Tag: business ethics

R. Edward Freeman and Business Ethics

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Uncategorized

Freeman is a philosopher not originally trained as a businessman. He brings an original point of view to the subject. He started teaching at Wharton some years ago and has taught regularly since then. This is a lecture of about an hour length. This is obviously not for all my readers. Only those devoted to further study in Business Ethics more likely students than regular readers. Nevertheless, hearing a lecture from a highly skilled and experienced teacher is a pleasure and I recommend it.

James Alan Pilant

No Vacation – Keep your job?

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, ethics, Government Failure

ABC news reports that many Americans are declining to use their vacation time. Only 57 percent of Americans are taking their full vacation time. And what makes this story even more bizarre, Americans average only 13 days of vacation.

Want to see the numbers?
Italians 42 days
France 37
Canada 26
Japan 25
Korea 25

United States 13 days

How did we get here? Aren’t we supposed to be the richest country on earth? How did Americans wind up with an average of 13 days of vacation and far, far worse, almost half unwilling to use their full time apparently for fear of losing their jobs?

It takes a decoupling of morals from business. When a businessman, when an employer, looks at his workers and says to himself, “That one is using his vacation time. I can do without him,” we have arrived at a bad place.

And yet, where is the outrage (besides mine)? Foreigners in far less wealthy countries give their workers in many cases three times the vacation time of American workers and what’s more they take the time.

“Let’s get rid of the people who work here for fifty weeks a year and take a vacation.” How do you even think like that? What kind of thought process produces that kind of cruel immorality?

It is written: Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn.

The King James Bible prescribes better treatment for an ox than that given American workers. The ox gets some share of its labor that could be denied. American workers have no benefits that cannot be denied if even the legal ones put you in danger of being fired.

And I don’t want to hear, “They have to do it to compete.” That’s a nasty age old excuse for any kind of immoral (and often incompetent) act. You could compete better with workers who have no where to go, who don’t get minimum wage or get pregnant or have bad days or get ill or don’t look like other people, etc. Where do you want to stop? You can’t. Talk about slippery slope. If any vile, virtually criminal, act can be justified by the need to compete, there is no bottom standard to stop at, no place of safety, no island of ethics.

You might ask me as a business ethics teacher, what it’s like to teach that subject in a country where taking your vacation days can cost you your job. No fun. It’s preaching against alcoholism in a saloon, safe sex in a Thai brothel, hypocrisy in mega church. In short, it’s hard and it’s not getting any easier. You always think that it’s just got to turn a corner that some limit has been reached and it hasn’t.

James Pilant

Goldman Sachs And Patriotism?

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, Economic measurement, ethics, Government Failure

Goldman Sachs in the true spirit of duty to country paid one percent of its profits in taxes. That’s right, you may have paid a little more but reflect that 14 million dollars is still a good piece of change. Of course, they did hold on to the other 2 billion dollars in profit. That might upset you. It made me feel uncomfortable. What am I lacking that they have?

It’s tax havens. There are places they can go to register their business and pay little or no taxes. Now, you might think that businesses obtaining heavy and continued benefits (like the bailout and cheap borrowing from the Federal Reserve) from being (actually) in the United States would feel an obligation to support the country that has given them so much (you know, little things, blood of our soldiers, etc.). But they don’t feel that way.

The following quote is from a report available here. The report is entitled – Unfair Advantage, The Business Case Against Overseas Tax Havens.

In 2008, Goldman Sachs, with 29 subsidiaries located in offshore tax havens, reported profits of over $2 billion and paid federal taxes of $14 million, an effective tax rate of just one percent, and less than one third what they paid their CEO Lloyd Blankfein ($42.9 million).

The report estimates that America loses minimally 37 billion in tax revenues due to tax havens. Fifty years ago, corporations paid almost a quarter of the tax revenues of the federal government. Today it is less than a tenth.

So, I return to my question, do businesses have a duty to patriotism or is the only duty a corporation has to its shareholders to advance profits? Should we expect business organizations to advance the welfare of the citizens of their country and the nation itself?

I have the duty to tell you that the current doctrine practiced in “American” corporations is that there is no national duty whatever. What is taught is a fervent loyalty to shareholders and profits.

I do not believe that a pursuit of profit should be the only goal of an organization like a corporation. I worry that one day this nation will be in terrible danger and these enormous behemoths of business will simply find another place to go.

James Pilant

Blaming The Americans!

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, Economic measurement, ethics, Government Failure8 Comments

Gary Hart has a post on his web site, Matters of Principle. He talks about his charming and hard working childhood in the bygone world of Ottawa, Kansas. Here’s a quote –

Everyone worked, in my case starting at the age of eleven. (I don’t think there were child labor laws then.) We didn’t spend money we didn’t have. There were no credit cards. And my parents would have been embarrassed to go to the bank and ask for a loan to buy more gadgets. The Depression taught them, and they taught me, don’t go into debt.

Gee, Gary, I’m glad that these Americans with poor judgment can still shape up and we can fix everything if they only start saving and, by the way, acting like you.

Of course, there are some pesky little problems associated with your point of view. The Middle Classes’ desperately slow wage increases over the last 30 years, the explosion of credit cards marketing and every other kind of heavily advertised easy credit, the rising costs of tuition, medical care and host of other necessary expenses. How about the slow grinding pain of America’s manufacturing disappearance and the good jobs that went with it? It’s not gadgets that gets Americans into debt, it’s trying to make ends meet, it’s trying to put food on the table, it’s trying to get through one more month.

It’s a fine thing to talk about personal responsibility when you lived in a time and place without these economic elements, without this kind of pain. Did you know that the average level of unemployment during the 1950’s averaged about 4% and that right now it is 9.5? Bother you any? Maybe every body worked in your happy childhood because they could find a job? It’s a fine time to blame the victims for the economic decline in America over the last thirty years. It is a fine deal when the incredible, amazing failure of this government to stand up for ordinary Americans, does not appear to figure in your fascinating blame game, where the victims are the perpetrators. Yeah, we all committed economic suicide.

Tell me something ole’ buddy, when the stock market went down from its high of 14,000 and demolished the values of pensions and 401k’s all over this great nation, where was the responsibility then? I guess those stupid lazy gadget buying Americans couldn’t be trusted to invest their hard earned money like they were urged to by their government, the business industry and every kind of serious of academic publication. Savings always gets its proper reward.

How dare you. I know these people, the ones that worked for twenty years at a factory that left and went over seas, the people whose medical expenses destroyed their lives, and the unemployed who got nailed by a financial crisis they had nothing to do with.

While you write your comic crap, they suffer.

James Pilant

American Business’ Ethical Collapse

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, Economic measurement, Government Failure

But there is yet another factor underlying this crisis that is the broadest of all, pervasive throughout our society today. It was well expressed in a letter I received from a Vanguard shareholder who described the global financial crisis as “a crisis of ethic proportions.” Substituting “ethic” for “epic” is a fine turn of phrase, and it accurately places a heavy responsibility for the meltdown on a broad deterioration in our society’s traditional ethical standards.

This is a quote from an article by John C. Bogle. It directly faces the question of the collapse of business ethics and the role in played in the financial melt down of 2008.

Generally speaking, articles dealing with the crisis focus on derivatives, Sallie Mae, the business press, rating agencies, etc. They all share blame and a lot of it. I have always been convinced that the underlying problem was greed, self interest, the corrosive effects of Milton Friedman’s bizarre doctrine of economic utopia, and the replacement of critical scrutiny by frantic cheerleading in the financial press, and I have some more villains to name.

Bogle doesn’t dodge the ethical question. He wonders how we got here and how we can get out. He longs for the day when businessmen understood the value of trust and fair dealing. I’m not surprised to find that Mr. Bogle has no simple solution. It took four decades of worship of the financial means of production of little more than electronic impulses to triumph over the creation of actual goods. This isn’t going to be easy, and it it likely to fail subjecting this country to a chain of financial meltdowns each one of which will severely damage the lives of millions of Americans who will bear the chief cost not only of their way of life but paying for the meltdown themselves out of their “widow’s mite.”

Here’s Bogle discussing his beliefs:

Among those in the know, someone who believes in doing what is right. So, I would pay attention to this gentleman.

James Pilant

Wall Street Looked The Other Way?

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, Economic measurement, ethics, Government Failure1 Comment

In an article written for the New York Times by Gretchen Morgenson, she discusses what major investment banks did after they discovered that many of their loans were going south.

The answer is brief, they kept the ball rolling. The profits were too good and the risks (for them) were to low for them to back out.

This is a quote from the article citing a remark from Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, as follows -“Our focus has been on the borrower,” she said in an interview last week, “but as we’ve peeled back the onion we’ve gotten the picture of the role Wall Street played through the financing of these loans.”

This is Gretchen Morgenson on a program called “Dialogue.” Here she explains in some depth her views on the financial crisis (28 minutes).

This is capitalism run off the tracks. Greed out weighed simple good judgment. Obvious signs of trouble, not just obvious but certain evidence of approaching disaster, were ignored as money piled up.

The market was supposed to be self regulating. Read a little Milton Friedman. This economic freedom to innovate was supposed to lead to better lives for all Americans, perhaps the whole world. This utopia, this nirvana, has thus far failed to appear. But incomes in a handful of the well placed are measured in the billions.

Justice is not coming. These people are immune to justice. They go to the right churches, have the right friends and are protected by the government while that same government ignores or casts their citizenry away from the door of the statehouse or congress. The people of the United States, the hard working American who lives a moral, ethical life; their goodness counts for nothing. They will have mortgages that will find no help. They will not have jobs and when they can find no work they suffer the slings and arrows of an economic elite that claims they cannot get along with other workers and do not work, that they are lazy. That’s right, Americans, the most productive workers in the world, the ones that work more hours and more days than other workers in the entire world, they are lazy, they can’t get along, they brought this upon themselves.

Right?

James Pilant

Treasury Makes A Mistake – Claiming They Are Not Blocking Elizabeth Warren (via The Baseline Scenario)

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, Government Failure

President Obama faces a choice and this choice will tell us a lot about the administration. Does this administration intend serious oversight of the finance industry. The choices are simple, Elizabeth Warren, a long time defender of the public interest or someone acceptable to Geithner and the Department of the Treasury. Who counts in this country, the millions of individuals who suffer from the fees and often the cruelty of these institutions or the institutions and their political muscle? We’ll know soon. In the meantime, read this fine analysis from Simon Johnson!

By Simon Johnson It’s one thing to block Elizabeth Warren from heading the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It’s quite another thing to deny in public, for the record, that any such blocking is going on (e.g., see this report; Michael Barr apparently said something quite similar today). There is a strong groundswell of opinion on this issue from the left – see the BoldProgressives petition.  But the center also feels strongly that, given … Read More

via The Baseline Scenario

This is one of Elizabeth Warren’s appearances before Congress:

Ethics Blog Roundup – 07/24/10

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, ethics

David Gebler writing on the blog, Business Ethics, discusses safety violations, codes of silence and what not to do when advancing safety practices.

Shel Horowitz begins his latest blog post (Principled Profit) with these words: As my Boomer generation ages, and as our parents move well into the elder category, I reflect often on something I learned as a young organizer with the Gray Panthers (1979-80): the idea that society had best learn how to incorporate people with disabilities into active daily life, because most of us were going to grow into that category sooner or later.

Horowitz writes that today, his entry is part of an event, Worldwide BloggersUnite, Empowering People with Disabilities. I’d give it a read and take a look at the idea behind the event.

I would like to call attention to two Chris MacDonald postings. A few days ago, Professor MacDonald posted an interview with the author of the “The Authenticity Hoax.” Since then the posting has had some comments (skip past mine) and they have been interesting. Chris gets pretty tough there in that last one. So, I recommend a read of the comments section.

The second MacDonald posting concerns British Petroleum’s faked photographs. MacDonald implies that he has been willing to give BP the benefit of the doubt in the past (I firmly believe this is true. I thought he was too fair) but he is increasingly doubtful of their motives and honesty.

A new business ethics blog has appeared. I give it a warm welcome and a hope of many postings!

Ethics Blog Roundup 7/21/10

On By southwerkIn business ethics

Shel Horowitz is back from vacation with a posting on confronting racism, a topic much in the news.

The Engineering Ethics Blog discusses education and the importance of experience, ability and education in different ways in different times. He is particularly upset with President Obama for his over emphasis on college as opposed to other kinds of learning. There is a lot of societal comment here. I quote:

The natural tendency of our society, unfortunately, is to look up to people who (1) have lots of money, (2) have lots of people working for them, or (3) manipulate symbols instead of real things.

I agree with him pretty much across the board but I am an advocate for education other than just credential education, that is, an education that enriches the many aspects of a person’s life as opposed to simply a note on the wall, a permission slip for employment often with no more intellectual importance than a postage stamp.

Gael O’Brien takes on the ethics of brand identity in the aftermath of so much corporate wrong doing. She points out much more kindly than me that their brand identities of quality and concern for clients were less than real. The article asks more questions than it answers but we as a people and a society will have to answer those questions. As corporations dominate every aspect of our lives, whether or not we have made a deal with concerned people or the devils’s acolytes is one that has to be dealt with.

Chris MacDonald is cruising into philosophical territory with an interview with Andrew Potter about his new book, The Authenticity Hoax. The book’s thesis is that authenticity, the seeking of an identity through consumer purchasing, is based on dubious claims and is inherently self defeating for too often the goal of the authentic is a societal story with little relation to the self but everything to do with the preoccupations of the society around us. The book sounds fascinating.

The Leading In Context Blog discusses green office supplies (something I didn’t know existed).

These gentlemen discuss green office supplies:

James Pilant

Did Not Take Pilant’s Ethics Class Award 7/17/10

On By southwerkIn business ethics, ethics, Teaching

Parents Shocked By Swimming Instruction Techniques reads the article title. The technique involved tying a child’s shoes and throwing him into the pool. This was to teach him how to float even in “dangerous conditions.”

Ethically, just where do you start? If the purpose of swimming instruction techniques is to teach the child to swim, an overwhelming fear of the water caused by your own actions might be a detriment. Secondly, it does not appear from the article that parents were aware of this aspect of training.

As a parent I think I would like to be aware if the class had taken a turn toward training my child what to do if a comic book villain ties his shoes together and throws him into water.

I ran an internet search to see if this practice was common but had no luck. It’s possible it happens elsewhere. But search terms like “tie shoes together” and “swimming instruction” just don’t seem to get any hits.

James Pilant