A Handbook of Productive Industrial Ethics

One of the biggest problems facing employers today is how to tell a bad employee from a good one. A study of 81,000 people on integrity, work attitude and drug use found that 24.9% of them admitted to stealing from previous employers, 28.5% admitted to some drug use, 24.0% admitted they had problems with absences in previous jobs, while 30.0% admitted tardiness in previous jobs. When the same system was used to screen 230,000 potential employees, researchers obtained similar results: 25.3% of them have high risk of workplace theft attitudes, 29.6% have high risk of drug use attitudes, and 23.2% have below average work attitudes. Clearly, no employer who intends to be on a competitive edge would want to hire such employees. Industry is increasingly faced with issues of ethics (principles of moral values) in the sundry activities that help to carve and provide its progress. The industrial workforce is the most important and expensive resource of all industrial resources in the United States’ industry. Workers are the ones who will use their expertise and initiative to produce products or services for their employers. These employees must be sought, hired, and trained particularly in industrial ethics to help combat these ethical issues. There have been moves in American industries and higher education to pursue solutions and studies in ethics to counteract ethical problems in the country. Science, technology, and society (STS), for example, is an established field of study in the United States generated by the environmental movement and the critique of technology in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, there is also the case of corporate ethical misconduct which has become a growing concern in recent years, leading to more and more companies instituting ethics programs. This trend has largely been brought about by lack of ethical values in decision making processes in the governments, industrial enterprises, educational institutions, and many other organizations. In terms of values, today’s American workers are lacking a lot when compared with their counterparts of yesteryears, in part, because many parents in our modern society hardly have enough time to teach their children needed values which can lead to industrial success. Most American parents are engaged in the workforce since it now takes two incomes to make ends meet. The result is that many children are “raised” in daycare centers and by individuals who are not their primary parents, and whose values may be different from those of their parents. As a result, many children grow up in a moral vacuum when it comes to ethical issues. Such individuals need to train themselves by reading this kind of book, to help them understand how to apply good values to their lives and work situations. In the absence of such self-help involvement, society will increasingly continue to witness unpleasant workplace occurrences, such as violent and criminal behaviors which are common in many of our workplaces today. Students and workers who operate in industrial environments often encounter ethical situations which demand that proper decisions be made for the benefit of the individuals, their organizations, and other stakeholders. In an era when thousands of college graduates are being employed in industrial jobs, more should be done to instill good attitudes and good work ethics into these young minds. A Handbook of Productive Industrial Ethics is written for all blue and white collar industrial workers, and for all students who will be working in industry upon graduation. The increasing need for good work ethics in industry was the major factor behind the conception of this book. American society and work environments are becoming so complex that individual workers are bombarded in different directions by ethical problems which they did not create. Too often, these workers are confused, in part, because society never really offered them the basic ethical foundation needed to respond adequately to the increasing demands of our complex world. This book is divided into six separate chapters that closely follow the different tenets of values upon which it is based. Chapter 1 (Introduction to Industrial Ethics), explains why our many industrial organizations are in their present situation. It also discusses the meanings and ramifications of ethics, and why the study of ethics is needed by everyone associated with these organizations. Chapter 2 deals with the topic of Industrial Responsibility, specifically from an industrial point of view. Chapter 3 discusses, from an organizational point of view, three key values that are closely identified with a worker as an individual: Honesty, Self-control, and Self-respect. The other critical values which the worker encounters in team or group work are covered in chapter 4, and include Fairness, Mutual Assistance, Tolerance of Diversity, and Respect for Others. To tie all the values together, the topic of Integrity is covered in chapter 5. Chapter 6 extends the ideas developed in previous chapters, by using real-life Case Situations to showcase misapplications of principles of industrial ethics. Finally, samples of industrial and organizational professional Codes of Ethics are included as Appendices to aid readers identify with the professional ethics of their affiliated organizations.