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.