Moral Rights at Work

CHAPTER 6
 Chapter Objectives
Distinguish moral rights from legal and contractual rights;
Explain and examine various meanings of a right to work;
Analyze arguments supporting an employee right to due process,
participation, health and safety, and privacy;
Distinguish due process from the legal doctrine of employment at
will;
Analyze arguments supporting an employee right to
participation.
 INTRODUCTION: EMPLOYEE RIGHTS

Work is one of the most important and highly valued human activities in
large part because it is necessary for so many other central human
goods.
But just as work is inescapable for most people, it is just as likely to be
something controlled by others.
Few of us control our own working lives. This fact highlights a real
vulnerability: While the overwhelming majority of people need to work,
other people typically determine most aspects of our work, including
whether we work at all.
 INTRODUCTION: EMPLOYEE RIGHTS

Among the many rights that employees have, the moral

rights are the highest of all rights that must be protected
moral rights is relevant in just those circumstances when
central human interests are jeopardized by the actions of
others.
The more important interests are to human well-being, the
more likely we are to recognize that they should be protected
by rights that impose duties on others to respect these
interests.
Three senses of employee rights common in business.

First, there are those legal rights granted to employees on the

basis of legislation or judicial rulings. As an effect, employees have a
right to a minimum wage, equal opportunity, to bargain collectively
as part of a union, and so forth.
Second, employee rights might refer to those goods that employees
are entitled to on the basis of contractual agreements with
employers. In this sense, a particular employee might have a right
to a specific health care package, paid holidays, pension funds, and
the like.
Three senses of employee rights common in business

Finally, employee rights might refer to those

entitlements to which employees have a claim
independent of any particular legal or contractual
factors. Such rights would originate with the respect
owed to them as human beings. ( moral
entitlements)
 Employee Rights

 Employee rights as understood in this chapter, like minimum wage and

protection against sexual harassment, lie outside of the bargaining that
occurs between employers and employees. Unlike minimum wage, moral
rights are justified by moral, rather than legal, considerations.
 there are such rights, employees cannot be asked to forgo to get a job or to
gain an increase in employment benefits.
 Employee rights function to prevent employees from being placed in what
would be a fundamentally coercive position of having to choose between
these basic moral goods and their job.
 THE RIGHT TO WORK

the right to work refers to a right to work without being

required to join a local union.
right to work implies that employees have a right to a job.
 government could provide jobs either through incentives and subsidies
to private employers (as many governments already do in the case of
former welfare recipients) or by providing direct employment.
 government has the responsibility to provide jobs compatible with
qualifications to those who are able to work but unable to find jobs in
the private sector. Government would be the employer of last resort.
 The right to Work

the right to work is not only a right to a job, but the right,
once hired, to hold that job with some degree of security.
 Once one has a job, this would be the right to keep that job or, in
other terms, the right not to be fired without just and sufficient
cause.
 ethically structured workplace provides “meaningful” work not in
the sense that the work is fulfilling or elevating of human potential,
but in the sense that it is work that “allows the worker to exercise
her autonomy and independence.”
 EMPLOYMENT AT WILL

An “at will” contract is one that exists only so long as both
parties consent or, conversely, can be broken at the
discretion of either party.
Employment at will means that employees are free to quit
their job at any time for any reason and employers are free
to terminate an employee at any time and for any reason.
“all may dismiss their employee(s) at will, be they many or few,
for good cause, for no cause, or even for cause morally wrong.”
This is absurd and unacceptable
 wide range of judicial exemptions to employment at will
 1. protect employees from being fired for serving on a jury, for reporting a
crime, or for refusing to participate in a fraudulent business practice.
 2. “implied contract exemption” and provide employees with protections
that are implied in such employer documents as employee handbooks, job
descriptions, and job advertisements.
Wide range of judicial exemptions to employment at
will

Finally, some courts have created a more general

“implied covenant of good faith” exemption which is a
more open-ended protection against employment
practices that violate a “good faith” condition.
 Thus, for example, firing an employee as a means for avoiding
payment of an earned annual bonus was judged an illegal
violation of an implied covenant of good faith.
 DUE PROCESS IN THE WORKPLACE

Due process in the workplace would mean that employees have a

right to be protected from the arbitrary use of managerial
authority.
Due process would mean that while employees can be dismissed
for “good cause,” they cannot be dismissed “for no cause, or even
for cause morally wrong.
Due process right would establish the procedures (the “process”)
that an employer must go through to ensure that the dismissal is
not arbitrary.
 Acceptable reasons to dismiss worker
incompetent job performance, intoxication, inordinate
absenteeism, theft, fraud, and economic necessity would be
obvious candidates.
This approach seeks to establish just cause conditions for
dismissal
This more procedural account of due process might include such things as
prior warning, documentation, written performance standards,
probationary periods, a process by which decisions can be appealed, an
opportunity to respond to allegations, and prior determination of
punishment that is proportionate to the infraction.
 Acceptable reasons to dismiss worker
Thus, an employee should know what is expected of her, know the
consequences of failing to meet those expectations, be given a
warning when any problem is first recognized, have an
opportunity to change and respond to the warning, and have a
right to appeal any decision to an impartial judge.

The strongest defense of an employee’s right to due process appeals

to the fundamental ethical concepts of respect and fairness.
 Moral Rights in the Workplace

a strong ethical case can be made for recognizing

due process rights in the workplace. Without such
protections there is no guarantee that employees
will not suffer unfair harms by the exercise of
managerial power.
 PARTICIPATION RIGHTS

Employees should have a right to participate in

managerial decision making.
 Reasons:
 McCall argues that the fundamental right to be treated with respect implies that
individuals be treated as autonomous decision makers, free from coercive interference
by others. employees should have rights to co-determine any policy that has a
significant impact on their work lives.
 Every individual has a fundamental right to impartial and fair treatment. When
decisions are made, the interests of every party affected by that decision must be given
due consideration. The most effective means to guarantee that each affected party is
represented is to allow each party to represent their own interests by participating in the
decision.
 Benefits of Participation

First, participatory management will create conditions of self-

respect for employees. Institutions that encourage and honor employee
participation will foster the important psychological goods of self-worth
and self-respect among employees.
 employees who participate in and contribute to decision making are less likely
to suffer the mental and physical harms of alienation and burnout.
SECOND, Employee participation can be an effective means for bringing
meaning and value into one’s work life and this can counter both physical
and psychological harms.
 EMPLOYEE HEALTH AND SAFETY

Protecting employee health and safety is certainly one of the

business’s major ethical responsibilities.
Like work itself, health and safety are goods that are valued both as
a means for attaining other valuable ends and as end in themselves.
When we are healthy and safe, we are much more likely to be able
to attain whatever other goods we desire. Health and safety have a
very high instrumental value. Yet health and safety are also
valuable in and of themselves. They have intrinsic as well as
instrumental value.
 Facts

 There is no denying that there are cases where employees die out of
overexposure to poisonous chemicals, lack of rest, too much stress and the
like while at work.
 In response to such concerns, government regulation of workplace health and safety
appears more appropriate ethically. Mandatory government standards address most of
the problems raised against market strategies. Standards can be set according to the best
available scientific knowledge and thus over- come market failures that result from
insufficient information. Standards prevent employees from having to face the
fundamentally coercive choice between job and safety. Standards also address the first
generation problem by focusing on prevention rather than compensation after the fact.
Finally, standards are fundamentally a social approach that can address public policy
questions ignored by markets.
 Occupational Safety

Employees have a legitimate ethical claim on mandatory health and

safety standards within the workplace. To say that employees have a
right to workplace health and safety implies that they should not be
expected to make trade-offs between health and safety
standards and job security or wages. Further, recognizing that
most mandatory standards reduce rather than eliminate risks,
employees should also have the right to be informed about
workplace risks. If the risks have been reduced to the lowest
feasible level and employees are fully aware of them, then a society
that respects its citizens as autonomous decision makers has done its
duty.
 PRIVACY IN THE WORKPLACE

Two general understandings of privacy can be

found in the legal and philosophical literature on
this topic:
 privacy as a right to be “let alone” within a personal zone
of solitude
 privacy as the right to control information about oneself.
 Right to be Let- alone

Individuals ought to be left alone only in certain very personal

decisions, such as those involving family, reproduction,
sexuality, home life, and life-sustaining medical treatment.
From this perspective, the clearest case of an invasion of privacy
occurs when others come to know personal information about
us, as when a co-worker reads your e-mail or eavesdrops on a
personal conversation.
 Right to privacy
 Limiting access of personal information only to those with whom one has a
personal relationship is an important way to preserve one’s own personal
integrity and individuality. This understanding of privacy will prove helpful
when we turn to the employment context and consider the relationship
between employer and employee.
 The right to control certain very personal decisions and information help
determine the kind of person we are and the person we become. To the
degree that we value individuality and treating each person as an individual,
we ought to recognize that certain personal decisions and information are
rightfully the exclusive domain of the individual.
 How about if employer want to gather information about
employees?

In recent years, polygraph and drug-testing, surveillance, third-

party background checks, and psychological testing have all been
used as means to gain information about employees. More
recently electronic monitoring and surveillance has raised privacy
issues in the workplace. Typically, but not always, such techniques
are used to investigate misconduct such as employee theft. In
addition, genetic screening of potential and present employees
suggests that this new technology will keep employee privacy
concerns in the public eye for many years to come.
 Rules

 First, we should require that the information sought through such

techniques be job-relevant and legitimately knowable by the employer. For
example, genetic screening to gather medical information that would then be
used to disqualify people from work would be unjustified.
 Second, To ensure fully voluntary consent we might also require that
employees be given prior notification before any of these methods are used.
There is no reason that employees not be fully informed of the uses for such
things as blood or urine samples. Random or blanket use of such methods
typically would be unjustified, and should be used only when a reasonable
just cause is established.