Ethics Newsline®

Not surprisingly, stories dealing with business ethics dominated the news this month. In this week’s edition of Ethics Newsline, we feature a report on a judge’s finding that the nation’s largest natural gas company deliberately manipulated supplies and contributed to California’s 2000-2001 power crisis. Previous issues covered the flap over perks provided to retired GE head Jack Welch (Sep. 23), a probe into finances at Tyco (Sep. 23), firings at a brokerage where employees allegedly refused to cooperate in an investigation of Enron finances (Sep. 23), a call by the New York Federal Reserve chief to take a hard look at spiraling CEO pay (Sep. 16), KPMG’s prediction that ethics — not the letter of the law — is the key to corporate responsibility (Sep. 16), sanctions against former Sunbeam CEO Al Dunlap (Sep. 9), a Canadian psychologist’s assertion that some corporate-ladder climbers fit the classic definition of psychopaths (Sep. 9), and the corporate implosion at WorldCom (Sep. 3).

Related workplace issues also figured prominently in September’s news menu. This week we feature a report on what promises to be a precedent-setting family-leave bill in California, and a new poll of “family-friendly” companies. On Sep. 16, we covered a dispute over employee evaluation methods at Goodyear.

Technology continued to garner a share of the ethics headlines. On Sep. 23, we reported on a new method of “cleaning up” movies by digitally bowdlerizing content — a technological breakthrough that has some producers crying foul. Our Sep. 16 edition covered the continuing controversy over stockpiling DNA samples by British law enforcement, and our Sep. 6 report chronicled apparent efforts by China to block the search engine Google after company executives refused to cooperate with censorship efforts.

Human rights issues almost always figure in ethics news, and in September we reported on a ruling that a U.S. company could be held liable for human rights abuses committed on its behalf (Sep. 23), the resignation of a controversial human rights chief at the UN (Sep. 16), a flap over secret deportation hearings held in the United States (Sep. 3), criticism of intelligence-sharing methods of the U.S. Justice Department and the CIA, and the Japanese government’s admission that the nation engaged in germ warfare during World War II (Sep. 3).

Several education-ethics issues surfaced during September. This week, we carried a report on how some parents are apparently diagnosis-shopping in hopes of scoring an advantage for their children on the SATs. In the Sep. 3 edition, we carried stories about the Los Angeles school district banning soda machines from schools, and Harvard’s decision, in the face of a possible loss of government funding, to allow military recruiters on campus despite disagreement over civil-rights issues.