Issues In Employment Case Study

1177 Words3 Pages

Report 2: Issues in Employment (Chapter 9)

The relationship between employees and employers is often confusing and blurry. Who has the upper hand? Who is in control? In an ideal world, both would be equal. Unfortunately this almost never happens. It’s a give and take situation that often fails. High level executives don’t often have the lower level employees taken care of as they should be. The case study on United Airlines is just one example of this. In 2005, United Airlines won the approval to default on their pension plans. Hundreds of thousands of employees lost a large chunk of their retirement money. Much like the Enron situation, employees trusted their company with their future and it didn’t work out the way they planned. It’s unethical
Employees interest aren’t being put first when it comes to larger corporations. Barbara Ehrenreich did a case study about working at Walmart that really brings this issue to light. Working in a place where you are treated poorly has absolutely no benefits. You can tell that her attitude and mind set changed significantly while working there. Walmart is effected by this because they have unhappy employees which means bad customer service. Luckily Walmart customers don’t have very high expectations as far as customer service goes but it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. Walmart created a vicious circle that all started with employees not being taken care of. According to Deontology, this is unethical. Walmart solely treats employees as a means to an end. They don’t care for them, they simply employ them in order for their business to
He talks about how long term employment doesn’t exist anymore and that it would solve a lot of problems if it did. If people were at jobs for longer, the economy would flow better and hopefully large businesses wouldn’t be going bankrupt as often. Kanter provides a list of new policies that could help with keeping employees for the long run. One thing in the list that stuck out to me was “Measure performance beyond accounting numbers and share the data to allow learning by doing and continuous improvement – turning everyone into self-guided professionals” (pg 397). I was talking with a friend the other day and he said that working in retail was probably the hardest job he ever had because of the numbers he had to hit every day. He had to sell a certain number of jeans for every 10 people who walked in the store. It only caused stress and that stress made it more difficult to have a casual conversation with someone and get them to buy jeans. Keep in mind that my friend is currently employed at McDonalds and likes it better than his retail job. This just shows how personable management needs to be with their employees. They can’t just tell them to sell x amount of t shirts by the end of the day and go on with their own lives. It’s a relationship that takes a lot of mutual respect in order to work, and if there’s no relationship then there’s not going to be an employee for very long. And high

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