The Moral Foundation of Employee Rights

In business ethics, clear communication from theorists (academics) to practitioners (managers) is crucial if positive effects in the workplace are to be achieved. Unfortunately, such communi cation does not always occur. We on the academic side tend to spend time reading and reviewing substantial amounts of ethical theory, and all too often we simply relay our findings, in their complex and impractical form, to managers. Thus, what managers frequently get is often not what they need, which is theory in a workable and relatively simple format guide lines which may be consulted when making difficult decisions or which may be implemented as company policy. If the communication is to be improved, it is we academics who must change. Managers simply have neither the time nor the inclination to attempt large-scale trans lations of complex ethical theories and guidelines forwarded to them. My aim in this paper is to retain these con siderations in discussing employee rights, which is one of the most important, yet complex, issues in the field of business ethics. First, it is impor tant because employees, generally speaking, are in a comparatively inferior bargaining position with respect to their employers. This inequality opens up possibilities for various sorts of exploitation, such as inadequate compensation, discrimination, and privacy invasions, all of which have been known to occur. Second, employee rights are complex, in that managers, as a prerequisite for making ethically sound deci sions, must assess which alleged employee rights are legitimate (spurious claims surely arise at times), and must weigh them against the rights of those in other stakeholder groups. If managers are to adequately address partie ular situations in which these issues arise, they must have a deeper understanding of the under lying ethical considerations. More precisely, an understanding of the moral foundation of employee rights is required. Guidelines alone can be ambiguous; the various amendments to the U.S. Constitution are examples of basic rules which, on their own (without theoretical context), can be interpreted and applied in a variety of ways. A mere list of employee rights will face similar difficulties. Thus, managers will be able to make more consistent, more ethically sound decisions when the scope of possible interpretations of rights is restricted by the par ticular theoretical foundation. This paper aims to provide just such a foundation, one that is defensible, practically workable, and can be grasped with relatively little time and effort. This will be achieved through a discussion of the foundation itself, followed by some examples of employee rights which it generates, and then some specific examples of policy and practice. It is hoped that this approach will provide what is currently lacking by providing a middle ground between the extremes of listing employee rights with what for managers is insufficient justifica tion (Ewing, 1977) and an overly theoretical justification (Donaldson, 1989; Gewirth, 1996; McCall, 1996). First, however, providing a definition of a right is in order. For our purposes, a right should be understood as a "moral claim." The first part of this definition, the stipulation that a right is moral, is meant to indicate that it is not neces sarily recognized by any conventional system. A legal right, for example, is held by a certain individual or group of individuals just in case the government decides that the right is held.