Does it pay to do the right thing?
I just finished reading an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled: “Does Being Ethical Pay?”
The gist of the article was that consumers are willing to pay a premium for a
product produced by an ethical company, provided the premium is not too high.
It reminded me of the joke whose punchline is: “That’s already been established. I thought we were just haggling over price.”
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Further, there are people who believe that eating any animal is unethical, and
there are people who believe methods of raising, slaughtering, and processing
cattle make eating most beef unethical.
Medical experts say to cut down on red meat for health reasons.
Taking the beef example one step further, I would probably pay more for beef
that was fed and raised in ways that created healthier and tastier beef. I
would not pay double to have a hamburger at a restaurant that claimed the steer
was kept in a pasture with Mozart symphonies piped in before it was euthanized
in the most humane way.
In the workplace, ethics come into play frequently in the context of cheap
foreign labor. Assuming we could make iPods in the United States, would a
consumer pay 25 percent more for an American-made player?
I suppose you could debate whether the global economy is a good or bad thing,
but I think a case could be made for keeping jobs in this country. I would feel
a whole lot better if the American iPod were better made than the Chinese one.
Then again, I am ethically opposed to slave and child labor overseas, and I am
in favor of banning the importation of such products.
I have been practicing labor law more than 30 years, and I find that juries have
their own ethics when it comes to concepts of right and wrong.
Many times, an instruction from a judge will be ignored just because the jury
could not condone the behavior of a company it found to be “unethical.”
On the other hand, if the jury believes the employee to be unethical, it will
find a way for the employer to win, even if the company may have technically
done something incorrect under current law.
For this reason, I always try to direct my clients to “do the right thing” when they make employment decisions. If they cannot convince 12 strangers that
the decision was correct, consider taking another approach.
The problem is, however, that workplace ethics — like beef — are difficult to pin down with any certainty.
We could probably all agree that three people with identical poor attendance
records can present different ethical problems.
What if the first employee is absent a lot because he is frequently hung over in
the morning, the second employee because of sick children, and the third
employee because of migraines?
All three create problems for the company and other employees, but different
people would disagree on who “deserves” to be disciplined. Legally, all three probably could be disciplined, but would
that be the right thing to do?
Another workplace ethical problem is the result of a phenomenon of the last 50
years or so: the socialization of the workplace. Employment used to be
primarily a market phenomenon, which meant that managers and employees were not
necessarily friends because friendship could get in the way of harsh market
reality.
My father-in-law never accepted a management position with the phone company
because he could not bear the thought of firing someone with kids, or near
Christmas.
Today, however, we want the workplace to be “warm and fuzzy.” We want to like our managers and our coworkers, and we want meaningful
employment. But what if the likable employees are marginal performers and the
unsocial ones are making the company lots of money? Is it the right thing to do
to fire the nice guys and retain the jerks? Maybe.
Do I think it pays to do the right thing? Yes, I do.
The right thing, however, is not always easy to figure out. An employer needs to
determine, in virtually every employment situation, what the right thing is. It
may be to fire a likable employee; it may be to cut another employee a break.
If the decision would raise eyebrows in a jury room, the employer has to be able
to explain why the difficult decision was made. “Yes, we fired Mary Beth (a single mother with three children) because her
mistake caused us to lose thousands of dollars, and she had been talked to five
times in the last three months about her performance deficiencies.”
It is a delicate balancing act figuring out what the right thing is, but it is
worth the effort.
If more employers tried to do the right thing, there would be less litigation.
If employees always tried to do the right thing, there would be no litigation.
Ironic, isn’t it? Burgers, anyone?
