Ethics Newsline®

Question: “Overall, how committed do you feel [you are to your company]/[your company is to you]?”

DETROIT
The driver apologized. He’d arrived early to take me to the airport, but had become so engrossed in reading the newspaper that he hadn’t seen me come out the door.

"You read about this guy who found all that money?" he asked as we pulled out into the traffic. I hadn’t, so he handed back the Free Press.

It front-paged the story of a motel developer from Kalamazoo named Hiren Patel. He was checking out an inner-city development site February 3, when he found a large canvas bag on the street. Contents: $578,690 in cash.

Patel drove to a police station and handed it in — all of it. "I’ve never taken a dime in my life," he told reporters the next day, "and I wasn’t about to start now. It wasn’t my money." Turns out it belonged to an armored car company. They said it fell out when their truck door accidentally popped open.

"What would you have done with that money?" the driver asked, catching my eye in the mirror. I said I’d return it, because I wanted to live in a world where people did things like that. I also told him my profession was studying ethics, and asked what he would have done.

"That’s a tough one," he said. He knew that neighborhood. "If I found all that money there, I’d be scared."

Why? Because he was skeptical of the it-fell-out-by-mistake explanation. He suspected the drivers of making an intentional drop, which failed because the recipient wasn’t there in time. He figured it was hot money and somebody would come after it.

And while he was impressed by Patel’s unhesitating honesty, he noted that he seemed to be a person of means, for whom the money wasn’t all that important. "Most of us have never seen half a million dollars," he said, musing on new cars, houses, and investments.

But what really upset him was that the owners had given no reward — though Patel never expected any. "There was a test from above," the paper quoted him as saying, "and I passed it. I feel good about who I am. That’s all the reward I want." Patel’s wife, Bela, said she was not surprised by what her husband did.

By now we were whizzing down the winter-gray interstate. "What do you think your wife would have told you to do?" I asked the driver.

He thought for a moment. "I just don’t know. I think she might have said to keep half and give the other half back, or something."

I asked if he had children. One son, he replied. What, I asked, would he say to him?

"Oh, I wouldn’t tell him," he shot back immediately.

"Even if you gave it all back?"

"Oh, then I’d tell him. That would be a really good example."

He fell silent, as though he’d suddenly heard what he said. I could feel him chewing over the unsettled sense that arises when we meet our better selves. A really good example. That’s what he yearned for. He knew the street-smart culture he came from, and its temptations. He also knew what was right, and what he wanted to tell his son.

He’s not alone. The world is full of good-hearted, candid people who want to live in a world where ethics works. They’re not cynics. They’re just not sure goodness is possible. It fascinated him that there were Hiren Patels in the world. And it sobered him to stumble into the gap between the example he wanted to set and the uncertainty of his own impulses.

He’s why it matters that we keep talking about ethics. It’s not for the Hiren Patels; they don’t need it. And it’s not for the inner-city con men; they aren’t listening. It’s for the good souls in between, driving life’s highways with their communities in mind, their candor intact, and their ethics ready to be engaged.

(c)1999 by Rushworth M. Kidder

With those words, a federal judge last week threatened massive fines against the pilot’s association that grounded many American Airlines flights with a “sickout.” It’s a story about accountability, and our lead in this week’s edition of Business Ethics Newsline, your guide to the top stories in ethics.

Our next stories also deal with issues of accountability: Pharmaceutical giant Bayer has been hit with a lawsuit claiming the firm “bought” concentration-camp prisoners for World War II-era medical experiments, and automaker DaimlerChrysler was ordered to pay a multi-million-dollar judgment in a class-action lawsuit involving airbag injuries. Also, a New Jersey racetrack announcer is trying to hold his employer accountable for forcing him to do work he claims will aggravate his gambling addiction.

We continue this week’s wrap of the news in ethics with two stories from overseas: a report on euthanasia in the Netherlands, and ethics training being administered to Malaysian police.

Next, two stories about morality and the media: a report on Calvin Klein’s decision to pull provocative underwear ads, and two reports issued last week finding fault with the way U.S. TV treats the issue of sexuality.

When are “bargains” not good deals? In one case we report on this week, when the merchandise comes unordered as part of an office-supply scam. In another instance, when critics charge that letting cattle graze at artificially low prices overtaxes government-owned grazing grounds.

Our Canada-based correspondent Errol Mendes files two reports this week: a new Canadian anticorruption law, and a trade war brewing over allegations of U.S. “cultural imperialism.”

And we conclude this week’s edition with two Ethics in the Workplace reports from the U.K.: concerns over what appears to be persistent racial discrimination on the job, and worries about employers increasing their surveillance of workers.

Have a productive, ethical week.

– Carl Hausman

DALLAS
American Airlines resumed full operations last week after a federal judge ordered the Allied Pilots Association (APA) to end its 10-day “sickout” and pay a $10 million deposit on future fines imposed against the association for not getting pilots back in the cockpits quickly enough.

U.S. district judge Joe Kendall ordered the pilots back to work last Wednesday, then fined the APA for contempt after pilots continued their protest. American says its losses may top $150 million.

“You pay for what you break,” Kendall told leaders of the APA, who have been given until April 12 to review American’s figures before Kendall assesses the final fine. The fine will be based, in part, on the final tally of damages, the Reuters news agency reported.

The 10-day sickout was waged over the APA’s demand that pilots for American’s newly acquired carrier, Reno Air, be covered by the same contract terms as American pilots.

The job action forced the airline to cancel more than 6,600 flights.

TERRE HAUTE, Indiana
German pharmaceutical giant Bayer was accused last week of buying concentration camp prisoners from the Nazis for use in drug experiments and product tests.

The accusations came in court papers relating to a lawsuit seeking unspecified damages and the recovery of profits that plaintiffs allege accrued from the research.

The charges were revealed in a lawsuit filed by Eva Mozes Kor, a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp. Kor claims her twin sister and she were used in medical tests run by Joseph Mengele and a Bayer representative.

Charges that Bayer repeatedly purchased prisoners from Auschwitz were allegedly documented in recently declassified World-War II-era documents, the Reuters news agency reported.

Bayer, which last week announced its participation in a compensation fund for Holocaust-era slave laborers that has been established in order to avoid U.S. lawsuits, withheld comment other than telling Reuters that it was “very surprised” by the charges.

PHILADELPHIA
Automaker DaimlerChrysler was ordered to pay $58.5 million in a class-action lawsuit led by a woman whose wrist was burned after an air bag in her Chrysler LeBaron inflated during a 1992 accident.

The Pennsylvania court ordered DaimlerChrysler to pay $3.8 million in punitive damages, and to pay $730 — the cost of buying safer air bags — to each of 75,000 plaintiffs from Pennsylvania.

The lawyer for Louise Crawley insisted that the air bag’s design was faulty, positioning air bag inflation vents in locations that were likely to burn drivers’ hands. Company research showed no such problem, DaimlerChrysler said.

DaimlerChrysler lawyer Karl Lukens vowed to appeal the decision, saying that it was symptomatic of an “out-of control legal system.”

“Ten years ago, we would have received a thank-you note from a customer for the air bag having saved her life,” Lukens told the Associated Press. “Today, we get slapped with a multimillion-dollar verdict.”

Last week’s verdict is the second recent air bag case lost by DaimlerChrysler. Last December, the automaker was ordered to pay $750,000 to a New York family whose 5-year old boy was killed by an air bag.

NEW YORK
A New Jersey Meadowlands Racetrack announcer last week sued track officials, claiming they docked his pay after he refused to predict winners on his television show — a practice that he feared would rekindle his gambling addiction.

Twenty-year veteran announcer John Bothe, known as “The Voice of the Meadowlands,” sued Meadowland’s operators for discrimination, claiming that they reduced his pay from $73,000 to $52,000 in retaliation for his refusal last December to handicap televised horse races, the New York Daily News reported.

Bothe, who quit gambling in 1992, says his gambling addiction is a disability, and is protected from discrimination by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Track officials declined to comment on the lawsuit, which seeks restoration of Bothe’s original pay and benefits, as well as compensation for damage to his professional stature and public image, according to the Daily News.

LONDON
A large number of Dutch doctors are routinely ignoring ethics codes regarding the proper circumstances and safeguards for euthanasia and assisted suicide in the Netherlands, the British Journal of Medical Ethics reported last week.

According to the study, nearly two-thirds of the Netherlands’s cases of euthanasia and assisted suicide went unreported in 1995, a violation of regulations governing the practice. The study also claimed that in 17 percent of doctor-assisted deaths or suicides, alternative treatments were available, the BBC reported.

U.K. critics of euthanasia reacted to the study by claiming that if the Netherlands — where euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide are widely accepted and ostensibly regulated — cannot adequately protect the rights of patients and doctors, then similar efforts would likely fail in the United Kingdom.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia
Roughly 11,000 of Malaysia’s senior police officers will begin taking courses in public relations, morals, and ethics — a measure intended to meet government calls for a reformed “firm but friendly” police force.

Malaysia’s police chief told the New Straits Times that he hopes the new classes will have a trickle-down effect on Malaysia’s 70,000 rank-and-file officers, who are also expected to receive ethics training as the program continues, according to the Associated Press.

Malaysia’s police force came under heavy international criticism last September when former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, currently on trial for corruption, was beaten while in police custody, the BBC reported.

NEW YORK
Fashion designer Calvin Klein last week scrapped his new ad campaign for children’s underwear, yanking print ads and pulling down a prominent billboard in New York’s Times Square 24 hours after critics blasted the ads as child pornography.

Klein, often criticized for using strong sexual images to sell his products, issued a statement defending the campaign, saying that the images of underwear-clad children were intended to “capture the same warmth and spontaneity that you find in a family snapshot.”

But critics, including New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, slammed the ads as prurient, pornographic, and publicity-seeking, the Associated Press reported.

Klein disputed those accusations, but noted that the short-lived campaign had raised “issues that we had not fully considered.”

HOLLYWOOD
A study released last week by a foundation criticized the television industry for airing shows with sexual content, and a separate report by a TV watchdog group called for a campaign against advertisers who sponsor “family unfriendly” shows.

The Kaiser Family Foundation claimed television producers neglected to portray or discuss the consequences of unprotected sex.

Kaiser president Drew Altman said his organization was not trying to be television’s “sex police,” but that the TV industry should work harder to “entertain and inform at the same time,” educating viewers about contraception, safe sex, and abstinence, the Reuters news agency reported.

Also, the conservative Parents Television Council last week blasted corporations, including Burger King, General Motors, Procter & Gamble, and L’Oreal, for advertising on primetime shows with strong sexual content.

The Council announced a $2 million ad campaign aimed at motivating parents to write letters urging corporations “to shift their billions of dollars” to family-friendly programming, Reuters reported.

CHICAGO
U.S. companies are frequently duped into paying for office supplies they did not order, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which last week announced a series of actions aimed at putting bogus office-supply companies out of business.

The scams, costing U.S. businesses millions of dollars, follow a similar pattern: Perpetrators learn the brands and models of a company’s office equipment, and then send them unsolicited supplies, often with the name of the company’s office manager on the invoice, the Associated Press reported.

Targeted companies frequently assume the supplies were actually ordered and pay for the unsolicited merchandise.

The FTC, which says companies do not have to pay for unordered supplies, filed injunctions against three suspect Chicago-area companies last week.

WASHINGTON
The Interior and Agriculture Departments last week announced that Western ranchers would continue to pay last year’s low fee for grazing rights to government lands, angering critics who argue that the $1.35 per animal unit fee is absurdly low and is an incentive to overgraze U.S. rangelands.

Cattle ranchers celebrated the rate freeze, which they say allows them to survive tough economic times.

Critics claim that current fees — the same price paid 14 years ago — should be between 5 to 10 times higher due to inflation and market demands, the Associated Press reported.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

OTTAWA
The 1997 OECD Convention on Combating Bribery and Corruption in International Business went into force on February 15, 1999, as a result of Canada’s mid-December 1998 ratification of the Convention.

Canada has passed a stringent new law to implement the Convention, expected to be operational in the next few days. The new law is called the “Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act.”

Under terms of the Act, corruption-related payments to foreign officials will be a criminal offense and could open Canadian companies and their employees to stiff criminal penalties including jail terms.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

TORONTO
According to an Associated Press report, Canadian trade minister Sergio Marchi and Canadian heritage minister Sheila Copps described the United States as a “bully” as regards its threat to retaliate by restricting billions of dollars of Canadian steel and textile exports to the United States if a protectionist bill on advertising in special Canadian editions of U.S. magazines goes into effect.

The bill would penalize foreign publishers who sell space to Canadian advertisers in these “split-run” magazines, which take vital advertising revenues away from Canadian magazines.

Canadian officials justify the bill by arguing that Canada is overwhelmed by U.S. cultural products in films, television, and with foreign magazines, mostly from the United States, accounting for 80 percent of newsstand sales.

The loss to U.S. publishers if the bill were implemented would be much less that the impact of the retaliatory steel and textile measures on Canada.

LONDON
U.K. workers still suffer persistent racial discrimination, especially at smaller businesses that often remain below the radar of government oversight, the BBC reported.

“We’ve really got a problem,” the Commission for Racial Equality’s chairman, Sir Herman Ouseley, told the BBC, “particularly in the medium and small sectors of employers where there are much more informal practices going on, where they are able to discriminate and get away with it, and we haven’t been able to penetrate that level of society.”

A BBC undercover investigation conducted last year had charged that employers often favor whites when hiring new staff.

LONDON
U.K. employers are watching over the movements, conversations, and keystrokes of their employees at an ever-increasing rate, according to a report released last week by the Institute of Employment Rights, a U.K.-based watchdog group.

The new report says that the invasion of the U.K. workplace by surveillance technology may backfire, causing greater stress, lower office morale, and a consequent reduction in worker efficiency.

The Institute cites the use of hidden cameras, hidden microphones, infrared tracking devices, and software that counts computer keystrokes as particularly “alarming,” the BBC reported.

From Wirthlin International:

“Today’s workplace environment is one of change, characterized by corporate mergers, globalization, increasing competition, changing technology, and the emphasis on productivity and efficiencies. This business climate has altered employee perceptions of loyalty and given way to the new employee contract, one that is best portrayed as a mutually beneficial partnership centered on commitment.

“A new survey by Wirthlin Worldwide shows that employees and employers are adjusting to this new relationship. In general, employees say they are committed to their companies and they perceive that their companies are committed to them, although to a lesser degree. But being “loyal?” That’s not how workers are describing the workplace relationship. That’s something appropriate to a past era, not this one. . . .

“Feelings of commitment, of course, are influenced by much more than just a paycheck. Commitment derives from a feeling of belonging to a good organization, of understanding how one’s work fits into the success of that organization, of having a chance to grow and develop, knowing that one’s contributions are recognized, and enjoying the people and the work.

“These dimensions are operationalized by employee assessments of their day-to-day experiences with their managers, with communication, with honesty and ethics, and with training, and so on. While most employees in this study feel they understand their role in contributing to their company’s success (97 percent), far fewer feel their contributions are rewarded or recognized (76 percent). And while most say they are personally satisfied with their work (92 percent), only three-quarters (74 percent) say they are offered appropriate training and career development. Neglecting these gaps in employee attitudes can prove to be a big misstep for companies in the long run. Although the new employee contract centers on a mutually beneficial partnership, it’s clear that employees are still looking to their employers to take the lead in providing the foundation of their experience, which is not surprising since training and rewarding are forms of corporate communication to employees.”

“There is no better measure of a person than what he does when he is absolutely free to choose.”

–Wilma Askinas (U.S. writer/publisher, 1921- )

Question: “Would you describe Bill Clinton’s faults as worse than most other presidents’, or as no worse than most other presidents’?”