Employees and

Organizations
Issues and Debates
Obligations of the Employee...
• Employee theft
• Against the contractual agreement
• Employee theft is often petty
• White-collar crime
• Trade Secrets
• Insider trading
• The act of buying and selling a company’s stock on the basis of “inside” information
about the company
• Insider trading is illegal
• Some have argued in favor of insider trading
• Insider trading helps reflect the true underlying value of the stock
• Insider trading does not harm anyone
• It is untrue that the insider trader has an unfair advantage over others who do not have
access to inside information
Obligations of the Employee...
• Others have argued against insider trading
• The information that the insider trader uses does not belong to him
• The information advantage of the insider is unfair or unjust
• It is untrue that no one is harmed by insider trading
Obligations of the Employer
• The firm’s duties to the employee
• The fairness of wages and the fairness of employee working
conditions
• Wages
• From the employer’s point of view, wages as cost of production
must be kept down
• No simple formula for determining a “fair wage”
• Depends on support that society provides the worker, non-wage
benefits, freedom of labor markets, contribution and
productivity of the worker, needs of the worker and competitive
position and earnings of the firm
• Criticism on wages companies from developed world pay their
workers in developing nations
• Response to this criticism
Obligations of the Employer...
• Working conditions
• Obvious workplace hazards
• Mechanical injury ,electrocution, burns, extreme heat and cold,
noisy machinery, rock dust, chemical fumes, mercury, lead,
arsenic, poisons, skin irritants, and radiation
• Hazards that are not obvious
• Asbestos and manganese
• Risk is an unavoidable part of many jobs
• Sweatshop is a workplace that has numerous health and
safety hazards and poor working conditions, as well as low
wages
• The critics have charged that the companies are exploiting workers
in the plants of their suppliers
Obligations of the Employer...
• Counterargument
• The critics have apparently judged that the best way to keep public
indignation at boiling point is to oversimplify the issue and treat it as a
morality play featuring heartless exploiters and victimized third world workers
• What are ethically appropriate levels of wages and labour standards
in international sweatshops?
• Home-country standards
• Living wage standard
• Classical liberal standard