Human resources in corporations and employee relations

¶ … Newton, Lisa, Elaine Englehardt, and Michael Pritchard, Taking Side; Clashing Views on Business Ethics and Society, 12th Ed., (McGraw-Hill, NY, 2012) ISBN 978-0-07-352735-2)

Summaries the two articles in Unit 3 Issues 12 and 13 in the book and write your opinion about the articles. take a side and make sure to emphasize on how the banking industry in the U.S. effected the issues in both articles.

The issue is about 'employment at will'. The articles deal with the problematic situation of a dedicated employee who has been for many years loyally and diligently serving a particular company. Along comes a new boss and demands her retirement on the basis of factors such as age, gender, or other elements that he feels are detrimental to the profile of his company. The question at hand, therefore, is: is it ethical to 'sack' this employee on the grounds of these elements alone? Shouldn't the employee be given the opportunity, perhaps, to upgrade his skills before he be abruptly dismissed? Long-term relationships demand reciprocity and consideration. Shouldn't; the same be here too?

Epstein defends the contract at will insisting that it is the most effective solution to the employment contraction. Freedom of will is equitable to freedom of other conventions. There is -- argues Epstein -- freedom of speech and freedom of terminating a marriage partnership; in the same degree, there should be freedom of terminating an employment contract when one party feels the relationship to have passed its possibilities of proving benefit to the organization as a whole.

The commonplace belief today is that the contract at will is not only cruel but also unfair and one-sided in that it is the employer, rather than the employee who decides when and under which conditions the contract is to be ceased. However, the employee is given notice and severance pay that amounts to a great deal of his regular wage. Employees are not faced with 'a bolt out of the blue', nor are they thrown into uncertainty. They are given time and space to prepare for the future. Lastly, benefits of this contract of will include the fact that it is cheaper to implement than, for instance, litigation. All it necessitates is an investigation into aspects of the employees' performance and pronounce the decision. Epstein, therefore, sees the contract at will as providing a far more reasonable and economic solution to dismissing employees than the long-drawn out alternate case of litigation and court case. The problem is that occasionally wrongful and unethical discharge occurs. That is another problem altogether.

In contradistinction, McCall argues that morality has to precede market principles. Each market operates within the particular moral strictures of its own culture so that, for instance, the U.S. abides by different moral principles than does a European corporation. McCall finds further differences between European and American corporations: managers of European corporations, he found, inevitably favored Just Cause requirements which meant that the employee not only deserved an in-house hearing bout also an external "court of appeal." In the U.S., however, the case is reversed with corporate lobbying resisting Just Cause dismissal rules and a growing number of U.S. corporations even requiring workers to sign waiver statements that indicate conditions of acceptance of employments as is. According to McCall, contrast to the two systems and analysis of their consequences shows that the European Just cause attitude is ethically superior to the attitude of American corporations of contract at will. The American objection to Just Cause is deficient. Supposedly, the American system of private property and freedom of contract rests on fairness and autonomy. This contradicts their practice of contract at will. Just Cause should be practiced on two counts: firstly, it is more ethical -- it would prevent against unfair dismissal; it may be less costly -- it will prevent against costly litigation where employers will be fined post facto for wrongful dismissal. Precisely how Just Cause should be implemented is discussion or another article.

I personally agree with McCall. Arbitrate dismissal can result in a situation where the new employer arbitrarily dismisses a dedicated and capable employee based on personal judgment alone. The personal judgment can often be faulty and unethical including instances of age, gender, appearance, and so forth -- any of which can disturb the employer. The employer is legally not allowed to dismiss on these factors, but he can work his way around this doing so in an innocuous manner or framing the case so that it seems as though he is dismissing based on other factors. Moreover, the employee may be too old, poor, helpless, naive, or in other ways incapacitated to take on her powerful employee. He -- and his organization -- intimidates her. It is a case of strong against weak, and the strong often win even if they have to turn to absurd strategies to do so. A case in kind is that of the 68-year-old employee of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage who was fired last week. The justification: in 1963, when a teenager, he plopped a cardboard cutout of a dime in a washing machine at a Laundromat in Carlisle. Eggers has no other blemishes on his record and is reported to be a fine, hard-working employee but banks are relying on new rules that anyone convicted of a crime involving dishonesty, breach of trust or money laundering must be fired regardless of the type of crime committed. The result: "Across the country, banks have fired thousands of workers as a result of the new rules" (the Hawk Eye. (Sep. 11, 2012)). And much of this is not only ridiculous, but also wrongful. And ultimately (since they are often dismissing their most dedicated workers) detrimental to corruption and detrimental to country since unethical and foolish.