Ethics Newsline®

The hotel maid who came to pick up the laundry last week spoke only Spanish. That seemed normal. Increasingly across the United States, service workers speak the language of our nation’s fastest-growing minority.

But this hotel was in Spain. I was the minority speaker, feeling slightly ashamed of my stumbling efforts to communicate. She, by contrast, felt no embarrassment as she coached my pidgin Spanish. What’s more, she probably felt little need to learn English. While Seville draws international visitors, it’s also a popular destination for Spaniards. Most of the time, I suspect, she can count on hearing her native language from the guests.

But after next week will she be an endangered species?

On May 1, the 15-nation European Union (EU), which includes Spain, adds ten new members from Central and Eastern Europe. Will my maid find her job at risk from waves of new workers pouring legally into her country? In a few years, will her coworkers at the Barceló Gran Hotel Renacimiento, built for the 1992 World Exposition in Seville, see yet another influx of foreigners, this time coming not as visitors but as employees? When I next visit Seville, will the maids speak Estonian or Slovenian to one another — and only stumbling Spanish to me?

These questions crossed my mind during a conference of 450 human resource managers from 55 countries gathered at the hotel last week. Speaking to the group, Victoria Curzon-Price, who directs the European Institute at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, raised a core question. When “73 million well educated, highly motivated, and underpaid individuals” join the EU, she asked, “will capital move East, or will people move West?”

The first alternative — capital moving East — is already part of the business landscape in Europe and the United States. The relentless economics that moves jobs offshore — replacing workers at home with lower-wage workers abroad — already is raising profound social and ethical questions. Similar movements may happen in Europe, but they won’t threaten my maid. It’s hard to clean a room unless you’re in it.

No, my maid’s challenge arises from people moving West. They’ll come, as Prof. Curzon-Price pointed out, because of disparities in wealth. The standard of living in an enlarged EU will stretch from that of Luxembourg, with a gross domestic product per capita of $56,660, to that of Lithuania, at $2,464. More important are the wage rates. Hiring a manufacturing worker for an hour, she said, costs $26.18 in Germany and $1.97 in Latvia. If entrepreneurial Latvians hear about hotel jobs in Seville, what are the chances they won’t come?

But there’s a darker question to enlargement. Put simply, will the new countries impact not only the economic but the ethical standards of the EU? The annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), through which Transparency International ranks 133 nations, suggests reasons for concern. The current 15 EU nations score fairly high. Finland tops the CPI as the cleanest nation in the world, getting 9.7 out of a possible perfect 10. With the exception of Italy and Greece, no EU nation ranks below a 6.6. But among the enlargement nations, the picture is reversed. Cyprus (which will join the EU despite the May 24 vote by Greek Cypriots to remain a divided island) tops the list at 6.1, while Poland, at 3.6, is the lowest among the new EU nations.

What accounts for this disparity? With the exception of Cyprus and tiny Malta, the enlargement nations share a legacy of communism. And communism corrupts ethics in two ways: morally, by denigrating individualism and personal responsibility in favor of collectivism and the regulatory grip of the state, and economically, by creating such harshness and unfairness that individuals are driven into habitual disobedience and routine dissembling simply to survive. Result: a culture of creative survivors who have had little practice in giving — or expecting from others beyond their family — a sense of respect, honesty, fairness, and responsibility.

Fortunately, a legacy of corruption isn’t permanent. Ethics can be learned, especially by good people who have been trapped for decades in a bad system. The potential contribution of such people to the EU is enormous. But if the corruption index is right, employers who hire them may have more to teach than language and communication skills. They may have to teach also the rudiments of character and integrity and a work ethic of trust and commitment. Of such are free nations made.

©2004 Institute for Global Ethics