Ethical Issue In Human Resource

            Ethical Issue Faced By The HR Manager

1: Employment issue-

                                   HR professionals are likely to face maximum ethical dilemmas in the areas of hiring of employees.

  

 Major challenges in this area are:

a. Pressure to hire a friend or relative of a highly placed executive.

b. Faked credentials submitted by a job applicant.

2: Employees Discrimination

              A framework of laws and regulations has been evolved to avoid the practices of treatment of employees on the basis of their caste, sex, religion, disability, age etc. No organisation can openly practice any discriminatory policies, with regard to selection, training, development, appraisal etc. A demanding ethical challenge arises when there is pressure on the HR manager to protect the firm or an individual at the expense of someone belonging to the group which is being discriminated against. 

3: Race, gender and Disability

                In many organisations till recently the employees were differentiated on the basis of their race, gender, origin and their disability. Not anymore ever since the evolution of laws and a regulatory framework that has standardised employee behaviours towards each other. In good organisations the only differentiating factor is performance! In addition the power of filing litigation has made put organisations on the back foot. Managers are trained for aligning behaviour and avoiding discriminatory practices.

4: Privacy issues

                            Any person working with any organisation is an individual and has a personal side to his existence which he demands should be respected and not intruded. The employee wants the organisation to protect his/her personal life. This personal life may encompass things like his religious, political and social beliefs etc. However certain situations may arise that mandate snooping behaviours on the part of the employer. For example, mail scanning is one of the activities used to track the activities of an employee who is believed to be engaged in activities that are not in the larger benefit of the organisation.

Similarly there are ethical issues in HR that pertain to health and safety, restructuring and layoffs and employee responsibilities. There is still a debate going on whether such activities are ethically permitted or not. Layoffs, for example, are no more considered as unethical as they were thought of in the past.

Case Related to this topic

Gucci is a multinational company with over 270 directly operated stores worldwide, serving customers of elite goods, and generating billions of dollars revenue per year. It has an iconic, even noble, luxury brand image in the Greater China region, where its revenue increased by 35.6% in the first half of year 2011. Gucci has expressed its intention to accelerate the process of opening stores on the Chinese mainland. Recently, however, the company came under fire after five former employees from its flagship store in Shenzhen revealed information online about inhumane working conditions and labor mistreatment in the company. This paper focuses on events that took place in a Gucci flagship store located in Shenzhen, China.

This paper has two main research objectives. The first is to analyze why labor abuses (as exemplified in the Gucci case) are allowed to occur and persist in foreign-invested firms that are located in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The second is to develop a multi-stakeholder approach to preventing further abuses of this kind. The next section provides a description of the case, focusing on the ethically problematic labor management practices and arrangements and noting some legal violations. We shall then present three propositions regarding why some foreign firms operating in the PRC and host local governments ignore and/or tolerate labor abuses of this kind. We follow this with a section in which we apply two different approaches, traditional Confucian ethics on the one hand and modern labor rights theory on the other, to provide a robust ethical basis for stakeholders to argue from, while taking action to persuade others that such malpractices are ethically unacceptable. Next, after identifying four stakeholders for the Gucci case, we suggest how each of them may play a role in discontinuing and/or preventing future labor abuses. We conclude with some further theoretical and managerial implications.

Ethical Issues in Finance

                          Meaning of Ethics In Finance

Ethics in finance are concerned with how to make good and moral choices in regard to the preparation, presentation and disclosure of financial information.

                     Why Ethics are Important in Finance

Ethics are important to any business, creating trust and customer confidence. When business people make unethical decisions, benefiting themselves only, it can lead to the kind of scandal and outrage that destroy careers and even companies. Nobody wants to deal with shady, unethical individuals, giving preference to those they can trust to behave in an ethical way.

Trust-

                 Ethics means transparency in accounting and financial matters, building trust within a community and among investors and customers. Once trust is lost, it is very hard to gain it back.

Confidentiality-

                    An ethical person will not disclose private financial matters to people who should not have the information.

Collaboration-

                 Collaboration requires a sense of honesty and ethics. If you know that your idea will be stolen by a colleague or that it will be misused, you will not collaborate.

                                     Ethical issue faced by finance manager

1-Disclosure Violations - Disclosure violations are errors of ethical omission. While intentionally recording transactions in a manner that is not in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles is considered fraudulent financial reporting, the failure to disclose information to investors that could change their decisions about investing in the company could be considered fraudulent financial reporting

2-Penalties for Violations - This legislation allows for harsh penalties for manipulating financial records, destroying information, interfering with an investigation and provides legal protection for whistle-blowers. 

UNETHICAL PRACTICES IN MARKING

                         Meaning of Unethical Practices in Marketing

Ethical marketing is a process through which companies generate customer interest in products/services, build strong customer interest/relationships, and create value for all stakeholders by incorporating social and environmental considerations in products and promotions.

          Different means to Adopt Unethical Practices In Marketing

Accuracy in text or advertising:- sometimes goods on the market are not worth buying.online marketing often uses photography and writing techniques to mislead.

Under delivering and over charging:- When you don’t deliver the full order or charge exorbitant prices, you are very likely to turn off customers. Many marketers adopt the unethical practice of promising the customers a lot of things within a package. 

Doctoring:-  Photos or using photos that are not authentic representations. Most people expect professional photographers and videographers to make the most of lighting and close-ups.

       Some recent examples of Unethical Practice by the Company

An increasing trend these days is diet drinks, some of which are lower in calories than regular soft drinks or even calorie-free altogether. However, just because these drinks have the label “diet” on them, does not mean that you should jump to the conclusion that they are healthier for you.

Loaded with aspartame, cyclamates and saccharin, artificial sweeteners in diet drinks have been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals. Diet Coke is an example of unethical marketing where the company, Coca Cola is making false advertising claims. One particular marketing campaign that Coca Cola launched was endorsed by karl Lagerfeld, the Chanel designer who claimed to have lost 80 pounds on a diet composed mainly of Diet Coke. Karl says “I drink Diet Coke from the minute I get up to the minute I go to bed … I drink nothing else.”

Targeted towards women, Diet Coke has become an ultimate fashion trend with a world-renown fashion designer as the face of the product. Since inception of the product 30 years ago, Diet Coke cans have been showing up in “every model and celebrity’s manicured hand.”

By using stick thin models and fashion designers who are obsessed with body image only makes the situation worse because it is giving women, especially young women, the wrong message. They are being told that obsessive dieting is acceptable and that Diet Coke is the key to being thin and beautiful. This is very detrimental to young girls as it has negative impacts on their self-esteem and body image.

Coca Cola should not be using Karl Lagerfeld’s radical dieting ways as a means of promoting their product. Rather, they should limit such extreme statements and use regular everyday people in their ads so as not to give the wrong message about Diet Coke being directly correlated to a “healthy” body.