Workplace Accommodation of Masturbation
Here’s an odd story, to say the least. A woman in Brazil has apparently won the legal right to masturbate at work — frequently — and to watch porn on her work computer as part of that activity.
Here’s the story, from David Moye blogging for the Huffington Post, via the Employer Handbook blog:
In a decision that can only be described as touchy, a Brazilian judge has reportedly ruled that a 36-year-old female accountant can legally masturbate at work and watch porn on her work computer.
Ana Catarian Bezerra successfully argued that she suffers from a chemical imbalance that triggers severe anxiety and hypersexuality, according to a viral news story….
It’s a story sure to engender plenty of giggles, but it’s also another example of a bizarre little story that serves as a pretty decent starting point for consideration of more serious issues.
A couple of quick points:
1) It’s worth considering the gender issue, here. People’s reactions to this story clearly have a lot to do with the fact that the individual involved is a woman. I wonder, if the employee with the habit of excessive on-the-job masturbation had been male, would people’s reaction change from giggles to disgust? I suspect so. I suspect a male with this proclivity would garner far, far less sympathy. Now in making this observation (or, I should say, this educated guess), I am emphatically not claiming reverse discrimination. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the fact that many of us would judge a man more harshly in this situation. In fact, that makes a good deal of sense to me. Men account for the vast majority of sexual predators and are the more frequent perpetrators of sexual harassment in the workplace. So it’s not surprising if our primary reaction to a male with a masturbation-at-work habit would be critical, rather than supportive. That’s not to say that a man wouldn’t deserve the same workplace consideration that the judge in this case mandated; it’s just to say that a man might have a harder time getting sympathy. I’m not sure what to do with that distinction, but it’s worth noting.
2) The woman in this case is basically arguing that she has a kind of disability, one that the workplace ought to accommodate. All obvious jokes aside, it’s an issue that ought to be considered seriously — as the court in this case clearly did. Now, the woman in question claims a chemical imbalance that triggers her odd behaviour. And of all the odd behaviours that take place in the workplace, something of a private and sexual nature certainly isn’t the oddest or most disruptive. But refusal to accommodate this particular disability wouldn’t need to be based in a repressive Victorian view of human sexuality. The very fact that humans — and I’m thinking in particular of co-workers here — have the reactions they do to the thought of other humans pleasuring themselves means that such behaviour, especially when publicized is bound to be disruptive, even if it happens out of sight. But then again, our society is still crawling slowly towards truly embracing the notion, enunciated most forcefully by John Stuart Mill, that we shouldn’t have rules against behaviour that doesn’t harm anyone, and that, hence, what goes on between consenting adults behind closed doors is nobody else’s business. But it’s not clear just how that rule of thumb applies when the ‘business’ in question is actually someone’s business, and when the closed door involved is an office door.
Profiting from Customers’ False Beliefs
Filed under: consumers, critical thinking, disaster, ethics, fraud, marketing, profits, science |
Comments (14) Is it ethical for a business to profit from its customers’ false beliefs? Or, more to the point, is it ethical to profit from your customers’ beliefs when you think those beliefs are false? What if you encourage those beliefs?
Case in point: a number of businesses have sprung up to take advantage of the fact that a number of fundamentalist Christians believe that May 21, 2011 (i.e., tomorrow) is the day on which “The Rapture” will happen, which will involve the return to earth of Jesus Christ, the rescue of believers, and the start of a process culminating in the destruction of the world in October. Enter the profit-seeking atheists. Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, for example, will guarantee (for just $135) to come to a believer’s house, post-rapture, to rescue their pets. Salvation, after all, is for human believers only, so the faithful “know” that atheists and animals will be left behind. (For more details, and more examples, see this item from ABC News: May 21, 2011: Profiting on Doomsday?)
Profiting from this particular set of false (i.e., unsupported) beliefs seems, frankly, pretty innocuous. Those who hold such beliefs are few, and are liable to be mocked by the vast majority of Christians, who scoff at the idea that the exact date of the Rapture can be determined so precisely. When the Rapture ends up not happening (and I realize I’m going out on a limb, there) those who ponied up for the “service” offered by Eternal Earth-Bound Pets will be out $135, but other than that they’ll be no worse for wear. But what about other examples?
Let’s start with a fictional example to test our intuitions. What if I find out that you believe, for whatever reason, and despite the fact that you live far from any indigenous populations of elephants, that your rose garden is in imminent danger of being trampled by elephants. And let’s say you also believe (for whatever reason) that elephants are deterred by he sound of the revving of a Porsche engine. Am I justified in selling you a Porsche that you do not otherwise need, and that perhaps you cannot truly afford? Would that be predatory? Your belief, here, is clearly a crazy belief, and my profiting from your delusion seems not-quite-right. But then, as far as you’re concerned, I’m genuinely helping you. On the other hand, what if the reason you have that delusional belief in the first place is that I’ve convinced you of it?
Next, let’s get back to real-life examples. But let’s look at one that doesn’t revolve around a single event, like Rapture insurance does. What about, for example, selling homeopathy? Now, it’s one thing for a homeopath to prescribe and sell homeopathic treatments. After all, the homeopath presumably believes that such remedies work, in spite of the lack of evidence for that belief. Now, that belief itself might be culpable — if you’re going to sell a product, then ethically you ought to do what you can to make sure it really works — but at least the homeopath is selling in good (if misguided) faith. What about when licensed Pharmacists, people with the training to know perfectly well that homeopathic treatments cannot possibly work, sell them? That happens all the time. Shoppers Drug Mart, for example — Canada’s largest pharmacy chain — sells homeopathic treatments, and all the franchisees of that chain are required to be licensed Pharmacists. That is, they are people whose scientific training tells them that such remedies have zero scientific credibility. So they, too, are profiting from their customers’ false* beliefs — beliefs that they, the sellers, know to be false. Of course, the difference between selling homeopathy and selling Rapture insurance is that in the case of homeopathy, people’s lives really might be at stake.
Information is crucial to the efficient operation of a free market. Asymmetries of information constitute an entire category of situations in which economists will tell you market failures are liable to occur. Knowledge, alas, can never be perfect. So what we instead insist on is that transactions at least be made in good faith. It’s clear that that means the consumer needs to have enough information to know that the product she is about to buy will satisfy her desires; what’s less clear is whether the consumer must also know enough to know whether the product will satisfy her needs.
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*Note: some of you may want to quibble with my use of the word “false” to refer to beliefs in either a) the Rapture or b) homeopathy. You may point out that saying that there’s a lack of evidence for a particular belief isn’t the same as saying that that belief is false. That’s technically true. But when a belief is implausible on the face of it, is unsupported by evidence, and conflicts with a great number of beliefs that are well-supported by evidence, it is entirely reasonable to call it “false.” At least until the Rapture.
McJobs, and Height as Bona Fide Employment Qualification
Filed under: discrimination, employees, Uncategorized, workplace safety |
Comments (15) 
Questions of employment discrimination and of what counts as a “bona fide occupational qualification,” are always challenging.
See, for example, this story published yesterday in the Globe & Mail: Starbucks sued for firing dwarf from barista job
The U.S. government is suing Starbucks Corp. … saying the coffee company fired a barista in El Paso, Tex., because she is a dwarf.
When the employee asked for a stool or small stepladder to perform her job, Starbucks denied the request and fired her that same day, claiming that she could be a danger to customers and workers, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission….
As several commenters on the Globe story point out, the space behind a Starbucks counter is not a great place for an employee to stand stationary on a stool. It’s a fast-paced workplace in which people work with hot coffee and scalding jets of steam. So, Starbucks is at least not being entirely unreasonable in suggesting that allowing their would-be employee to stand there on a stool. That, I take it, is the key legal question.
But it seems to me that there’s another issue here, which has to do with just how critical this particular job is to this particular person. How critical the job is reveals the extent to which the company’s refusal to accommodate counts as an impediment to the would-be employee’s interests. Consider a different kind of example. Consider a situation in which the job in question is a high-paid unionized job, in a town with few employers. In such a situation, having that job might be really, really important. Or consider an employee who is moving up a corporate ladder. Imagine that the job at the third rung of the ladder (but only that one) requires that the employee receive some form of accommodation. Here, accommodation is crucial not just for the job, but for the employee’s entire career trajectory.
So there are, arguably, jobs for which accommodation is exceptionally important. But (with all due respect to the nice people who make my grande no-whip mocha) most of us don’t think of a job at Starbucks that way. We think of a job as a barrista as basically just another McJob, one which pays maybe a little over minimum wage and which is interchangeable with lots of other kinds of jobs in similar industries.
On the other hand, Starbucks likely doesn’t see its jobs that way, and doesn’t want to. At least, that’s the impression one gets from visiting the company’s Career Centre. So even if it turns out that Starbucks isn’t legally required to accommodate this person, doing so might be consistent with the values they claim to embrace, and the kind of workplace image they want to project.
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Thanks to Dominic Martin for showing me this story.
Should Boards Monitor CEO Morality?
Filed under: accountability, boards, CEOs, character, crime, decision-making, employees, governance, leadership, privacy |
Leave a Comment A Board of Directors is responsible for overseeing the management and direction of a company, and that task includes monitoring the full range of risks to which a company might be subject. But what if the company’s CEO is one of those risks? What should a board do when a CEO’s off-the-job behaviour raises concerns? The IMF’s Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a case in point. Long before his recent arrest, Strauss-Kahn’s behaviour towards women raised eyebrows. Should it also have spurred the IMF’s Board to act?
See this story, by Janet McFarland, in the Globe and Mail: When and how to confront a wayward leader
Most corporate directors find it hard enough to confront a respected CEO about work-related poor performance, but it is even harder to tip-toe into the minefield of rumours about problems in an executive’s personal life.
(I’ve blogged before about whether ‘private’ vice is a business issue. I’ve also written about whether a CEO’s divorce is a purely personal matter or not.)
McFarland quotes me in her story, but let me give a slightly fuller version of my comments here.
To start, it’s worth making a distinction. There are personal vices that are strictly personal (including most of what goes on between consenting adults behind closed doors.) And there are personal vices that are very likely to impinge upon the workplace or on performance at work. A tendency to engage in sexual harassment is an obvious example, as is heavy drug use.) But, when you’re a CEO of a name-brand organization, that distinction tends to break down. High profile means that personal vices can turn public very quickly, and affect the organization.
Also, bad behaviour on the part of those in the public eye can easily lead to blackmail, which can result in misuse of position and other kinds of bad decision-making. This is another example of why great power brings great responsibility.
On the other hand, there are lines boards should be hesitant to cross, on principled grounds. A CEO’s sexual orientation, for example, should be off-limits. This is obviously less of an issue in 2011 than it would have been in 1951, but even today a gay CEO might be seen as a risk factor (especially for an organization with a conservative customer base) but boards should take a principled stand against taking an interest in their CEO’s sexuality. The board has fiduciary duties to protect the company, but even fiduciary duties have their limits.
The last point I want to make here is that, when faced with a CEO’s bad behaviour, a Board faces more than a yes-or-no question. The ethical question here is not just a matter of whether to confront the CEO, but how to do it. A Board in such a situation needs to formulate a plan — a method of proceeding, including answers to questions like:
- Will the Chair of the Board approach the CEO solo, or should an ad hoc committee do it?
- Should they raise the issue explicitly, or obliquely?
- Should they give the CEO an ultimatum, or ask his or her suggestions for how things might improve?
- Given various anticipated responses by the CEO, how will the Board/Chair plan to react in turn?
Are the Unethical in Business Also Untalented?
If disgraced hedge-fund manager Raj Rajaratnam were good at his job, couldn’t he have done well without insider trading?
Unethical (and illegal) behaviour in business is often compared to breaking the rules in sports. And it has always seemed to me that the sportsman who cheats is basically admitting he’s not good enough to win any other way. Same goes for the student who cheats on a test — she cheats because she knows she hasn’t got what it takes to get a passing grade any other way.
Too often, in the world of business, those caught doing something unethical end up being regarded as “great but flawed.” The story that gets told is usually a Shakespearean one of a talented business mind driven to the dark side by greed, ambition, etc. So Rajaratnam gets described as “brilliant”. And Enron’s Jeff Skilling was, after all, “the smartest guy in the room.”
Now, this line of thinking has occurred to me before, namely that if you have to do something unethical to make a profit, then you’re just not very good at your job. But I was reminded of it by Andrew Potter’s recent blog entry on countersignalling, and how refusal to use modern, high-powered hunting bows might be a way of signalling the hunter’s true skill, and consequent refusal to ‘cheat’.
I sense there’s an opening for a potent new narrative here. When someone is caught doing something unethical in business, we should, in addition to criticizing their lack of character, and perhaps worrying about the institutional structures that facilitated their wrongdoing, also mock their lack of business acumen. Yes, mock. We should mock them the same way we might mock the hunter who uses a sniper rifle to take out a deer. Or maybe the guy who shoots fish in a barrel. Oh, congratulations, tough guy. And we should reserve our praise not for the shrewdness of the Rajaratnams and Skillings and Madoffs of the world, but for the quiet sagacity of the other guy, the truly talented one who quietly goes about building and maintaining a thriving business without having to resort to cheating.
Gas Prices, Criticism, and Ethics
Filed under: consumers, economics, energy, media, pricing, protest, sustainability |
Comments (3) There’s more than a little unseemly about the pervasiveness of complaints about the high price of gas. Of course, you can’t really expect anybody really to like high gas prices, at least from a consumer perspective. But disliking something is not the same thing as getting irate and pointing fingers.
Here in Toronto, gasoline prices hit an all-time high this past week. Talk radio jocks and editorialists were all over it. In the US, politicians are railing against oil companies. Of course, this is not the first time that high gas prices have spurred a populist pile-on. It’s a predictable phenomenon in response to perceived price-gouging. (And lets not forget the not-unrelated but misguided calls to boycott BP in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon blowout last year.)
But whining about the price of gas just might be unethical — or at least unseemly — in a couple of circumstances.
One such circumstance is if you really, really ought to know better. And lots of people, including most people editorializing for major newspapers, ought to know better. In fact, most of us ought to know better. We all ought to understand, as citizens, voters, and consumers, the basic interrelationship between supply and demand, and the factors that make price-gouging likely or unlikely, as well as something about how hard it is to anticipate the effects of the price controls some people favour. But I realize that that’s asking for a quantum leap in economic and financial literacy. (Ever notice that no one ever compliments gas companies or stations when their prices happen to be relatively low? This suggests that people think the low price is the right price, a the notion of a “right” price for a commodity is utterly at odds with any reasonably sophisticated view of economics.)
Another problem is when the gas-price complaints are aimed at gas stations themselves. Most of those are actually independently-owned small businesses, with precious little control over the price of gas. And as James Cowan recently wrote for Canadian Business, high gas prices don’t mean big profits for station owners. Picking on small businesses to express displeasure at the effects of fluctuations in worldwide commodity prices is thoroughly shameful.
Finally, I’ve heard surprisingly few people, in all this, bother to challenge the notion that high gas prices are a bad thing in the first place. What happened to everyone’s zeal for going green? Economics 101 says that when prices go up, demand goes down. And we all want demand for gas (i.e., consumption of gas) to go down, right? Now demand for gas, in particular, doesn’t change much when prices go up, but it does go down a bit. So if we want gas consumption to go down (as most of us agree would generally be a good thing) then we should be happy, in our less-selfish moments, to see gas prices going up. Now, admittedly, high gas prices don’t affect everyone equally. But nor do the high price of anything else. One of the few sane voices in all this is The Economist. A recent editorial there pointed out that the most effective thing that governments can do to take the sting out of high gas prices isn’t to do anything directly about those prices, but rather to insist on higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars. This suggests that the bad guys in this story, if you need to point fingers, are more likely to be found among the big auto makers than among the big oil companies. But even that is pretty lame. Car companies only make the cars that people show a preference for buying. Like it or not, not every unhappy story has a villain.
Rajaratnam: Insider Trading, Soft Skills, and Slippery Slopes
Filed under: finance, fraud, investing, profits, white collar crime |
Comments (1) Yesterday, Raj Rajaratnam, founder and head of hedge-fund management firm, The Galleon Group, was found guilty of 14 separate counts of securities fraud and conspiracy.
I think two things are worth talking about, with regard to this case.
1) One is the extent to which Rajaratnam was apparently a master of the so-called ‘soft skills’ of business. Rajaratnam’s success (and his eventual downfall) was rooted to a large extent in his talent for extracting insider information from his network of corporate contacts, charming them into revealing their employers’ secrets. To get a sense of this, it’s worth reading this richly detailed piece by Peter Lattman and Azad Ahmed, for the New York Times: Galleon Chief’s Web of Friends Proved Crucial to Scheme. Here’s a taste:
In his soft-spoken manner, shaped by his years at secondary school and college in England, Mr. Rajaratnam alternately prodded, chided, ridiculed and flattered his sources. Above all, he was a good listener, saying little as those on the other end of the phone, eager to impress the hedge fund titan, kept talking….
In other words, this ‘hedge fund titan’ used the same interpersonal skills in pursuit of millions as the common scam artist uses in pursuit of the little old lady’s retirement savings. This fact reinforces the importance of teaching these skills — and teaching about the dangers inherent in misusing them — in business schools.
2) The second point worth discussing has to do with grey zones and slippery slopes. Rajaratnam was found guilty of a criminal variant of something that professional investors do all the time, namely gathering information from people who know stuff about the firms those investors are considering investing in. In order to make their case, prosecutors would have had to convince the jury that Rajaratnam’s intelligence-gathering wasn’t just the run-of-the-mill kind.
But it’s also worth pointing out that there’s more than just a binary distinction to be made here. Somewhere between benign information-gathering, on one hand, and criminal insider trading, on the other, is a category of ethically-suspect behaviour that involves asking corporate insiders to provide ‘perspective’ or an ‘overview’ of, for example, the financial health of their firms. Such behaviour can be unethical for the same reason actual insider trading is illegal. Corporate insiders have fiduciary duties — duties rooted in trust — and providing information to outsiders so that they can have a trading advantage is a betrayal of that trust. And Rajaratnam’s methods played on his accomplices’ uncertainty about where to draw the relevant lines. The slope from benign to unethical to illegal is, it seems, quite slippery, especially when that slope is greased with flattery and a few hundred thousand dollars.
Are Girl Scout Cookies Evil?
Filed under: activism, boycott, environment, food, health, protest, snacks, sustainability, values |
Comments (4) 
Is nothing sacred? What could be more pure and innocent and hard-to-object-to than delicious bite-sized cookies sold, door-to-door, by happy-faced young girls trying to raise money to support a wonderful not-for-profit organization?
Well, apparently nothing is safe from criticism. Girl Guide cookies, as it turns out, are under attack for being made with palm oil, a tropical oil the production of which has been blamed for deforestation and for endangering the habitat of orangutans. Girl Scout cookies, in their current form, are apparently evil.
Dammit.
Here’s the story as reported by Tara Kelly, blogging for Time: Do Girl Scout Cookies Harm the Environment? Renegade Scouts Fight Against Palm Oil Ingredient
…now two renegade girl scouts are lobbying the Girl Scouts of America to remove the ingredient from the cookies.
Rhiannon Tomtishen and Madison Vorva, who are high school sophomores, stopped selling Girl Scout cookies in 2007 after they began working on a public service project to bring attention to the plight of endangered orangutans in Borneo. To ramp up their efforts, Rhiannon Tomtishen and Madison Vorva, natives of Ann Arbor, Michigan, have teamed up with Rainforest Action Network (RAN) to make the change a reality….
OK, OK. So I’ve long realized that Girl Scout Cookies (a.k.a. “Girl Guide Cookies,” here in Canada) are evil, but only in roughly the same way that any addict realizes that the object of his desire is evil. Every year I buy quite a few boxes of GG Cookies (the mint wafer kind, thank you very much) and hoard them, hiding them from family and friends, to enjoy them one-by-delicious-one.
A few random thoughts about the ethical issues here:
1) This is a lovely example of why not-for-profit organizations fall squarely within the bailiwick of business ethics, even if they’re not “businesses” as that term is traditionally conceived. (According to Time, by the way, the Girl Scouts annually sell nearly three quarters of a billion dollars worth of their delicious baked goods.) I suspect that Kathy Cloninger, CEO of Girl Scouts USA, is finding out that even a not-for-profit cannot hide its head in the sand when faced with criticism of its supply chain.
2) Sometimes (but only sometimes) evil comes from trying to do good. Time notes the reason for the existence of palm oil in the cookies:
In 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began requiring unhealthy trans-fats to be listed on the Nutrition Facts labels on food products. Two official Girl Scouts bakers worked to make its cookies healthier in light of the changes, said Tomkins. “In order to rid cookies of trans-fats, you had to find another alternative.” That alternative is palm oil.
So, the cookies are less-environmentally-friendly because of efforts to make them better for your arteries. Is there a win-win alternative out there? Maybe, but that cannot be assumed. It may well be that some sort of tradeoff is going to be required. So, ask yourself: which do you care about more…your arteries or the orangutans? (“Pssst! You’ve got cookie crumbs on your tie!”)
3) The main reason that Girl Scouts USA makes such a good target for criticism (in addition to its prominence) is of course precisely the organization’s clean-cut, do-gooding image. In other words, the organization is vulnerable to criticisms that would simply be shrugged off by whatever anonymous company makes the cookies sold in the bulk-food aisle of the grocery store. The Girl Scouts have an image to protect, and, other things being equal, this means they are more likely to be responsive to pressure. But then, that image has been earned, and critics may well find that the public would rather continue to support a favourite charitable organization than learn about a new set of ethical issues focused on the effects such support could have in far-away lands. That doesn’t mean that the anti-cookie campaign can’t get traction. It just means that when the battle is good cause versus good cause, the outcome is hard to predict, and it’s not clear whether there can even be winners.
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Hat tip to NW, for pointing me to this excellent story.
Bullying in the Workplace
Most people think of bullying as a problem of the schoolyard. But increasingly that term is being used to describe aggression in all kinds of settings in which power imbalances are common and in which aggression is problematic. Bullying in the workplace, for example, is far from new, but it has been in the spotlight in recent years.
See, for example, this editorial by Theresa Brown, for the NY Times, on bullying in healthcare workplaces: Physician, Heel Thyself
…while most doctors clearly respect their colleagues on the nursing staff, every nurse knows at least one, if not many, who don’t.
Indeed, every nurse has a story like mine, and most of us have several. A nurse I know, attempting to clarify an order, was told, “When you have ‘M.D.’ after your name, then you can talk to me.” A doctor dismissed another’s complaint by simply saying, “I’m important.”
While bullying may be a particularly dangerous in healthcare, where patients’ lives can easily depend on just how well a team of heal professionals functions, bullying, or even subtler forms of interpersonal conflict, can be common in any kind of workplace. And indeed, while the risks of poor team performance in healthcare are especially vivid, it has the potential to have serious negative effects — effects far beyond the people directly involved — in all kinds of businesses that themselves have significant impact on people’s lives or the natural environment. It isn’t difficult to imagine, for example, bullying being part of the root cause of the kind of poor teamwork that might result in an environmental catastrophe like BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill.
Brown’s article rightly points to the significance of ‘tone at the top.’ Basically, if the boss is a bully, such behaviour is liable to trickle down the chain of command. So leaders have a strong obligation neither to engage in, nor to tolerate, bullying. But people much farther down the chain of command also face ethical questions with regard to bullying — including especially how to respond to it and deal with it. Those with the least power within an organization are likely going to be the most vulnerable to bullying. Some of the toughest ethical challenges faced by junior people in an organization may have to do with responding to pressure from above, and with the difficulties inherent in being at the bottom of their organizational hierarchies. Younger employees, or ones simply new to that particular workplace, understandably find it difficult — and a source of moral distress — not just to survive bullying, but sometimes to be involved in courses of action that they see as unethical and yet that they are powerless to do anything about. It’s hard to know what advice to give to people in such situations, because sometimes there really is very little they can do. But one thing they can do is to consider, starting right now, how they should treat those beneath them in the hierarchy, if and when they themselves move up it, and how they are going to make sure not to fall into those same, all-too-common, toxic behaviours.
Wage Negotiations, Transparency, and Justice
Ontario’s public-sector unions are up in arms, over a secret deal granted by the government to one particular union. All of the province’s public-sector unions were to receive just a 2 per cent raise for 2012, part of an austerity plan aimed at taming the province’s multibillion-dollar deficit. But one union, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, was secretly given a 3 per cent raise, “in exchange for non-wage concessions.”
See the details here: Employers up in arms over Ontario’s ‘secret’ wage deal, by Karen Howlett for the Globe and Mail.
The generosity of the deal is in sharp contrast to the McGuinty government’s pronouncements on the need to rein in spending in the public sector as it grapples with a multibillion-dollar deficit. Its flagship restraint measure consists of a voluntary two-year wage freeze for public sector workers who bargain collectively.
Against this backdrop, revelations that a sweetened deal was reached in December, 2008, for a union that often sets the benchmark has upset many employers in the sector….
For my purposes, the fact that the employer in question here happens to be a government is entirely beside the point. An employer is an employer, and this story could in principle have happened in the private sector.
Now, there’s an interesting side-issue here about whether limits expressed in terms of percentage points ultimately make much sense: we don’t know what “non-wage concessions” the government got from OPSE in return for the extra 1%, but it is entirely possible that it is something better for provincial coffers, in the long run. The non-wage benefits that unionized workers enjoy often amount to a large portion of their total compensation. But as I say, that’s a side issue. Wages per se have a special salience in labour negotiations, both because of their immediate impact on workers’ pocketbooks, and because of their symbolic significance.
The key ethical issues here have to do with transparency, and whether other unions have a right to know the details of one particular kindred union’s negotiations with the employer they share in common. There are reasons for and against transparency. On one hand, a reasonable level of transparency is essential for benchmarking, and knowing how much other groups are earning is a precondition for seeking wage parity. In that sense, transparency serves justice. On the other hand, wanting to know how much someone else makes is not the same as having a right to that information. An argument needs to be made that having such information serves an essential purpose. Also, more generally, such benchmarking can have a tendency to ratchet salaries upwards, sometimes pushing compensation higher than is warranted either by performance or by the law of supply and demand.
Equally interesting is the government’s (i.e., the employer’s) rationale for the secrecy:
“By bargaining hard, the government protected taxpayers,” said Geetika Bhardwaj, a spokeswoman for Government Services Minister Harinder Takhar. “That has one union upset because they wanted more from taxpayers and didn’t get it. We make no apologies for that.”
Two things are worth noting about this rationale:
The first is that, taken seriously, it justifies entirely too much. No behaviour is beyond the pale, so long as it saves taxpayers a few bucks.
The second thing worth noting about this rationale is that it makes plain an important truth: spending a budget is a zero-sum game. Many people treat “a good deal for the working man” as an unqualified good. But in government, as in business, every dollar in an employee’s pocket is a dollar taken out of someone else’s pocket. That’s as true for Walmart or GM as it is for the Government of Ontario.
The Business Ethics Blog 