Archive for the ‘employees’ Category
HR Policies and Fundamental Justice
When employers terminate an employee as punishment for wrongdoing, it is important that they proceed in a way that pays attention to fundamental principles of justice. The firing can’t be arbitrary, or be carried out without sufficient evidence. The firing should be a penalty proportionate to the wrong committed — that is, the punishment should fit the ‘crime.’ And the employee to be terminated ought to be allowed a reasonable opportunity to respond to the accusations. These are fundamental ethical principles, ones that happen also to be entrenched to a greater or lesser degree in HR law.
In that regard, here’s an interesting story about a civil servant in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, who successfully appealed her dismissal, on the grounds that the right process hadn’t been followed. More specifically, she’s a city employee who stands accused of doing work on behalf of other employers on city time. Interestingly, the court that overturned City Council’s decision to fire her didn’t disagree with Council’s reasons — the court merely disagreed with the process that was followed. In particular, the employee hadn’t been given enough time to prepare for the Council meeting at which her case was considered and a guilty ‘verdict’ issued.
The key point to understand, though, isn’t about the legal standard the court applied. Or at least, the legal standard isn’t the only interesting part. Because the legal standard applied — one according to which someone accused of something deserves a decent amount of time to prepare a defence — isn’t just a legal principle, but also a fundamental principle of justice. It’s a moral principle that is embedded in our legal system, and that ought to have been embedded in Connellsville’s HR policies. In other words, the city’s policies ought to have stipulated that an employee accused of wrongdoing be given sufficient time to mount a defence before being asked to stand ‘trial.’
Last Friday I spoke at the annual Client Conference for the big Toronto HR law firm, Hicks Morley. The talk was entitled “The Ethical Core of HR Law.” The basic idea was one that is nicely illustrated by the story cited above. Laws exist to protect rights and to promote human wellbeing. Organizational policies are in a sense a kind of private law, albeit a kind of law designed to support achievement of organizational goals. Thus every policy an organization puts in place ought to be thought of as grounded in one or more ethical principles or values. Organizations ought to give as much thought to the ethical content of their policies as they do to promulgating and enforcing them.
Healthcare, Unions, and Selling Donuts to Canadians
Filed under: compensation, employees, health, pay, unions, virtue, wages |
Leave a comment Selling donuts to Canadians sounds so easy that it seems like the punch-line to a not-very-funny joke.
Apparently, however, it isn’t always such and easy thing to do. Or at least, not easy enough to support paying double the minimum wage to the people who serve the donuts. Witness the case of the three Tim Hortons kiosks at Windsor Regional Hospital (in Windsor, Ontario, just across the border from Detroit, MI). At Windsor Regional, the donut-and-coffee kiosks are a big drain (to the tune of a quarter-million dollars a year) rather than a source of revenue. Part of the reason, apparently, is that the servers who work there are paid over $20/hour — far above Ontario’s minimum wage of $10.25. The kiosks are in effect being driven under by their own employees.
Part of the complexity of this story lies in the fact that the donut kiosks in question are at a hospital. So this isn’t just a question of a profit-hungry capitalist at odds with unionized employees. The cost overrun in this case is borne by the hospital, a not-for-profit organization that must recoup the cost in other ways.
The donut kiosks, along with other food service outlets at the hospital, are part of the organization’s overall operating budget, part of the overall cost of providing healthcare to the people in the hospital’s catchment area. As Canadian health economist Robert Evans has often pointed out, every dollar spent on healthcare is a dollar of income for someone. The result is that there are plenty of people — some wealthy, and some not so wealthy — with a vested interest in not reducing the cost of healthcare. That’s not a matter of malice; it’s just a matter of math.
But of course, the salaries of unionized employees can only be part of the tale, here. If the three kiosks have, say, two employees on duty at a time, then paying each of them only minimum wage would still only save about $120,000 — which accounts for less than half of the shortfall. So it doesn’t make sense to point to the workers’ wages as “the” cause of the problem. The supply of donuts and coffee at Windsor Regional simply seems to be out of line with demand.
Of course, one way out would be for the coffee kiosks to raise their prices. That may or may not be permitted by Tim Hortons’ franchise agreement. But anyway, raising prices would mean pushing the burden onto patients and their families along with hospital staff. And at most hospitals, the on-site food outlets have a virtual monopoly, which puts customers at a serious disadvantage. It also means that demand at a hospital is less elastic, which means the hospital kiosks have more power to raise prices than a non-hospital donut seller would. And if you believe that the wage currently being paid is a fair one (by some measure), then that’s what should be done. They should raise prices to benefit employees at the expense of patients, families, and staff.
All if this just illustrates that idealism about fair wages has its limits. In a world of limited resources — i.e., the world we live in — giving more to one person often means taking more from someone else. The result is that you can’t argue for higher (or lower) wages without talking about prices. Wages are part of an economic system, and discussions of justice in one part of that system can’t ignore justice in the others.
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(Thanks to Prof. Alexei Marcoux for pointing out this story to me.)
Should JPMorgan Fire the London Whale?
Would you fire an employee responsible for losing your company a couple billion dollars? I mean, hey, mistakes happen. But we’re talking two billion, here, with a “B”.
It’s not a hypothetical question, at least not for one major financial institution. As has been widely reported, JP Morgan Chase has now acknowledged that recent trading losses of two billion dollars are “somewhat related” to the controversial activities of a single London-based broker. The broker, whose real name is Bruno Iksil but who is often referred to as The London Whale, made enormous bets on U.S. corporate bonds…and lost.
I don’t think anyone has seriously suggested firing The Whale, at least not in public. But it does make you wonder. Even a company the size of JPMorgan can’t quite shrug off losses of that magnitude. And as others have pointed out, the hit to the company’s reputation may be more damaging, in the long run, than the short-run hit to its bottom line.
It’s worth noting that The London Whale was not a rogue trader. Indeed, his strategy was widely known, and apparently approved of by top executives at the company’s chief investment office.
Still, executive approval or no, it would be easy enough to make a scapegoat of The London Whale. But of course, that would be disingenuous, and the complicity of the Whale’s bosses is now public knowledge. And anyway, it’s entirely possible that the company will continue to see him as a valuable trader. He lost money this time around, but only insiders have the numbers to know how much he has made or lost for the company during his years there. And it’s entirely possible for even a losing bet to be regarded as one that it was smart to make in the first place.
There is also a public interest angle here. One of the key lessons of the last 4 years has been that innovative risk-taking by financial institutions can be a threat to the public good, not to mention the public purse. So even if The London Whale, and his overseers, aren’t destined to be axed by those who serve the company’s shareholders, that doesn’t mean they don’t collectively deserve our opprobrium, in addition to warranting stricter regulation.
Why the Wal-Mart Bribery Scandal Doesn’t Really Matter
The recent allegations of bribery at Walmart de Mexico are, if true, a damning indictment of a significant handful of senior executives. But they tell us little about the company as a whole, and even less about capitalism.
One of the most pervasive, and least endearing, characteristics of human beings is our tendency to project instances of failure on the part of one or a few individuals onto entire groups or institutions, and to use such individual failures as evidence confirming deep, dark suspicions to which we are already committed. The nationalist and racist versions of this pattern are too familiar to need description. But this tendency plays a role in our evaluation of various corporations, too.
This is precisely the risk with regard to the recent Wal-Mart bribery scandal.
Many critics of Wal-Mart, or of the corporate world more generally, are, I suspect, secretly or not so secretly pleased at the revelation that executives at the highest levels of the company are (allegedly) implicated in this scandal. It supports, after all, a thesis that critics believed all along. It proves, doesn’t it, that the company is rotten to the core. And perhaps it even proves, or at least adds substantial weight to the thesis, that capitalism itself is inherently evil. After all, we now see credible allegations that the most senior executives at one of the world’s biggest companies — that very paragon of ruthless efficiency and expansionary capitalistic zeal — were engaged in a practice so thoroughly discredited that it is illegal even in places where, unfortunately, it is still common.
It’s a tempting conclusion, but also a very bad mistake.
First, it’s a mistake because the (alleged) behaviour of Eduardo Castro-Wright (president of Walmart de Mexico during the events in question), Mike Duke (CEO of Walmart Stores, Inc.), and other top executives tells you nothing about the other 2.2 million people who work there. It tells you nothing about the character of the people who stock the shelves and work the cash registers. And it certainly tells you nothing about the sincerity of the people hard at work to implement the company’s ambitious sustainability and CSR goals. Nor do the recent revelations help with the big question about Walmart’s overall impact. Some people hate Walmart; others literally think the company deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. The corrupt actions of a handful of executives tell us nothing about whether the company is, on net, a force for good or evil. Walmart serves as a go-between, joining poor factory workers in Asia with (mostly) poor consumers in North America. It improves lives at both ends, while notoriously squeezing the middle-man. Whether that is on balance a good thing has nothing to do with who bribed whom to do what.
Nor do the recent accusations tell us anything, factually or ethically, about capitalism itself. Bribery isn’t a feature of capitalism; rather, it is anti-capitalistic, the very opposite of proper, competitive, capitalist behaviour. The accusations, if true, don’t prove that capitalism is inherently corrupt, but merely that a handful of executives at one particular company were corrupt.
Not to be clear: none of this is exculpatory, nor is it intended to trivialize the very significant impact that this scandal might have on Walmart, its employees, and its suppliers. None of what I’ve said above excuses the reprehensible behaviour that seems to have gone on at the world’s biggest retailer. That behaviour violated fundamental moral principles. It violated the law. It violated the company’s own standards of ethics. It violated the fundamentals of capitalism. But we must not confuse the actions of individuals, even highly-placed individuals, with the virtues or vices of entire organizations or of the market itself.
The True Cost of Conflict of Interest
Filed under: accountability, conflict of interest, education, employees, lobbying, marketing, scandal, taxpayers, trust |
Comments (3) What does conflict of interest cost?
It was recently reported that certain employees of the Chicago Public Schools food services department were going to be required to undergo ethics training, after it was revealed that they had accepted improper gifts from contractors.
The worry, naturally, is that accepting gifts put those CPS employees into a conflict of interest, a situation in which they were trusted to make good decisions on behalf of CPS, but in which they had an ‘outside’ interest — in this case, gratitude to the gift-givers — that might reasonably be thought likely to warp their judgment. The behaviour here was more specifically a violation of the section of the CPS Code of Ethics that specifically forbids accepting gifts, but the moral root of the problem is conflict of interest.
Now, in addition to the trouble the employees are in, it’s been reported that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to go after two food services companies that had given improper gifts.
Just what have those companies done wrong? What’s wrong with putting someone else in a conflict of interest? I’ve argued before that we might think of this as analogous to suborning perjury. When you intentionally put someone else in a conflict of interest, it means that even if you’re not violating any duties yourself, you’re encouraging other people to violate their duties.
And the companies’ bad behaviour, here, is going to cost them. It may well cost them future contracts, but it may cost them (and other companies that want to compete for CPS contracts) more than that. It’s been reported that they may be required to provide ethics training for their employees, and hire an independent auditor to make sure they’re complying with CPS ethics standards. Neither of those things is likely to be cheap. In an industry with narrow profit margins, such additional costs could well mean the difference between black ink and red.
But the most important “cost” in this case is, of course, the loss of confidence in the CPS and its purchasing procedures. That is always the risk with conflict of interest, namely that when conflicts are accepted and fostered, rather avoided or remedied, they erode confidence in the judgment not just of individuals, but of entire institutions.
Greg Smith, Goldman Sachs, and Corporate Culture
Filed under: banking, corporations, culture, employees, ethics, governance, trust |
Comments (6) By now everyone has heard that a guy named Greg Smith wrote a letter this week. Who is Greg Smith and why does anyone care? Why is Greg Smith’s letter getting attention from anyone who isn’t a Goldman Sachs employee, customer, or shareholder? Sure, he’s a mid-level executive at one of the world’s most powerful financial institutions. So he’s certainly not a nobody. And sure, Goldman, like other big financial institutions today, is seen by many as the corporate embodiment of evil, and so people are bound to be fascinated by an insider’s repudiation of the firm — especially accompanied, as it was, by a good dollop of juicy details. But there’s more to it than that, and the “more” here is instructive.
I think the key to understanding why Smith’s letter caused such an uproar is the fact that Greg Smith’s letter taps into the deep, dark fear that every consumer has, namely the fear that, somewhere out there, someone who is supposed to be looking out for us is instead trying to screw us. Smith’s letter basically said that that is exactly what is going on at Goldman, these days: the employees charged with advising clients about an array of complex financial decisions are, according to Smith, generally more focused on making money than they are on serving clients.
Now, first a couple of words about the letter. It goes without saying that we should take such a letter with a grain of salt. It’s just one man’s word, after all. Now that doesn’t make Smith’s account of the tone at Goldman implausible. He’s not the first to suggest that there’s something wonky at Goldman. It just means that we should balance his testimony against other evidence, including for example the kinds of large-scale surveys of Goldman employees that the company’s own response to Smith’s letter cites. Then again, such surveys are themselves highly imperfect devices. Either way: buyer beware.
(Note: one group that must take this stuff seriously is Goldman’s Board of Directors. A loyal employee taking a risk like Smith has is not a good sign, and his story deserves to be investigated thoroughly by the Board.)
OK, so let’s bracket the reliability of Smith’s account, and ask — if it accurately reflects the tone at Goldman — why that matters.
It matters because of this awkward fact: in many cases, in business, all that stands between you the customer and getting ripped off is that amorphous something called “corporate culture.” Most of us are susceptible to being ripped off in all kinds of ways by the businesses we interact with. That’s true whether the business in question is my local coffee shop (is that coffee really Fair Trade?) or a financial institution trying to get me to invest in some new-fangled asset-backed security. My best hope in such cases is that the business in question fosters a culture within which employees are expected to tell me the truth and help me get the products I really want.
Now culture is a notoriously hard thing to define, and harder still to manage. Culture is sometimes explained as “a shared set of practices” or “the way things are done” or “the glue that holds a company together.”
Why does culture matter? It matters because, other things being equal, the people who work for a company won’t automatically feel inspired to spend their day doing things that benefit either the company or the company’s clients. People need to be convinced to provide loyal service. In part, such loyalty can be had through a combination of rewards and penalties and surveillance. Work hard, and you’ll earn a bonus. And, Treat our customers well, or your fired. And so on.
But sticks and carrots will only get you so far. Far better if you can get employees to adopt the right behaviours voluntarily, to internalize a set of rules about loyal service and fair treatment. An employee who thinks that diligence and fair treatment just go with the turf is a lot more valuable than one who needs constantly to be cajoled. And, humans being the social animals that we are, getting employees to adopt and internalize a set of rules is a lot easier if you make it part of the ethos of a group of comrades. Once you’ve got the group ethos right, employees don’t act badly because, well, that’s just not the sort of thing we do around here! In the terminology used by economists and management theorists, culture helps solve ‘agency problems.’ Whatever it is that you want employees to be focusing their energies on, corporate culture is the key.
Of course, there’s still the problem of what exactly employees should be focusing their energies on. Should they be taking direct aim at maximizing profit? Or should they be serving customers well, on the assumption that good service will result in profits in the long run? In any reasonably sane market — one without ‘TBTF‘ financial institutions — the latter strategy would be the way to go, practically every time. And that fact is precisely what makes large-scale commerce practical. Consumers enjoy an enormous amount of protection from everyday wrongdoing due to the simple fact that most businesses promote basic honesty and decency on the part of their employees.
Unfortunately, it’s far from clear that Goldman operates in a sane market. So it is entirely plausible that the company could have allowed its corporate culture to drift away from seeing customers as partners in long-term value creation, toward seeing them as sources of short-term revenue. I don’t know whether Greg Smith’s tale is true, and representative of the culture at Goldman Sachs. But if it is, that means not just that Goldman isn’t serving its clients well. It means that Goldman embodies a set of values with the potential to undermine the market itself.
Child Labour in North America
Filed under: children, employees, regulations, workplace safety |
Leave a comment 
Once upon a time, I was a child labourer in the agricultural sector.
You see, I grew up on a small farm. I learned to drive a tractor when I was 10 years old. I was barely strong enough to push the clutch pedal all the way in. By 12, I was loading bales of hay onto wagons and feeding livestock. Like thousands of other youngsters across North America, I was part of a middle-class farm family.
Of course, my experience — and, I would think, the experience of other farm kids in North America — was worlds apart from the brutality of child labour in developing nations. But there is at least some overlap in terms of ethical issues.
So I’ve been interested to see the debate over proposed changes to US labour laws. The proposed changes “would ban children younger than 16 from using most power-driven equipment and prevent those younger than 18 from working in feed lots, grain bins and stockyards….” The only exception would be children working on farms “wholly owned” by their families.
I don’t have a strong point of view to put forward on this issue. I know I learned a lot as a farm kid, and my parents always made sure I was safe. But growing up on a farm, even a North American farm, isn’t always a positive experience.
All I want to point out here is that there are a couple of importantly-different levels to this controversy.
One level has to do with the conflict between parental autonomy and government regulations designed to protect children. Kids are among society’s most vulnerable members, and some parents are careless, and so government has some obligation to promote their safety and wellbeing. But on the other hand, a society in which parents were not allowed to make important lifestyle decisions for their children — including some risky ones — would be intolerable. (Note: far more children die of drowning each year than die in agricultural mishaps. Never mind automobile accidents.)
But the other level here has to do with regulation and the complexity of human business activities.
You see, the details of the above story, about revising US labor laws, illustrate the difficulty inherent in writing regulations. When US labour laws were originally devised, the meaning of the term “family farm” may have been relatively clear and succinct. So it made sense to say that kids, while generally forbidden from working, could still work on their parents’ “family farm.” But as the story points out, the current proposal “did not consider the thousands of farms nationwide that are owned by closely held corporations or partnerships of family members and other relatives.” In other words, there’s more than one way to structure a business that fits the basic criteria for what we would legitimately call a “family farm,” of the kind that merits a (partial) exemption from child labour laws.
And so this case provides just one more little example of the general principle that regulations aimed at regulating business face the eternal challenge of keeping up with varying and evolving business practices. That means not just headaches for regulators, but also heightened obligations for business to self-regulate.
Must the Captain Go Down With His Ship?
Filed under: accountability, CEOs, character, codes of ethics, contract, decision-making, disaster, employees, ethics, excuses, leadership, professionalism, risk, workplace safety |
Comments (7) 
Italian cruise-ship Captain Francesco Schettino is in jail, following an incident that left 6 dead and (at present) 29 missing. Among the accusations levied against is that he fled the foundering vessel before it was empty. (According to maritime law, a captain doesn’t literally have to “go down with the ship,” but he or she is supposed to be the last one off after ensuring the safety of others.)
Legal requirements aside, is there an ethical obligation for a captain to risk life and limb to stay on board until the last passenger and crewmembers are off? The answer is pretty clearly “yes.” Like many jobs, the job of captaining a ship comes with a range of risks and benefits. As long as the risks were understood when the job was taken on, you’re obligated to follow through.
There’s a more general point to be made here about the nature of ethics, and about ethics education and training.
Ethics often requires of us actions that we’d rather not carry out. You should tell the truth, even when it would be more convenient not to. You should keep your promises, even when breaking them would be more profitable. This is necessarily the case: if ethics only ever required you to do things you already wanted to do, there’d be no need for ethical rules (or at least no need to think of them as rules in the prescriptive sense).
But there’s at least a superficial tension, here, with the idea that ethics should be useful. After all, if having and following an ethical code doesn’t benefit us in some way, why bother? Sure, it’s easy enough to say “The right thing to do is the right thing to do,” but a system of ethics needs some justification in terms of human well-being or it’s just not going to be very credible, not to mention stable. Indeed, some ethical systems are subject to serious criticism precisely because their implications for human well-being are negative. Yes yes, I understand that your code of honour requires you to kill the man who killed your brother, but don’t you see how crazy this all is?
So there’s got to be some connection between ethics and benefit. And it’s not enough to point to social benefit. After all, pointing out that the community benefits from me taking ethics seriously merely pushes the question of justification to a second level: why should I care about the good of the community, especially if doing so requires significant self-sacrifice?
None of this should engender skepticism or cynicism. It just means we need to think carefully about who benefits, and how, from a system of ethics.
It also means that we need to think about how we can help individuals keep the promises that it was in their interest, initially to make. Captain Schettino found it in his interest to make certain promises (albeit perhaps implicit ones) when he signed on to be captain of the Costa Concordia, but then all of a sudden found himself in a situation where it was not in his interest to keep that promise. Threats of punishment were understandably insufficient, here. Staying out of jail is no great incentive if you’re free-but-dead.
Organizations of all kinds — including especially corporations and professional associations — need to work hard to help members think of the relevant ethical rules as something more than the terms of a contract, to help members become the sorts of people who simply would never abandon ship when they are needed most.
Do Corporations Shield Against Personal Responsibility?
Filed under: accountability, corporations, crime, employees, government, shareholders |
Leave a comment One of the key criticisms lobbed in the direction of corporations is that they’re essentially a mechanism for avoiding personal responsibility.
But this property is hardly unique to corporations. And it’s certainly not always a bad thing.
The notion that corporations shield individuals from responsibility actual has two components: one about moral and legal culpability for wrongdoing, and another about financial responsibility.
On the financial side, the lack of individual responsibility goes by the legal name of ‘limited liability.’ Limited liability applies most famously to shareholders, who generally cannot lose more than whatever they have invested in corporate shares. When corporations do well, shareholders may be paid dividends; but no matter what happens, shareholders are never expected to pay the corporation’s debts. That’s what makes it relatively safe to invest. But less commented-upon is that the same principle applies to another important group, namely front-line employees. Corporations shield them from financial liability too. If the company you work for goes bankrupt, you’ll lose your job, but the company’s creditors general cannot go after your savings, or your house.
What about responsibility for wrongdoing? In cases of actual wrongdoing, do corporations shield individuals from being held responsible?
Well, yes and no. Enron’s Jeff Skilling is in jail, and so is Conrad Black. They’ve been held accountable for what they did within their respective corporate structures. But yes it’s still true that individuals behind corporations — including shareholders, executives, and front-line employees — are shielded from responsibility for the corporation’s actions. If, due to someone else’s decisions within the corporation, the corporation does something criminal, you as an uninvolved employee or shareholder can’t be blamed for that. This generally seems right; responsibility requires knowledge and control. If you weren’t involved, you shouldn’t be blamed. People would be extremely hesitant to work together in large groups — something corporate structures facilitate — if they were going to be held responsible for other people’s behaviour.
But still, it remains true that one of the central moral problems related to corporations is their tendency to obscure and diffuse responsibility. Even though individuals within corporations can in principle be held (and sometimes are held) responsible for their actions, the complexity of corporate structures and decision-making can make it hard to figure out just who really is responsible, and hence who to blame. This is a genuine cost of the system. But it’s a system with considerable advantages. Our modern lifestyle would quite literally be impossible without corporations. So rather than reason for despair, the fact that corporations obscure and diffuse responsibility is a challenge to be dealt with.
Finally, it should also be remembered that corporations are hardly unique in shielding individuals from responsibility. Because really, in a sense, that’s what all organizations are for. They’re for achieving things that individuals cannot achieve alone, while avoiding personal responsibility. Think of all the things that governments, unions, nongovernmental organizations and charities do. Generally, most members of an organization (taxpayers, for example, or card-carrying members if Greenpeace) contribute to a joint cause, and contribute to its success, but are shielded from personal responsibility when things go wrong. That’s a cost we may want to try to minimize, but it’s also one to balance against the considerable gains we achieve from structures that allow us to work together towards a common cause.
A High-Tech Replacement for Sweatshop Labour! Um…yay?
Filed under: activism, employees, human rights, international, technology, values, workplace safety |
Comments (17) When new technology puts sweatshop labourers out of work, is that a good thing or a bad thing? It’s not an entirely hypothetical question.
Here’s the story, from Fast Company: Nike’s New Thermo-Molded Sneakers Are Like Sculptures For Your Feet
The classic Air Force 1, Dunk, and Air Max 90 Nike shoes get the Vac Tech treatment–a thermo-molding technique that produces one-piece, stitch-free sneakers.
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As a centerpiece for the holiday season, Nike Sportswear has released three of its most venerable brands–the Air Force 1, Dunk, and Air Max 90–constructed using a thermo-molding technique, a kind of vacuum compression method that allows the shoe to be held together without any noticeable seams or stitching. The Nike Dunk VT, above, basically recreates the familiar silhouette of the original design as sculpture around your feet.
Now presumably — though details are sketchy — the lack of stitching will mean these babies will be cranked out by machines, rather than assembled by hand by underpaid people in underdeveloped nations. Critics who think there’s no such thing as a good sweatshop should rejoice. But will sweatshop workers be so happy?
I hasten to add that the word “sweatshop” in its most pejorative sense doesn’t really apply to Nike. Nike, once villainized for having its shoes made by poorly-paid workers working under appalling conditions, is now widely recognized as a garment-industry leader in terms of labour standards. But that’s not to say that a job in a factory that makes Nike shoes is peachy. It’s still a hard life, by western standards. So is it good, or bad, for such labourers if a machine is developed that makes their services redundant?
As I’ve pointed out before, the workers vs machines conflict is, in the grand scheme of things, a false one. Machines can make workers more efficient (and hence valuable), can save humans from dangerous tasks, and can improve net social productivity in a way that stands to benefit literally everyone, in the long run.
But such generalizations don’t obviate the fact that there are some cases in which a new technology comes along and puts you out of work.
Unemployment is bad. Sweatshop jobs are bad. So do we celebrate or mourn when someone with a sweatshop job is put out of work? And is this a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils? Or the greater of two goods? And what does our answer to that question imply about the ethics of buying products made in the sweatshop jobs that remain?
The Business Ethics Blog 