The Business Ethics Blog

Last Friday I blogged about the Wal-Mart employee who died when customers, anxious to save a few bucks at the store’s ‘Black Friday’ sale, burst through the locked front doors of a Wal-Mart store in suburban New York. Focusing on the future, I said, in part:

…it’s not at all clear that Wal-Mart could have foreseen that their low prices would cause a frenzied crowd to rip the front doors of their hinges and trample an employee. But now it has happened. And it cannot happen again. Wal-Mart has either to improve security measures during future big sales events, or cancel such events altogether.

Here are some comments on developments since then:

Not surprisingly, law-makers are reacting: Officials planning ‘doorbuster’ sale crowd-control laws

Two days after a mob of impatient shoppers trampled to death a worker at a Valley Stream Wal-Mart, a Queens lawmaker announced plans to propose a new law aimed at controlling future Black Friday crowds while Long Island officials said they were considering similar measures.

My guess is that this is silly. The intention might well be noble. But the problem, and its solution, is likely far too specific to be amenable to regulation. Some details:

…the New York City law would seek to define the appropriate amount of security for a major sale and mandate that retailers meet that standard. The law would also determine which sales would need extra security.

Good luck with that. My guess is that we’re better off assuming that Wal-Mart has learned its lesson, and will do things differently next time. That’s not starry-eyed optimism on my part. It’s just a suggestion that in some cases, a human conscience — or even a corporate conscience — is more likely to be effective than is legislative micro-management.

And from CNN: Customers injured in crush suing Wal-Mart

Two customers are suing Wal-Mart for negligence after being injured in a mad rush for post-Thanksgiving bargains that left one store employee dead, the men’s attorney said Tuesday.
….
Attorney Kenneth Mollins said Fritz Mesadieu and Jonathan Mesadieu were “literally carried from their position outside the store” and are now “suffering from pain in their neck and their back from being caught in that surge of people” that rushed into the Wal-Mart.

I read somewhere that Wal-Mart CEO, Lee Scott’s, day — every day — begins with a briefing from the firm’s lawyers. One more lawsuit will not change how his week goes. Then again, the fear of lawsuits might work better than the legislative mentioned above.

And finally, also not surprising: Wal-Mart Watch issued a statement laying the blame squarely on Wal-Mart.

While Mr. Damour’s death was an accident, Wal-Mart Watch believes it can be attributed to Wal-Mart’s blatant disregard for the concern and safety of its workers and customers

Not surprisingly, the activist group goes further, and says that this incident is not just Wal-Mart’s fault, but part of a larger pattern:

Unfortunately, this disregard is not an isolated situation, but an everyday occurrence. In fact, we receive disturbing workplace accounts from Wal-Mart workers every day and post them on our walmartspeakout.com website. Over the last three and a half years we have exposed the company’s poor treatment of its workers and tried our best to get Wal-Mart to hear the message that the company was putting its workers at risk.

WMW’s solution? Allow workers to unionize, naturally. I don’t know of any evidence that unionized workplaces are safer than non-unionized workplaces. (I’m not saying there is no such evidence; I just don’t know of any.) In particular, what I’d be curious to see is evidence that unionization matters within a given industry — after all, retail is a pretty safe industry, as opposed to, say, the meatpacking industry. Would this really have been avoided if only that particular Wal-Mart had been unionized? If anyone knows of any such evidence, let me know.
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Quick update:
From the WSJ: Wal-Mart Assailed on Death

This is shocking.

NY Times: Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death by Customers

A Wal-Mart employee in suburban New York died after being trampled by a crush of shoppers who tore down the front doors and thronged into the store early Friday morning, turning the annual rite of post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting into a frenzy.
The 34-year-old employee, who was not identified, was knocked down by a crowd that broke down the doors of the Wal-Mart at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, N.Y., and surged into the store. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital at 6 a.m.

Police are apparently investigating. That’s good; charges should be laid, and I hope the tramplers go to jail for this (it’s going to be hard to apportion responsibility among various members of the mob, but that’s a problem for a different kind of blog). But from a business ethics point of view, it’s clear that Wal-Mart also has to take action, here.

The 2005 attack-documentary, “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” claimed that Wal-Mart’s lax security was responsible for crimes committed in Wal-Mart parking lots. In my review of that movie, I suggested that was unfair. But today’s death happened inside a Wal-Mart store, and was presumably incited by the sale Wal-Mart was having. I’m not saying Wal-Mart was responsible — the death was the mob’s fault, and it’s not at all clear that Wal-Mart could have foreseen that their low prices would cause a frenzied crowd to rip the front doors of their hinges and trample an employee. But now it has happened. And it cannot happen again. Wal-Mart has either to improve security measures during future big sales events, or cancel such events altogether.

Here are a handful of items that have come to my attention recently:

From CBC: Consumer watchdog wants tougher rules for credit cards

Quebec’s consumer watchdog is calling on the province to make it illegal for credit card companies to solicit new customers.
Options Consommateurs said credit card companies often target young people who don’t fully understand the concept of credit, and get into financial trouble.
Credit card companies need to assume some responsibility for the troubling trend of growing consumer debt, said Options Consommateurs spokesperson Isabelle Mailloux.

(Bad choices are the proximal cause of consumers’ debt woes, but credit card companies do seem to foster bad decision-making.)
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From NYT: Amazon.com Tries User-Generated Public Relations

The company has announced what it calls its “Holiday Customer Review Team.” These are six Amazon customers who are particularly active in writing product reviews that it has offered to reporters to discuss gift picks. ….
Some team members have been flown to Seattle to conduct broadcast interviews on behalf of the company. Moreover, they have been given free products to review and keep.

(There’s no indication they’re being encouraged to tilt their reviews in any particular way, but pretty clearly Amazon benefits from positive reviews, generally.)
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Splitting Hairs
Also from CBC: Court cuts barbers’ legal fight to work in hair salons

The New Brunswick Court of Queen’s Bench is trimming the ability of barbers and hair stylists to work in the province.
The court has ruled that barbers and hair stylists can’t hold a licence in both disciplines. That means barbers can no longer work in hair salons and hair stylists can’t work in barbershops. ….
Barbers have been fighting to separate themselves from hairstylists for years. That happened this year, but the separation led to the loss of licences and a court case.

(Many critics have claimed that licenses in the professions and trades are just a kind of legislated monopoly. Defenders of licensing say it’s about maintaining standards. Critics say it’s about maintaining power.)

This story broke 2 months ago: Student auctions virginity, sparks online debate (via Reuters)

A 22-year-old woman in the United States is publicly auctioning her virginity to pay for her college education, sparking a heated online debate about sex and morality.

The student from San Diego, California, who is using the pseudonym Natalie Dylan for “safety reasons,” said she had no moral dilemma with her decision and found it “empowering”.

But few bloggers sided with her and some suspected her intentions.

Now, a disclaimer: 2 months have passed, and I don’t know (haven’t been able to find out) if the auction has happened yet. Or even if it’s going to. For all I know, the whole thing was a hoax. It doesn’t really matter. It certainly could happen, and that’s enough to warrant some ethical reflection.

This story has generated controversy, titilation, and outrage. To some, this is just a voluntary business transaction between consenting adults. To others, it’s a mortal sin. To others still, it’s a woman’s demonstration of ownership over her own body and sexuality — though maybe a somewhat unfortunate one. Many people are uncomfortable with the very idea, but it’s hard to give clear, coherent reasons for condemning this transaction.
The best I can do is break down the different reasons we might be uncomfortable with this particular commercial transaction.
Reasons might be broken into two categories:

• Concerns about the transaction itself. Just how “voluntary” is this transaction? Does Ms. Dylan really (really) understand what it is she’s selling? Is financial need “forcing” her into this? Will this transaction result in psychological or social harm to the buyer, the seller, or people on the sidelines (like Ms. Dylan’s family)? What about the role of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, the Nevada brothel where the auction is to take place? Lots of people draw a line between a woman selling sex, on one hand, and others profiting from helping her sell it, on the other.
• Concerns about social trends. Is this auction an indication of the extent to which sexuality (in particular women’s sexuality) has been ‘commodified?’ Will such a high-profile act contribute to that trend? What does the possibility of such an auction say about the arguably-unhealthy way our culture continues to obsess over virginity? And what does it say about men (maybe not men in general, but those who are likely to bid)?

I’m not sure there’s a knock-down argument to be had in the answers to any of those questions. Beyond those questions, there are of course objections based on religion, but those aren’t publicly-accessible reasons and certainly not convincing to all. My main point, here, is that if you object to what Ms. Dylan is doing, you need to get past the kind of knee-jerk reactions and name-calling that a case like this tends to generate. But if we’re going to say “She shouldn’t do it!” — and if we intend that to be an ethical claim, rather than just advice — we need to be able to provide an argument: plausible premises, connected by the right logical relations to our conclusion.

Relevant past blog entries:

• Deaf Embryos as Controversial “Product”
• Gov. Eliot Spitzer and Business Ethics
• Craigslist to Limit “Erotic Services” Ads

Relevant books to suggest:

• Selling Sex: A Hidden History of Prostitution
• and also maybe The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Live Auctions

As my U.S. colleagues head off for Thanksgiving, here’s a story of contrition — maybe:

From the NY Times: Remorseful Ex-Officials Decline Pay From UBS

As a number of American banks resist calls to rein in executive pay, the unthinkable is happening — at least in Switzerland, where three former officials of UBS, the troubled Swiss financial giant, said on Tuesday that they would forgo more than $27 million in compensation.

Marcel Ospel, the former chairman of the board at the Swiss bank, and Stephan Haeringer and Marco Suter, two former directors, said they would give up pay promised them after the bank reported nearly $50 billion in losses and received even more than that in financial support from the Swiss government.

“With the involvement of the Swiss government, I realized that decisive action was required on my part,” Mr. Ospel said in a statement. “I hope that my action will help to resolve a situation that was inconceivable to me until a short time ago,” he said.

I’m not sure what to make of this. Comparisons were bound to be made with U.S. executives who aren’t showing similar contrition. But is this really a true sign of regret on the part of these bankers? There is surely a behind-the-scenes story dying to be told. Not to be too much of a cynic, but I have trouble believing that these 3 gentlemen simply got together and said, effectively, “Hell, we just don’t deserve that money!” I mean, it could have happened, I guess. A clue comes towards the end of the NYT story:

In their press release, the three former UBS board members noted that their decision should not be considered an admission of guilt “in a legal sense.”

Ah, of course not.

What would you if you woke up one day and someone had proven that the product you manufacture or market or sell just doesn’t work. That’s roughly what happened recently to people who market remedies for Alzheimer’s Disease based on the popular herbal ingredient ginkgo biloba.
Here’s the story, courtesy of the Sacramento Bee: “UC Davis researcher finds no effect from ginkgo biloba.”

The world is a complicated place, and the effects of many products is hard to evaluate — hard for consumers and sometimes even hard for manufacturers. I suppose we could think of several epistemic categories:

• Products we know generally work for their intended purpose (e.g., knives for cutting, antibiotics for bacterial infections),
• Products we know don’t work (antibiotics for viruses, and now ginkgo biloba for Alzheimer’s)
• Products we’re (collectively) unsure about.

I suppose lots of herbal remedies fall into the latter category. If some herb has been used “for centuries” as a medicine by some culture or another, but has never been rigorously tested, it’s maybe not crazy to think it has some effect, but it’s foolish to profess certainty about it. But it might not be crazy for a company to say, in effect, “Hey, look, we think there’s some evidence our product is useful. If you agree, try it out. No guarantees.” But once that product has been demonstrated not to work, then what? Presumably the ethical company has to stop marketing it.

On the other hand, I’m guessing that many buyers and sellers of herbal remedies would reject the scientific — some would say scientistic — framework that allows the researchers who conducted the study referred to above to say, with such certainty, that ginkgo biloba just doesn’t work. Science, they might say, has its limits. There are ways of moving through life other than living by the edicts of scientists. Fair enough. But as a society, we also want to have some reasonable assurance that companies selling products (in this case, herbal products) aren’t pulling a fast one, taking advantage of naive, sometimes-uncritical consumers. And the only way to do that is to hold them to standards such as requiring commercial claims to be capable of being evaluated in publicly-accessible ways. Scientific methods fit the bill. Scientists never say, “I just know this…so trust me.” They say “here’s the evidence, here’s how I got it, and here’s how you can check my work.”

Any product that could be tested that way should be tested that way. And any product that fails the test, probably shouldn’t be sold.

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See also this blog entry from a few weeks ago: Marketing Useless (Magnetic) Products.

Relevant book to suggest: Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Ethics, the Patient, and the Physician and Herbal Medicine: Chaos in the Marketplace and Snake Oil Science: The Truth about Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Business ethics isn’t just about how businesses conduct themselves while selling goods and services. It’s also about what sorts of things should, and shouldn’t, be sold in the first place. There are a few things that most people believe cannot, ethically, be sold. For many people, the organs of a living person are high on that list. What could be more abhorrent, critics ask, than the idea of offering someone money &mdash filthy lucre — in exchange for a part of their very body?

Well, in that regard, see this story, from Singapore: Kidney law to change

From early next year, the law will be changed to allow compensation for live kidney donors.

The amount should not be so large that it’s seen as inducement, said Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan when he announced it yesterday.

Both the World Health Organisation and countries like the United States say it is ethical to compensate donors, so they do not suffer for their act of altruism.

Mr Khaw said the amount of compensation is not ‘hard wired’ into legislations of countries such as the US, Britain and Australia that allow it. Singapore will follow suit.

He hinted that the sum will be at least five figures, and possibly six. The actual amount of just compensation will be left to a committee, which will be set up to look into this.

Now, to be precise, what Singapore is proposing here is not exactly the selling of kidneys on an open market. But it’s arguably a move in that direction. Is that a good move, or a bad one?

On the issue of kidney sales, I’ve been convinced, despite myself, by James Stacey Taylor’s 2005 book, Stakes And Kidneys: Why Markets In Human Body Parts Are Morally Imperative. Taylor argues very effectively that allowing carefully controlled sales of kidneys is a win-win idea, good for donors and recipients alike. Cries of “exploitation” are unconvincing. Once fraud, extortion, and deceit are ruled out (Taylor is proposing a highly regulated market) all that’s left of charges of exploitation is a kind of paternalism and wishful thinking about the sorts of choices poor people shouldn’t have to make.

(I’ve blogged about this before. See: Black Market Kidneys)

Fast food doesn’t make kids fat. Parents who buy fast food make kids fat. Right? Then again, what if you saw evidence that your industry’s advertising practices bore a causal relationship with the obesity (and, hence, the eventual illness and early death) of millions of children? Would it really be that easy to say, “Not our fault”?

From the Associated Press: Banning fast-food TV ads could dent childhood obesity

A little less “I’m Lovin’ It” could put a significant dent in the problem of childhood obesity, suggests a new study that attempts to measure the effect of TV fast-food ads.
A ban on such commercials would reduce the number of obese young children by 18 percent, and the number of obese older kids by 14 percent, researchers found.

Surely the child obesity epidemic is the result of a lot of factors, and TV ads are just one of them. Add to that the fact that advertising by fast food chains poses a ‘collective action’ problem: unilateral changes in advertising practices by even the largest chains might not have much effect, given that other chains are likely to a) buy up the TV airtime thus freed up, likely at a reduced price, and b) partly as a result, expand their own market share. If the entire industry were to act in concert, it’s much more likely to work. And the industry might want to do that — if not for altruistic reasons, then to avoid the kind of ban that the title of this story refers to.

Then again, there is some precedent for individual companies taking action. See this blog entry from 2006: Kudos to Kellog (Fewer Ads Aimed at Kids). In that case, Kellog was limiting the way it advertises to kids in order to forestall lawsuits.

Today is the 3rd ‘blogaversary’ of The Business Ethics Blog!

Yes, it was 3 years ago today — November 20th, 2005 — that I burst Out of the starting blocks. In the blogosphere, 3 years is a long time (I’m told the average life of a blog is about 3 months).

Over the last 36 months, I’ve made 389 blog postings (including this one). To celebrate, I thought I’d simply share with you a few of my favourites. Actually, I’m in such a jocular mood I’m just going to share what I think are my funniest blog postings. Some of these I like because the stories they’re based on are themselves funny; others I just like because of some wise-crack that amuses me. Indulge me.

Here goes (in reverse chronological order)…

• Monkey Waiters & Ethics, Redux
• Ethics Consultant as Hall Monitor: Business Ethics on “The Office”
• PETA’s Prize for Artificial Meat
• Human Breast Milk Ice Cream: Udderly Ridiculous, Right?
• Welcome: The Food Might Kill You
• Beer, Ethanol, and Unforeseen Consequences
• Tempest in a Timbit
• Flat Pricing for Bras
• Fight for Your Right to Potty
• Business Ethics, Mafia Style
• They’re Ugly, and um, oh yeah…maybe dangerous.
• Honesty in Advertising
• Victoria’s Secret to Change Catalog Paper
• Sex-Offender T-Shirts
• Are Pictures Worth A Thousand Words?
• Angry Emails & Ethics Expertise
• What Next? “Diet Crack?” “Meth Lite?”
• Tobacco Company Smokes the Competition on Corporate Citizenship
• Karaoke & Business Ethics
• We’re WAY less un-ethical than THEM!
• Someone’s been a VERY bad boy…
• Ken Lay to Sponsor Ethics Prize
• Non-Philanthropy
• Anonymous Internet: Tool of the Oppressed, and Pornographers?
• Non-Charity at Reebok
• Revenge On the Nerds
• Pharmaceutical companies: MOST Ethical?!
• Hiding Unethical Behaviour Behind Unethical Behaviour?!

(p.s. if you’re a fan of this blog and want to help keep it going, bookmark the EthicsWeb Bookstore. If you get to Amazon’s webpage via that link, this blogger gets a little referral fee for anything you buy.)