This document discusses privacy and workplace issues. It addresses the moral issues around organizational influence on employees' private lives and obtaining personal information. It also covers working conditions like health and safety, management styles, childcare policies, and redesigning work to improve job satisfaction. The key topics are the tension between employee privacy rights and employers' interests, and how work design impacts worker well-being.
2. Introduction
According to the U.S. Supreme Court, privacy is “the right to be
let alone.”
The Court considers privacy to be one of the most comprehensive
and valued rights of citizens.
What moral issues arise in the workplace regarding privacy?
What are a company’s responsibilities regarding employee privacy?
3. Organizational Influence in Private Lives
Privacy is widely acknowledged to be a fundamental right.
Yet corporate behavior and policies often threaten privacy,
especially in the case of employees.
This can happen through the release or exchange of personal (or
“privileged”) information about employees
It also occurs when imposing employer values upon employees.
4. Organizational Influence in Private Lives
The importance of privacy – Our concern for privacy has three
aspects:
(1) We want to control intimate or personal information about
ourselves and not permit it to be freely available to everyone.
(2) We don’t want our private selves to be on public display.
(3) We value being able to make certain personal decisions
autonomously.
5. Organizational Influence in Private Lives
There is no consensus among philosophers or lawyers about the
following:
(a) How to define the concept of privacy.
(b) How far to extend the right to privacy.
(c) How to balance a concern for privacy against other moral considerations.
The burden is on the organization to establish the legitimacy of
encroaching on the personal sphere of the individual.
6. Organizational Influence in Private Lives
Legitimate and illegitimate influence: A firm is legitimately interested
in whatever significantly influences work performance.
It has a legitimate interest in employee conduct off the job only if
conduct affects work performance.
It is difficult to say precisely what constitutes a significant influence on
job performance.
It is also difficult to spell out exactly when off-duty conduct truly
affects company image.
7. Organizational Influence in Private Lives
Issues of privacy interference in the workplace:
(1) Legitimate and illegitimate influence.
(2) Involvement in civic activities.
(3) Participation in welness programs.
8. Obtaining Information
Businesses often obtain information about their employees through
testing and/or monitoring.
Informed consent: Its presence or absence is the main ethical issue
in testing and monitoring – it implies deliberation and free choice.
Deliberation: Employees must be provided all key facts concerning
the information gathering procedure and understand its
consequences.
Free choice: The decision to participate must be voluntary and un-
coerced.
9. Obtaining Information
Polygraph tests: Businesses cite several reasons for using the
polygraph test:
(1) It is a fast and economical way to verify information provided by job
applicants and screen candidates for employment.
(2) It allows employers to identify dishonest employees or job candidates.
(3) It eliminates the need for audits and oppressive controls, so may
increase workers’ freedom.
10. Obtaining Information
Those who defend polygraphs rely on several assumptions that are
open to question:
(1) Telling lies triggers an involuntary, distinctive response – but this is
not always the case.
(2) Polygraphs are extraordinarily accurate – this has been disputed.
(3) Polygraphs cannot be beaten – they may catch the guilty but also
generate false positives, wrongly identifying as liars those who told the
truth.
11. Obtaining Information
Additional issues to consider in evaluating the use of polygraphs in
the workplace:
(1) The information the organization seeks should be clearly and
significantly related to the job.
(2) The grounds must be compelling enough to justify violating the
individual’s privacy and freedom.
(3) The data gathering must be evaluated – the type of information being
gathered, who will have access to it, and how it will be discarded.
12. Obtaining Information
Personality tests: One of the most popular, the Myers-Briggs Type
Indicator, is used by eighty-nine of the Fortune 100 companies,
and is taken by more than 2.5 million Americans every year.
Such tests help businesses both screen candidates and match
individuals to appropriate jobs.
But they involve questionable psychological premises (that
individuals fit into a small number of personality types), may
invade privacy, and may reinforce conformity.
13. Obtaining Information
Monitoring employees on the job: This may be necessary, but it
can be abused and can violate privacy.
Like testing, it often gathers personal information about workers
without their informed consent.
Organizations frequently confuse notification of such practices
with employee consent, but notification does not constitute
consent.
14. Obtaining Information
Drug testing: Became an issue when the National Collegiate
Athletic Association (NCAA) began banning college football
players from postseason bowl games based on their steroid test
results.
A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association
supported drug testing: Postal workers testing positive in a pre-
employment test were 50 percent more likely to be fired, injured,
disciplined, or absent than those testing negative.
15. Obtaining Information
Additional considerations regarding drug testing:
(1) Excessive media attention and political posturing can lead to extreme
or unnecessary measures.
(2) Drugs differ, so one must carefully consider which drugs one is testing
for, and why.
(3) Companies must determine how to respond appropriately to
individuals who fail the test.
(4) Any warranted tests must be careful to respect the dignity and rights
of the persons to be tested.
16. Working Conditions
Health and safety: The number of occupational hazards is
awesome and generally unrecognized.
U.S. Census Bureau indicates that about five thousand workers
are killed on the job each year.
The director of the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA) says thirty-two workers are killed on the
job each day, more than doubling the Census figure.
17. Working Conditions
Census Bureau statistics reveal that the rate of industrial injury
has been declining since 1960.
But the absolute number of workers disabled at work every year
is ever increasing – about 3.7 million men and women.
Job-related injuries and illnesses cost the nation $65 billion a year
– $171 billion when indirect costs such as lost wages are included.
18. Working Conditions
Employers clearly have a moral obligation not to expose workers to
needless risks or to negligently or recklessly endanger their lives or
health.
Employers, however, are not morally responsible for all workplace
accidents caused by coworkers’ negligence or failure to exercise due
care.
In some circumstances or in certain occupations, an injured worker
can reasonably be said to have voluntarily assumed the risk.
19. Working Conditions
Problems with voluntary assumption of risk: It presupposes
informed consent, which requires the worker to have been fully
informed of the danger and to have freely chosen to assume it.
Employees have a moral right to refuse dangerous work (upheld
by the U.S. Supreme Court).
Employers, in turn, have a moral obligation not to expose
workers to needless risk.
20. Working Conditions
What causes accidents? Accidents don’t just happen, but often result
from poor job practices and environments that fail to prioritize safety.
OSHA: With the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, regulation
of working conditions passed from the states to the federal
government.
The thrust of the act was to ensure safe and healthy working
conditions and impose a duty on employers to provide those conditions.
21. Working Conditions
New health challenges: The scope of occupational hazard is greater
than many people think.
The numbers harmed by work-related injuries and illness may be
generally underestimated.
These include musculoskeletal disorders, shift work, fatigue, and stress.
OSHA’s enforcement of existing regulations has too often been lax.
22. Working Conditions
Management styles: Nothing affects environment more than
management style and quality.
In The Human Side of Enterprise, Douglas McGregor described
two management styles:
Theory X managers believe that workers dislike work and try to avoid.
Theory Y managers assume that employees basically like work and view it as something natural and
potentially enjoyable.
23. Working Conditions
Theory X managers coerce and bully workers into conformity
with organizational objectives.
Theory Y managers believe that workers are motivated by pride
and self-fulfillment as well as money and job security, not dodging
responsibility but accepting it and even seeking it out.
Other management styles include Theory Z managers, who hold
Japanese-style respect for workers.
24. Working Conditions
One management style eschews a traditionally masculine
approach (hierarchical, aggressive, winner-take-all) in favor of
one more congenial to women (personal, empathetic, and
collaborative).
Managers who operate with rigid assumptions about human
nature, or who devote themselves to infighting and political
maneuvering, may damage employees’ interests and lose their
respect.
25. Working Conditions
Day care and maternity leave: Women still bear the primary
responsibility for child rearing.
So their increased participation in the paid workforce has led to a
growing demand for maternity-leave policies and child-care
services.
In its research of 168 countries, a Harvard School of Public Heath
study found that more than 160 guarantee paid maternity leave,
whereas the U.S. mandates only unpaid leave (except in
California and Washington).
26. Working Conditions
Business and child care: Some argue that offering child care as a
fringe benefit, and dealing flexibly with employees’ family needs,
can prove advantageous for most employers.
Such policies can be cost-effective in the narrower sense –
decreasing absenteeism, boosting morale and loyalty, enhancing
productivity, and attracting new recruits.
27. Working Conditions
Three moral concerns:
(1) Women have a right to compete on equal terrain with men, and paid
leave can reinforce that right.
(2) Development of potential capacities is a moral ideal, and perhaps a
human right, so women should not be forced to choose between
childbearing and pursuing careers.
(3) The work world often reproduces the traditional male-female division
of labor within the family.
28. Redesigning Work
Dissatisfaction on the job: The Work in America report (1970)
identified three chief sources of worker dissatisfaction:
(1) Industry’s preoccupation with quantity, not quality; rigid rules
and regulations; and the monotonous repetition of small,
fragmented tasks.
(2) Lack of opportunities to be one’s own boss.
(3) “Bigness.”
29. Redesigning Work
Other sources of dissatisfaction: Studies since the 1970s have cited
workers’ feelings of powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation, and
self-estrangement or depersonalization.
Factors affecting job satisfaction: Employees at all occupational
levels value interesting work, enough support and information to
accomplish the job, enough authority to carry out the work, good
pay, the opportunity to develop special skills, job security, and a
chance to see results of their work.
30. Redesigning Work
Importance of job satisfaction: The design of work materially
affects the total well-being of workers.
Example: Studies show that job satisfaction is the strongest predictor of longevity.
Therefore, work content and job satisfaction are paramount moral concerns.
Satisfied workers are also more productive.
Business has an economic reason as well as a moral obligation to improve work quality.
31. Redesigning Work
Quality of work life: For some firms, this means providing
workers with less supervision and more autonomy.
For others, it means providing work opportunities to develop and
refine skills.
For still others, it means providing for greater participation in the
conception, design, and execution of their work – that is, with
greater responsibility and a deeper sense of achievement.