Tabl 2712: Business Ethics and the Law

...

2.3 Arguments for and against seeking to prevent discrimination

Eliminating discrimination in the workplace promotes equal opportunities. Based on equity theory, if employees perceive that they are treated unfairly, they are less motivated and will gain less satisfaction from work (Hatfield, Walster, Walster and Berscheid, 1978). Thus, preventing discrimination or at least showing the efforts to prevent discrimination conduces to increasing employees’ productivity and accordingly increasing the overall performance of a company.

However, in the process of seeking to prevent discrimination, some approaches can be inappropriate. Positive discrimination, or affirmative action, is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group suffering from discrimination (Oxford Dictionaries, 2014). The opponents claim that rather than favoring minorities and women now to remedy the past discrimination of favoring white men, a complete blind method to race, gender and other aspects should be adopted (Shaw, Edwards and Scarman, 1988).

2.4 How to prevent discrimination

Laws and regulations

Australian commonwealth government and the state and territory governments have formulated discrimination laws covering aspects of age, human rights, disability, race and sex. These could serve as a legal deterrence, preventing discrimination.

Anti-discrimination Policy development

A company can prevent discrimination by the following steps, as suggested by Arnold (2013):

- The employers should be familiar with all applicable anti-discrimination laws;

- The company should develop and implement a comprehensive discrimination policy with an business attorney;

- The company can then develop and institute mandatory anti-discrimination training programs;

- Formulate investigatory procedures as a resolution of complaints of discrimination

- Reflect on business decisions to spot unintentional discrimination. For example, assess facilities, office layout and safety policies to determine whether they meet the needs of the disabled.

The core idea of these measures is to articulate the message of anti-discrimination and equality among employees as well as the management themselves. Additionally, before starting recruitment, managers should develop a set of qualifications and prerequisites and reflect regularly whether they have adhered to the standard.

2.5 Why preventing discrimination matters from my view

In my opinion, in seeking to prevent discrimination, a more passive form should be used. Rather than reinforcing or reiterating the differences between the ‘minority group’ and the ‘privileged group’ in terms of race, sex, age and disability, employing a blind perspective in these aspects is more likely to be accepted. Meanwhile, it would be sensible to concentrate on the differences in terms of personal traits or capabilities that are required by the job nature itself.

To conclude, while many forms of discrimination are unethical, some of them are not. Besides, some forms of discrimination are legal and have become a common practice but they are not ethical.

QUESTION 3

3.1 Specific examples of unethical conduct within a business context

Toyota Safety Issue in 2009

Probe into the scandal of Toyota’s sticky gas pedals which can lead to sudden acceleration problems reveals the conspiracy between Toyota and NHTSA, the government department responsible for crash test ratings (Connor, 2010). The whistleblower in this case is Betsy Benjaminson who translated correspondence between the company’s top-level executives. From the pattern of documents passing through her hands, she found that Toyota knew the flaw in its cars was likely electronic rather than mechanical and concealed that knowledge in order to save costs (Schechter, 2014). After efforts to affirm her suspects, she began sending incriminating documents to media. However, she bore enormous risk for she was actually risking her career. The price was that she was fired and every reputable agency refused to hire her thereafter.

Enron Scandal in 2001

The whistleblower of this famous accounting scandal is Sherron Watkins, the former Vice President of Enron Corporation. She alerted then-CEO Ken Lay in August 2001 to accounting irregularities within the company. After Lay ignored her warning, she began reporting to media, external lawyer and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

3.2 Who would or should be in a position to identify, report and deal with unethical conduct

In my perspective, the responsibility to identify, report and deal with unethical conduct within a business context lies in internal staff and external customers as well as auditors. Internally, management is responsible to provide an environment that encourages ethical conduct and managers themselves should uphold ethical standard. Externally, customers or users of the product are responsible to identify and report, although not obliged to, the unethical behavior. This is part of citizen responsibility to care for other users. Besides, auditors should also be alert to report any unethical behavior for any neglect or intentional concealment such as Enron incident could end up worse for both the audited organization and auditing firm.

3.3 Mechanisms, strategies or techniques in response to unethical conduct

Procedures requiring more formality

In many occasions, unethical behavior arises due to lack of supervision and by amending the procedures, it will be less likely that such conduct will happen. For example, the organization can establish procedures that require authorizations for more than one person or formulate rules that accounting records can only be journalized with valid receipts. These efforts will add to bureaucrat systemization indeed, but at the same time they will increase the possibility of identifying unethical behavior. Thus it is still worthwhile adding more formality when appropriate.

Internal Complaint System

The lessons drawn from the incidents are that firstly, an internal complaint system should be accessible,