Ethical or Not?
About a decade ago, I wrote a story about corporate ethics and what companies were doing to practice more ethical behavior. Ethics is one of those stories that gets covered extensively when the economy is in reverse.
So are companies doing all they can to behave ethically? How we behave when others aren’t looking is a mark of character for individuals and is for companies also.
Is it ethical for companies to be discriminatory however unintentional? The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) reported in early January that private sector workplace discrimination charge filings with the federal agency nationwide hit an unprecedented level of 99,922 during fiscal year (FY) 2010, which ended September 30, 2010.
As Careerdiva.net reported, is it ethical for companies who misclassify employees as contract workers or expect a contract worker to perform a task reserved for an employee without additional compensation or a change in status?
Is it ethical for a major publicly traded company to shield the privacy of its senior executives at the expense of its fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders?
Are company ethics different from the garden variety kind and if so why? And what might be the reasons relatively little progress has been made during the last ten years? We’ll examine these issues in a future post.
Tags: contract workers, corporate citizenship, discrimination, ethics, executive privacy, fiduciary responsibility
