Corporate Ethics Codes: A Waste of Time?

Ethics codes are not enough; that is to say, making applications of ethical principles explicit is not sufficient, even where they are grilled into employees in recurrent training sessions. Indeed, individuals or a dominant coalition can use a code’s existence as window-dressing. For example, in his letter on July 1, 2000 announcing Enron’s new and improved 65 page Code of Ethics, Ken Lay wrote, “Relations with the Company’s many publics . . . will be conducted in honesty, candor, and fairness.” If Ken Lay could get away with trumpeting a code of ethics, who’s to say who is out there now acting unethically in business under the cover of an effervescent code?

The full essay is at "Corporate Ethics Codes: Oxymorons?"

Using Corporate Position to Torture Whistle-Blowers

Jack B. Palmer made a quiet complaint through internal channels at Infosys, an outsourcing company based in India. He suspected some managers were committing visa fraud. His complaint leaked. As a result, investigators from the U.S. Government looked into “whether the company used workers from India for certain kinds of jobs here that were not allowed under their temporary visas, known as B-1.”[1]

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business: A Malignant Mentality of Mendacity, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

1. Julia Preston, “Whistle-BlowerClaiming Visa Fraud Keeps His Job, but Not His Work,” The New York Times, April 13, 2012.