Part 5: Duties to Employees
72 What are the “take home” messages from this Part?
This Part covered a wide range of legal, ethical, and practical concerns for employees, a central organizational stakeholder for most companies.
We covered a wide variety of content about the employment relationship in this Part. This included various laws which protect employee rights, the ethical duties of employers, and the unique status of employees as stakeholders of a firm. Several significant lessons are:
- Employees are a central stakeholder, but often a troubling one, because employee desires for pay or political stances may conflict with those of the company.
- Federal law protects the rights of workers to organize and collectively bargain, which may increase their power as stakeholders.
- Federal law also provides a wide variety of specific, but limited, rights for employees, such as to be free from discrimination under Title VII.
- At the same time, the baseline relationship for employees in the United States is employment-at-will, which gives businesses great flexibility in hiring and firing, but provides little security for employees who depend on companies for their livelihood.
Exercises
- For the company you have been considering in these Exercises, discuss whether they treat their employees in an ethical manner. Then, discuss the firm’s relationship to these employees using stakeholder theory.
