Workplace EthicsIf you cannot work with love but

only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work.

— Kahlil Gibran

Overview: Workplace Ethics Issues The meanings of work Wage-labor contract vs. a more explicitly ethical

view Minimum wage and “living wage” Compensation and benefits Occupational safety and health Equal employment opportunity Sexual harassment Substance use and abuse on the job, theft, sabotage,

workplace violence, and privacy

Why do people work?

Income for survival and life style support. Opportunities to learn and grow. Social connectedness and a sense of belonging. Personal identity: “I am a machinist/waitress/manager.” Opportunities to be and to feel useful. Status, prestige. Pleasurable and rewarding “flow” experiences. Power and independence. A feeling that we are following our mission or calling. Anything else?

Other benefits of work: Work keeps us healthier. Ciulla: Work “offers instant discipline,

identity, and worth. It structures our time and imposes a rhythm on our lives. It gets us organized into various kinds of communities and social groups. And perhaps most important, work tells us what to do every day.”

How We View Work:

Wage-labor contract: employees are free to choose their jobs & trade their skills and labor for wages. Market demand for and supply of labor determines prevailing wage rates.

Ethical view: work has intrinsic worth and offers what people need to live a life of respect and dignity.

Minimum Wage

2.5% of American wage-earners are at or below minimum wage. (NOT including 8 million farm workers and transient day-labor)

26% of these are teens; 27% are very young adults; 47% are aged 25 or older.

Minimum Wage Most minimum wage jobs are part-time with

no benefits. Most have no career track. Little training, few or no ‘development’

opportunities.

Living Wage: What Does It Take to Live a Decent Life? Add it up:

Rent & utilities Car Food Clothes & shoes Phone Cable TV, DSL Medical/dental Pets Tuition & books Entertainment Other?

Are You Making Ends Meet?If so, congratulations! How do you do it?

Share housing Eat ramen noodles Walk/ride bike/bum rides from friends Drink less (no) beer Lose the pet(s) On credit (college loans, credit cards….) Parents help out/fullscholarship Work many hours a week; lose sleep, cut classes.

The Working Poor in America The working poor are those who spent at least

27 weeks in the labor force—working or looking for work—but whose incomes fell below the official poverty level.

Of all persons who worked 27 weeks or more, 5.3 percent were classified among the working poor in 2002, up by 0.4 percentage point from the previous year.

SOURCE: “A Profile of the Working Poor, 2002,” U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Sept. 2004, Report 976 http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2002.pdf

Working Poor, continued nearly 2 in 3 of the working poor who worked

during 2002 usually worked full time. about 71 percent of the working poor were white . Blacks and Hispanics are twice as likely to be among

the working poor as are whites and Asians. 6 percent of women, vs. 4.7 percent of men, are

among the working poor. 9.0 percent of 16- to 19-year-olds and 10.2 percent

of 20- to 24-year-olds were in poverty. SOURCE: “A Profile of the Working Poor, 2002,” U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics,

Sept. 2004, Report 976 http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2002.pdf

Working Poor, continued Nearly 4.0 million families with at least one member

in the labor force for 27 weeks or more—6.3 percent of all such families—lived below the poverty level in 2002. This was up from 5.9 percent of families in the previous year.

Of the 29.8 million unrelated individuals who were in the labor force for 27 weeks or more in 2002, 8.7 percent lived below the poverty level. This was up from 8.1 percent in 2001.

SOURCE: “A Profile of the Working Poor, 2002,” U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Sept. 2004, Report 976 http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2002.pdf

Poverty in the U.S.2003 HHS Poverty Guidelines Size of Family Unit 48 ContiguousStates and D.C.

1 $ 8,9802 $12,1203 $15,2604 $18,4005 $21,540

SOURCE: 

Federal Register, Vol. 68, No. 26, February 7, 2003, pp. 6456-6458.

Let’s Translate That…. $8,980 for an individual living alone (not counting

college students in dorms, homeless people, or other ‘uncountables’)

Divide by 12 months: $748 per month gross. Average work week of 35 hours yields $4.93 per

hour, so… the average workweek must actually be less than 35

hours, if earning minimum wage.SOURCE: “A Profile of the Working Poor, 2002,” U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics,

Sept. 2004, Report 976 http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2002.pdf

“Living Wage” Advocates propose a minimum wage that would

assure a dignified life for individuals and families. The working poor must use public welfare programs

– food stamps, Medicaid, Section 8 housing, free emergency care for the indigent, homeless shelters, heating oil and electricity subsidies – just to survive.

When subsidized employers are allowed to pay their workers less than a living wage, tax payers end up footing a double bill.

Wages Abroad “Prevailing wages” are often too little to

allow workers to arise from poverty. World Bank estimates: more than one billion

people live on a dollar a day or less – extreme poverty.

Many of these people are working to make the sweats, jeans, & shoes we wear, the toys we play with, the electronics we love.

Mark Twain on Wage Work

There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about "the working classes," and satisfy themselves that a day's hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day's hard manual toil, and is entitled to much bigger pay…. [A]s far as I am concerned, there isn't money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down – and I will be satisfied, too….

– A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

U.S.-Mandated Benefits Social Security tax of 6.2% (another 6.2% is paid by

the employee) of wages or salary, up to $94,200. Medicare tax of 1.45% (another 1.45% is paid by the

employee, on all wages or salary. Unemployment insurance, with rates varying by

state. Workers’ compensation insurance, also varying by

state. ONLY for full-time workers; some industries and

small businesses exempt.

Common Voluntary Benefits paid vacation holidays and sick days health, life, dental, and

vision insurance contributory and non-

contributory retirement plans

charitable gifts matching programs

daycare dependent care &

medical spending accounts

tuition reimbursements travel, clothing, and

equipment allowances stock grants or options flex-time

Workplace Safety and Health OSHA founded 1971; necessary to raise

quality of life in workplaces. Sick/injured workers less expensive

sometimes than making a workplace safe. Health/safety issues are incredibly diverse and

often very complex.

Equal Employment Opportunity The Civil Rights Act of 1964 - centerpiece of

efforts to end discrimination in employment (Title VII) and education (Title IX), extending protections on the basis of race, color, religion or creed, national origin, and sex.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was established by this Act and founded in 1965, with 100 employees and an initial budget of $2.5 million.

The Equal Pay Act of 1963, requiring employers to pay men and women the same wages for essentially the same work.

Executive Order 11246, issued by President Johnson in 1965, established “affirmative action” as a valid mechanism to correct for the unjust effects of past discrimination.

The Age Discrimination in Employment Act, passed in 1967, prohibiting practices such as firing older workers because they are more expensive than younger workers.

The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 forbade employment discrimination in the federal government against persons with disabilities.

Weber v. Kaiser Aluminum and Chemicals, 1976: The Supreme Court upheld the legality of Kaiser’s affirmative action plan, approved by management and the union, which reserved 50 percent of training spots for unskilled black workers regardless of seniority. Kaiser, a white employee, was judged not to be the victim of “reverse discrimination” because the court held that Kaiser’s set-asides were temporary protections for an underrepresented group.

Bakke v. University of California, 1978: This famous case upheld the use of race as a criterion in admissions to medical schools, as long as it was not the sole factor in the decision.

EEOC issued guidelines for voluntary corporate affirmative action plans in 1979. The plans were mandatory, however, for federal contractors.

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 prohibited employment discrimination against qualified persons with disabilities in private industry as well as in federal, state, and local governments.

The Civil Rights Act of 1991 allowed compensatory and punitive damages to successful plaintiffs and made jury trials available in cases of intentional discrimination, thereby increasing employers’ chances of losing big, because juries are more likely than judges to award damages to plaintiffs.

Affirmative Action Controversial, but initially straightforward: Developed to help restore groups that had

historically been discriminated against to a position where equal opportunity was possible.

Meant to correct for the effects of past discrimination.

Affirmative action plans are not quotas; they are plans for trying to improve the number of women and minorities in jobs, training programs, and promotion tracks.

These plans require that qualified minorities and women be given preference in hiring and promotion until established goals are met, to correct for the effects of past discrimination and continuing prejudice.

Hiring or promoting an unqualified person is contrary to affirmative action and serves only to retard the progress of employment equity.

Nevertheless, some employers faced with regulatory compliance demands may settle for a “quick fix” by hiring or promoting an unqualified minority or woman candidate, just to fill a “quota” or to show efforts to be nondiscriminatory.

Some may even do so to sabotage the whole affirmative action effort, trying to create a kind of “see, I told you so” backlash.

As of EEOC’s 2003 data, 6.5 percent of the 4,543,489 “officials and managers,” a Census Bureau category, are black, and 35.2 percent are women (only 3.2 percent are black women).

In 1990, about 5 percent were black and 20 percent were women, and these figures represented very substantial increases over earlier decades.

Improvements largely exist in lower- and middle-level management positions.

Among the 2006 Fortune 500 companies, only ten had women CEOs: Reynolds American, Avon Products, Xerox, Safeco, Lucent Technologies, Rite Aid, Golden West Financial, Radio Shack, Sara Lee, and eBay.

Franklin Raines became the first black Fortune 500 CEO (of Fannie Mae) in 1998.

Sexual HarassmentAstraZeneca pharmaceuticals, 1996: CEO Lars Bildman was under suspension and

investigation for allegedly maintaining a corporate culture in which women employees were routinely fondled, required to go to bars and strip clubs with male managers, made the butt of sexual jokes, and exposed to hard-core pornography plastered all over the home offices.

Ultimately the CEO was fired, numerous civil suits were settled out of court, and the company merged with another and restructured.

Sexual harassment is NOT about sexual attraction – it is about power the harasser wishes to exert over the victim.

Employees have a right to be free of uninvited and unwanted sexual incidents on the job.

Most large organizations have clear-cut policies and training programs to help their employees avoid sexual harassment problems

How EEOC views sexual harassment: The victim as well as the harasser may be a woman

or a man. The victim does not have to be of the opposite sex.

The harasser can be the victim's supervisor, an agent of the employer, a supervisor in another area, a co-worker, or a non-employee.

The victim does not have to be the person harassed but could be anyone affected by the offensive conduct.

Unlawful sexual harassment may occur without economic injury to or discharge of the victim.

The harasser's conduct must be unwelcome.

Other Workplace Issues substance use and abuse on the job theft sabotage workplace violence privacy concerns (drug testing, medical and

employment records, health conditions, personal life circumstances or events)

Conclusion Work is so vital to human beings that societies in the

developed world all have a large number of specific, legal protections to ensure that workers’ rights are not violated.

It is easy for company executives to lose sight of the fact that their employees are human beings with inherent rights to dignity and respect and with civil and legal rights to be free from discrimination and harassment, undue hazards, violence, and violations of privacy.

This is why so many essential ethical protections for workers are built into law and public policy.