said. “Shell as a company has provided as best we can a safe work environment in normal circumstances.”

So far, nothing is mentioned about all this on Shell Canada’s website. (I’ve e-mailed Shell about this…I’ll update this posting if I hear back from them.)

So, how much responsibility do employers have for the safety of their employees, ethically speaking?

The easy answer, of course, is that employers should do everything they can to keep employees safe. But that answer quickly runs aground: no workplace is ever 100% safe, and so the amount of time, energy, and money that could in principle be spent on workplace safety is literally unlimited. So, instead, maybe we should say that employers should take “reasonable” steps to ensure workers’ safety. The word “reasonable” is the hard part. Who’s to say what is a “reasonable” degree of safety, or a “reasonable” amount of effort to put into ensuring safety?

Here, in no particular order, are some points to consider.

1) Risk is not an objectively determinable property of a situation. Whether a situation is “risky” or not depends upon, among other things, what kinds of dangers you fear, and what kinds of dangers you’re used to. I read somewhere that most coal-miners don’t consider their job risky, though most of us would think of it as very risky.

2) Legal standards matter, but they don’t settle the issue. The simple fact that it’s legal to have a 17-year-old girl work alone at night doesn’t make it right (or wise).

3) From a business manager’s point of view, industry standards do matter. Does your company lead the field in safety? Just barely meet industry standards? Do you lag behind? (So, in the present case, I’d really like to know how Shell’s safety measures compare to those of other gas stations.) Of course, it’s also possible for an entire industry’s way of doing things to be wrong, or to be out of step with the reasonable expectations of the community.

4) Some job-related risks are considered acceptable because they’re “part of the job” (e.g., the risks faced by police & firefighters), and they’re accepted by the people who do those jobs. People may accept job-related risks because a) the pay is worth it, b) they value some aspect of the work itself (e.g., the opportunity to serve their community or to do interesting & challenging work), or c) because they’ve got few other realistic options. For whatever reason, they consent to the risks.

5) The fact that some people consent to job-related risks does not make those risks ok, especially if a) those risks could have been avoided easily, b) the worker has few other real options, or c) the worker is too young to exercise reliably good judgment about the kinds of risks being taken.

Some other relevant links:
Here’s a story on employee safety, inspired by this case, from the CBC’s Manitoba bureau.
According to the Montreal Gazette, Quebec has no plans to change the laws