The Employer–Employee Relationship as a Building Block for Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract

One of the great challenges of pursuing the ideals of ethical behavior is discovering how to implement such an ideal at the applied level. As the unremitting stream of bad ethical news flows from the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets testifies, academicians have not performed especially well in applied ethics. In fact, as of this writing, business schools tend to downplay the importance of ethics relative to functionalist skills, or resist the alternative of establishing a course in ethics, let alone, minors or concentrations in the topic. Consequently, we were delighted to be called upon to forge this special issue addressing ways to balance ethics, social responsibility and the rights of employees and employers. There are numerous complex cases focusing on the practice of human resource management. We anticipate, as international economies continue to integrate, more ethical issues involving workers will emerge. Some of us can, all too clearly, recall the quandary of whether it was better for the injured party that American firms continue to operate in the apartheid regimes of South Africa, or pull out. We face much the same predicament today when we consider the charges of child, or otherwise “exploitive” labor practices, in many developing economic regions. We hope, and believe, that the following papers will provoke ideas about what it means to balance organizational ethical responsibilities. Ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) works at multiple levels in organizations, beginning at the individual level and the accountability of individual employees and managers, to the responsibility of corporations to their employees and the communities at large through CSR. One important theme we wanted to address in this special issue is the importance of considering the employee in an organization’s ethical and CSR assessment of stakeholders. While the primary stakeholder, shareholders, tends to get most of the media’s and the management team’s attention, the employee is one of the most important stakeholders organizations can face. Unfortunately, these individuals tend to get consistently ignored when considering the scope of ethical decisions. The impact of the Enron debacle comes to mind whereby employees lost not only their jobs in the aftermath, but also lost their retirement investments as most organizational incentives came to employees in the form of company stock and stock options. Along with the organization’s Employ Respons Rights J (2009) 21:275–277 DOI 10.1007/s10672-009-9124-4