Thursday, January 13, 2011

Beyond “business ethics”

Seeing and treating employees as persons, not just as means to profitability

Persons have intrinsic worth. They have value just by the fact of their existence as persons, for their own sake. They have value because of who they are, not just for the things they can do or make for someone else’s benefit or use. (This is the reason murder is murder, regardless of whether the victim was a wealthy celebrity or a tramp on the street. Although the former may garner more time on the evening news than the latter, the accused perpetrator faces the same prospects in the application of justice—if it is true justice.) To treat human beings simply as economic commodity units, as means to a company’s profitability, is a serious violation of justice. It is to reduce their true value to mere economic utility, their availability to be used (in the sense of consumed) by “the company” (i.e. the owners and/or management).

Don’t get me wrong. Productivity is a very good thing, and no company will survive without it. The problem arises when productivity (an employee’s material contribution to a company’s product or service line) is placed on the highest level and viewed as the highest possible good in terms of the company’s existence. This in practice denies that employees, as human persons, have any purpose or value beyond the material level. It denies that they have any spiritual value or purpose. In essence it denies the existence (or at least the relevance) of spiritual realities in regard to persons.

This is not to say that employees should necessarily bring their spiritual beliefs or views to the fore in their work activities (e.g. preaching to their co-workers or “wearing their religion on their sleeves”), but only that a company (employer or boss) must at the very least recognize the validity of a higher spiritual dimension and value of all employees (not expecting them to park their spiritual sensibilities at the door when they come to work) and not abuse them solely for their perceived economic usefulness.

In the minds of many executives and managers in corporate America (and around the world in this “global economy”), the term “ethics” is frequently interpreted so narrowly as to refer almost exclusively to the employees’ responsibility to the company and its interests, and not having anything to do with the company’s responsibilities towards its own employees. “Ethics” has become in many places in the business world a one-way street.

Of course, virtually all companies both big and small have written or unwritten rules about “treating others with respect” and “valuing diversity,” but the concepts usually remain vague, and in practice such phrases frequently become mere lip-service, while in the daily grind of the business operations the utilitarian imperative to “stay focused and engaged” on the immediate tasks of the job tend to obscure or replace our awareness of the higher value of the persons around us in the workplace. People who are so “focused” on their jobs soon forget that they have duties and concerns that go beyond the immediate economic concerns of the company.

“Ethics” has come to mean things like protecting company secrets, avoiding giving embarrassment (to the company, its officers or management), no “insider trading” of company stock in violation of statutes or regulations, and never, ever implicating the company (or management) in anything illegal (even if it’s true). It generally boils down to this: “It costs the company enough money just to employ you. Don’t cost us any more money than you have to.” “Ethics,” in other words, is all about the company’s (or management’s) money and prestige, not people’s true human dignity. If some activity or behavior does not somehow redound to these narrow materialist categories, it is not considered to fall under “corporate ethics”. Since you can’t put a dollar figure on human dignity, it is safe to ignore. The only dignity that concerns management is their own, when they are concerned about possible fines, criminal prosecution, civil liability, or their public image.

Everything is considered in crass economic terms. For example, if a production worker is paid a wage of, say, $21.60 per hour (which works out to 36 cents a minute, 6/10 of a cent per second) a supervisor may see fit to reprimand him (or her) or dock his pay pro rata by the stopwatch if he feels he is not “focused and applying his efforts directly to the production tasks of the job” at every moment he is “on the clock” or “on my [the manager’s] nickel”. (And is it really his nickel to begin with, or the company’s?) Some managers have even been known to intimidate their workers and act as though their wages are a gift from the company, and not something that is due them in justice. “We pay you enough,” they seem to think, “we should be able to treat you any way we like. While you are ‘on the clock’, we own you!”

Having worked in a large company for many years myself, I have known managers who seem to think that the only legitimate matters of justice on company premises during “company time” involve the increase in profitability of the company. All other (“personal”) concerns or considerations must be laid aside until company-authorized break periods (lunch or coffee breaks). “This is not a matter of justice for the individual employees,” they might claim. “The only consideration of justice is what they owe the company—their diligence and hard work.”

Should a production or support service worker who is paid “by the hour” be treated differently than a supervisor or office worker who is paid on a monthly or annual salary? Why should that make any difference? Is an hourly worker somehow less deserving of leeway or consideration than a salaried employee or manager? Is he somehow less human? Is there any justice in that? Wouldn’t it be unethical (in the true sense of the word) for a manager (or even the business owner) to “squeeze” labor out of an employee like so much water from a dishrag, expecting him to be “hard at it” at every minute of the day? Human beings are not made to function, either on the mental or physical level, like galley slaves. They are not to be turned on and off like machines at the whim of management. (This is also why forced or “mandatory” overtime without any consideration of the employees’ “outside” duties and responsibilities to family and community (with very few exceptions, such as for manifest public order and safety) is immoral and unjust. If overtime ever becomes the rule rather than the exception, it is a sure signal of the need to hire more employees!)

In truth, the business owes a living wage or salary to each of its employees sufficient to provide a reasonably dignified standard of living, enough to support the worker and his spouse and his children (this is also called the “family wage”). No manager, executive, director or business owner should receive compensation beyond a reasonable figure—not the astronomical salaries and “compensation packages” that are so common in large corporations today. Perhaps the highest level of compensation (pay & other incentives) in a company (e.g. for the company president or CEO) could be of a fixed and limited percentage above the level of the lowest paid employee (e.g. the entry-level janitor), with a reasonable grade scale in between. This way, if the business is very successful, everyone who played a part in its success would reap a proportional and equitable share in the benefits. The business should use the superabundance of its profits to expand the business and hire more employees. This would ensure that “a rising tide” would indeed “lift all boats,” to use a slogan popular in “free market” capitalism. Workers are also consumers, and more people in society with sufficient money to spend on goods and services (beyond the bare minimum to sustain life) will stimulate the general economy all without government intervention!

The first responsibility of any company is, contrary to popular conception, not to its stockholders or customers, as important as they are, but to its employees. A company is in business to provide a product or service to customers, and a company that sells shares of stock should strive to give a good return on investment to its stockholders who share in the business risk. But its first responsibility is to offer meaningful employment (and a “family wage or salary”) to as many people as reasonably possible.

If a manager feels that a worker is not sufficiently “focused” on his work, or is “not applying himself enough”, just not working hard enough, what is the boss’ standard for saying so? Against what is the employee’s effort being measured? Or by what objective scale is one type of work (e.g. product manufacturing, construction or assembly—manual or physical labor) being compared to a different type of work (e.g. design engineering, logistics [movement of information, people or goods], clerical or supervisory)? To make the claim that a CEO or other executive somehow “deserves” annual compensation in the millions of dollars (because his job is somehow “more important” or of “greater value”) while his production or service workers are left to struggle from paycheck to paycheck, often losing ground month by month, is sheer insanity!

I submit that the concept of “comparable (or equal) worth” is not objective at all, but rather subjective to the point of being meaningless, like comparing the proverbial “apples and oranges”. The objective standard that should be employed here is the family wage, what an employee needs to live and support himself along with his spouse and children. In an age when even comparing one person’s intelligence (I.Q.) to another’s (when some people are obviously more intellectually gifted than others) is considered a social heresy, how is it that comparing the “value” of their work is even tolerated?