Working During Holidays
It’s not easy, and maybe impossible, to see into the mind of another person and evaluate his true goals and motivations. Exploiting Employees When stores open, they are taking their employees away from their families. I personally feel that the stores are putting the dollar ahead of the welfare of their employees. When stores open, they are taking their employees away from their families no matter what day it is. If this is a problem in itself, any employment outside the home (and sometimes inside) is an ethical issue.
And if “taking employees away from their families” is equivalent to “putting the dollar ahead of the welfare of their employees,” then it’s always doing so, whether or not it happens to be the fourth Thursday in November or the Friday after that. People who choose not to work on Thanksgiving will be hurt if they lose their jobs or miss some of the biggest commissions/tips of the year by not going. If working on Thanksgiving is a deal breaker to you, get a different job. If it’s not, then just get on with it and stop griping about it. It’s like moaning and groaning every time a baby needs a diaper change.
It’s just part of the deal. Common Good While most agree that businesses need to make a profit, the concept that businesses exist to increase shareholder value is not unanimous. It has been claimed that businesses exist to serve the common good. This is a foundation of socialism, where profit is seen as exploitation of the workers. In America, there has been a push by people such as Ralph Nader, to establish a charter for corporations that would allow government oversight to confirm that corporations are indeed serving the common good.
Under this system, if a corporation is determined to be detrimental to the common good, its charter could revoked and the corporation would be forced to stop operating. The problem thus far is that we have two seemingly opposite theories for the role of a business. Using our operating definition of ethics, the ethics for an organization whose role is to make profit are different from the ethics of an organization whose role is to serve
How strapped for cash are you? Where does your family live? What’s your relationship with them like? How sentimental are you about specific holiday rituals? People will differ. This Thanksgiving there are going to be people with jobs at the Gap who wish they weren’t working Thanksgiving but feel that they’d lose their jobs if they weren’t willing to take an extra shift. There are also going to be people with jobs at Radio Shack who wish they could earn some extra cash and get out from under that credit card debt.
