Ethics -- Employee and Manager Term Paper

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At the heart of the matter, the "servant's responsibility is to obey the employer's direction and the employer's responsibility is to pay the agreed-upon wages." (116) The law allows for a step further, adding that agents owe legal duties of "loyalty, trust, obedience, and confidentiality." (116) The hackneyed character to this relationship is undeniable. If the primary responsibility of the worker is to his boss, modern American society would conclude that the principal owes the agent the same respect provided by the Constitution to the citizen in his private life. The rosey pages of the Financial Times and the crinkled sheets of the Wall Street Journal warn of stories where employers have neglected their inherent responsibility to their workers, American to American, and have subjected them to the unfair treatment and ultimate downfall witnessed in the loss of 401k plans in the Enron scandal. Furthermore, employees in the private sector who are not unionized can face dismissal without due process, be subjected to urine drug tests at risk of losing their job, and even the subject of secret digital and technological monitoring.

Managerial positions hold great responsibility to both their owners (be they small-business individuals or stock holders in multi-national corporations) and their workers. Friedman purports that their responsibilities to their owners are summarized by attending to their leader's desires, largely, "to make as much money as possible." ( 119) But in the modern sphere of stock holders, the concept of "owners" could extend back to the workers, as it did in Enron, whose 401ks consist of shares in the company's stocks. As such, they have the right to know exactly the nature of the business, allowing for a new range of responsibilities and rights at both levels. At the same time, the role of the manager is further complicated.

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"Every decision that a business manager makes imposes costs on someone." (121) Every decision that manager makes puts one opportunity at odds with another, and in choosing to make any decision, the manager is forced to choose one option over another, subjugating one party to the other. The ethical realm of the decision-making process for the manager extends to impose costs that serve two ends: fiscal stability and protection of understandable employee rights. Many times, these decisions are put to the test when conflicts of interest emerge. "Conflicts of interest occur when the personal interest of mangers interfere with the professional judgments of managers." (121) Andrew Fastow at Enron is an example of when interest is conflicted, since his personal interests and professional responsibilities were at odds. "I is difficult to believe that Fastow was representing the best interests of Enron stakeholders in these negotiations." (121)

When conflicts of interests occur, the ethical guidepost by which the manager should illicit the berth of his decision-making should steer the principal through the process. When ethical relationships, responsibilities, and rights falter, though, the result is a clear loss. In the case of Enron, the loss is highlighted as universal; stockholders lost the weight of their ownership, employees lost job and financial security, and even those whose personal interest was weighted most high with corruption lost out, forgoing their liberties to a court, their reputation to corruption, and the gloss on their resumes to the dull printers' ink of scandal media. The relationship between the manager and the employee needs to exist within an ethical frame that not only goes beyond the provisions of American law, but also seeks to embody the spirit of that law and the liberties provided by the American constitution to….....

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