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

Coming Clean on the Clothes We Wear: Transparency Report Card was published last month. It’s a fairly detailed report on the supply-chain practices of some of Canada’s most prominent retailers and clothing brands. Interestingly, rather than reporting on actual labour conditions in overseas factories, etc., this report is based on publically available information. That is (and as the title of the document implies) this isn’t a report about how well these companies are doing in terms of fair sourcing, etc., it’s a report on how transparent — how up-front — they are about just what their practices are.

The Transparency Report Card assesses and compares 25 apparel retailers and brands selling apparel products in the Canadian market in terms of their efforts to address worker rights issues in their global supply chains and on how and what they report on those efforts.

Companies are rated according to their programmes to achieve compliance with recognised international labour standards in the factories where their products are made; and the steps they are taking to communicate thoroughly, effectively and transparently these efforts to the public.

The following conclusions are included in the report:

– none of the companies surveyed is currently providing sufficient, credible and verifiable information to consumers or shareholders to allow informed ethical choices
– of those companies that have made codes of conduct available to the public, few have codes that are consistent with International Labour Organization (ILO) standards
– only a small minority of companies report assigning specific responsibility for ethical issues in their supply chains to board members or committees. There is also very little reporting on labour rights issues as a risk factor for investors by any of the companies surveyed for this study.

Here’s a snapshot of key findings (click on the image to see a larger version)…

Conclusions of note:

High marks: Nike, Mountain Equipment Co-Op, Liz Claiborne,Levi Strauss & Co., and The Gap

Mediocre marks: Wal-Mart, The Bay (HBC), Roots

Low marks: Sears, Le Chateau, Giant Tiger, Harry Rosen, Reitmans

Perhaps not surprisingly, several of the companies that got high marks are companies that have, in the past, faced serious pressure (including boycotts, etc.) to improve performance in this area.

OK, it’s hard not to post something about the trial of Enron’s Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling.

Technically, of course, this (the trial) is not an ethics story. It’s a legal story. The jurors in this case won’t be asked to decide whether Skilling & Lay did something bad. They’ll be asked to decide the legal question of whether the facts presented to them support the prosecution’s charges “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

It’s easy to confuse legal issues with ethical issues, in part because there’s so much overlap. Most things that are illegal are also unethical; and many (but not all) seriously unethical things are also illegal. Further, judges (especially at the Supreme Court level) very often appeal to ethical principles to explain their rulings. I think it’s best to think of ethics & the law as two overlapping circles. Some things are unethical, but not illegal (e.g., lying to a friend about something important). Some things ar illegal, but arguably not unethical (e.g., many forms of civil disobedience). And some things are both unethical and illegal (murder, theft, assault, etc.).
It’s pretty clear (and you don’t need an ethics professor to tell you this) that what Lay & Skilling did was unethical. Whether it was illegal depends on a) the facts of the case, and b) the specific wording of relevant bits of legislation, and legal precedents set in previous court cases. That, as they say, is for the jury to decide.

Here are a few links about the Enron trial:

• Jury Selected for Enron Trial (AP story @ Yahoo news)
• How The Media Missed Enron , by Paul Maidment @ Forbes.com
• Lay-Skilling trial really comes down to lying
• Enron trial set for opening arguments (from Reuters)
• My review of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Don’t you love it when big companies squabble among themselves over not whether, but how, to help folks in developing nations?

A couple days ago I blogged about the $100 Laptop idea, which has the backing of MIT’s Media Lab, as well as corporate partners like Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Brightstar, Google, News Corporation, Nortel, and Red Hat.

Now, Microsoft says it has a better idea. Cellphones already pack a fair bit of computational power, and are getting more common even in poorer countries. So, why not use them as the heart of a simple desktop computer setup? Attach a cheap keyboard, and a TV as a monitor, and voila!
Here’s the story from the NY Times: Microsoft Would Put Poor Online by Cellphone

Craig J. Mundie, Microsoft’s vice president and chief technology officer, said in an interview here that the company was still developing the idea, but that both he and Mr. Gates believed that cellphones were a better way than laptops to bring computing to the masses in developing nations. “Everyone is going to have a cellphone,” Mr. Mundie said, noting that in places where TV’s are already common, turning a phone into a computer could simply require adding a cheap adaptor and keyboard. Microsoft has not said how much those products would cost.

Many folks in North America suffered through high gas prices during parts of 2005, supposedly mostly due to instability in the oil industry resulting from Hurricane Katrina.

Of course, the year wasn’t bad enough to prevent Exxon Mobil from reaping the biggest profits of any company anywhere ever.
See the Bloomberg story: Exxon Mobil 4th-Qtr Profit Climbs to Record $10.7 Bln

According to Bloomberg, the company actually benefited from the effects of the hurricane:

Revenue rose 20 percent to $99.7 billion as rising demand and hurricanes lifted prices for crude oil, natural gas and gasoline. The average U.S. profit on refining crude into gasoline and other fuels widened to a record of almost $11 per barrel processed, based on futures prices.

In light of this, it seems suitable to post this bit of anti-ExxonMobil satire…“Toast The Earth”. Now, a funny cartoon lampooning a corporation wouldn’t merit much attention on this blog, except these folks have gone a step further and provided a Fact Sheet. So, it’s not mere mud-slinging.

Update (January 31)
Late yesterday, Reuters ran a story about the reaction to Exxon Mobil’s record profits: Record profits spark new backlash against Big Oil

A few days ago, I asked “Does Google’s “Dont Be Evil” Apply in China?”

I just found out that, coincidentally (I’m sure), that very same day Google’s own blog featured a pretty frank explanation of Google’s rationale for entering the Chinese market and complying with the Chinese government’s insistence that Google assist in censoring search results. (Apparently their main search site, Google.com, while available to users anywhere in the world, works pretty poorly for folks in China. Hence the need to have a local presence and a dedicated Chinese search site.)

Here are a couple of snippets, but it’s worth reading their whole explanation.

This problem could only be resolved by creating a local presence, and this week we did so, by launching Google.cn, our website for the People’s Republic of China. In order to do so, we have agreed to remove certain sensitive information from our search results. We know that many people are upset about this decision, and frankly, we understand their point of view. This wasn’t an easy choice, but in the end, we believe the course of action we’ve chosen will prove to be the right one.
…
Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population, however, does so far more severely. Whether our critics agree with our decision or not, due to the severe quality problems faced by users trying to access Google.com from within China, this is precisely the choice we believe we faced. By launching Google.cn and making a major ongoing investment in people and infrastructure within China, we intend to change that.

Here’s a starting point for a good classroom discussion.

A story in today’s New York Times is called “How to Outwit the World’s Internet Censors”. It’s mainly about ways net-savvy folks in China might be able to circumvent their government’s stranglehold on the internet.

The OpenNet Initiative (www.opennet.net), an international human rights project linking researchers from the University of Toronto, Harvard Law School and Cambridge University, tracks Internet censorship and the techniques used to evade it. To surf the Web in China and elsewhere without censorship and in marginal safety, said John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor and a member of the initiative, the primary tool is an old standby: the proxy server.

A proxy server is simply a generic computer through which people who want to be anonymous drive Web traffic before it reaches their own machines. This helps dissociate a computer address from the Web sites its user has visited.

It’s not perfect. You never know, for instance, how trustworthy any proxy really is, and servers go up and down unpredictably. But people regularly use proxy servers for all kind of reasons — from the political to the pornographic.

So, companies and other organizations that supply proxy servers, or that supply software designed to mask a computer’s location on the net, are doing a big favour to both a) people living under repressive governments, and b) people who want to be able to traffic in child pornography (for example). And it’s very unlikely that those companies & organizations will be able to claim that their services & products are only used for the good purposes, and never for the bad.

So, here’s the question for class discussion: is a company supplying such products and services doing a good thing?

Links:
Electronic Fronteir Foundation
The OpenNet Initiative
Wikipedia entry on Proxy Servers
Wikipedia entry on Anonymity
Google resources on fighting Child Pornography

Wow. Bono seems to have reinvented corporate involvement in the fight against AIDS, while at the same time slagging old-fashioned philanthropy and hippies too. One smart dude.

From BBC News: Bono bets on Red to battle Aids

The rock star Bono has launched a new global brand, Product Red, with a share of profits to go to the fight against Aids in Africa.

Launch partners American Express, Gap, Converse and Giorgio Armani announced a range of “red” branded products.

These will include T-shirts, footwear, sunglasses and a credit card.

The hope is that profits from the venture will generate a “sustainable” flow of money to support the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria.

Bono warned the world was losing the fight against HIV/Aids, with 6,500 Africans dying of the disease every day.

He stressed that this was a commercial venture and not philanthropy. [emphasis added]

“Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands. Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce,” Bono said.

More on this, from BusinessWeek Online: For Bono, Star Power with Purpose

Perhaps no celebrity alive today is more effective at leveraging his fame for social good than Bono. A day earlier, he had launched a new fund-raising effort called Product Red, an effort to exploit famous brands such as Armani, Gap, and American Express to raise money for efforts to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria in Africa. Gap, for example, will sell an African-made T-Shirt (guess what color…uh, red), and Giorgio Armani is designing a pair of sunglasses. American Express will issue a Red credit card. A percentage of the sales that the products generate will go to the cause.

Update:
Here is the Product Red website.
Here’s Bono’s own website
Same story, this time from an African news-source.

King Kaufman, the sports columnist from Salon.com, has this skewering of what seems to be a ploy by Reebok to get credit for a huge charitable donation without, you know, actually making a donation:

Reebok escapes charity

I’m sorry to report that Reebok won’t be giving $1 million to Boys and Girls Clubs of America, because the virtually impossible condition the shoe company put on the donation wasn’t met.

You’ll remember that in the “RBK Touchdown Challenge,” Reebok promised the donation if its handpicked squad of six Reebok-endorsing quarterbacks threw more touchdown passes this year than any six quarterbacks had ever thrown in a season. They needed to throw 207.

This required that the six men — Peyton Manning, Donovan McNabb, Matt Hasselbeck, Mark Bulger, Chad Pennington and Byron Leftwich, plus “subs” Alex Smith and Eli Manning if up to two got hurt, which they did — improve on their career highs by 25 percent per man. Peyton Manning’s career high was the NFL record, by the way, so it was a pretty safe bet he wasn’t going to improve on it by 25 percent.

(To read the full story you either need to subscribe to Salon, or get a free one-day trial by agreeing to watch a commercial, first.)

I noted in an earlier posting that Google is a company with a rep for having some pretty high ideals. Their corporate ethics motto is straightforward: “Don’t Be Evil.”

Now Google is facing criticism — well, mixed reviews — for its decision to comply with the Chinese government’s request that the Chinese-language version of Google censor search results. See this story from Wired News: Google Gagged, but There’s Hope

Google’s decision to filter sensitive topics from web searches in China is a major triumph for the regime’s campaign to have the internet censor itself, observers said Thursday, amid mounting criticism of the move.

However, scholars who study the internet in China said free speech advocates still had room for optimism. While China’s grip on web content appears to be tightening, communist authorities can’t stop the overall trend toward access to more information and greater transparency, they said.

Google said its decision to launch a sanitized version of its famed search engine using China’s “.cn” suffix was aimed at reaching China’s massive internet audience. It defended the move as a trade-off.

The rationale is one I’ve seen before, for other instances of acceding to “local standards” that violate either a company’s home country’s standards or international standards. The idea is that progressive companies from progressive countries are likely to have a net positive effect on local standards. In Google’s case, the argument would look like this: look, if Google is operating IN China, that can’t not be a good thing. Google is all about making information — all information — available, easily, to everyone with net access. So, Google will inevitably result in freer information in China.

I gotta admit, I’m tempted by this rationale. Another way of looking at it: Chinese citizens won’t have any LESS access to information now that Google (even a censored Google) is available there. Only time will tell, but I’d lay money on Google’s presence having, overall, a positive influence on the openness of Chinese society.