Question

Skill sets for manufacturing workers are changing rapidly as manual labor is being replaced with employee-assisted manufacturing robots. Rather than hire new workers, a company chooses to invest in a skill-based pay plan that will tie pay increases to successfully learning new skills. The cost of the training system is significantly higher than anticipated, causing the company to limit access to training. The company decides to limit participation to workers who joined the company upon completing high school (age 18) and who have fewer than 15 years with the company. This decision excludes a large segment of the workforce who have substantially higher seniority, particularly those with more than 25 years of seniority.

Questions:

1. 5-9. What would you do? (Hint: Review the material in Chapter 2, Learning Objective 2-5.)

2. 5-10. What factor(s) in this ethical dilemma might influence a person to make a less-than-ethical decision?

Answer 1

5-9

Since the skill sets required are changing rapidly, then it is important to provide access to the training platforms so that they can learn new skills and or update existing skills. For this, there is a need to take different initiatives. The first initiative is to organized skill enhancement programs for the affected workers after the working hours and it is to be made mandatorily for the employees who have limited access to the training platform acquired by the company. This exercise will incur cost to the company, but it will also bring additional revenues as workers will learn new skills or update their existing skills to enhance productivity and efficiency. The second initiative will be to develop internet based new skills learning program that can be accessed from any where and it is a flexible program. Each employee who is not able to access the expensive system, will get the access to it via login credentials. It will be mandatory again to learn new skills in designated period and pass the e-x-a-m to be considered as successful completion of new skill learning program. It will bring more revenues or benefits than the cost to be incurred and provide everyone, an opportunity to learn new skills, gain higher incentives and remain productive for the organization.

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5-10

The first factor is focus upon reducing cost and it is the pressure by the top management that is to be considered as an important reason of giving increment to myself. It will cause, take less than ethical decisions. The second factor is long term relations with the highly experienced employees and their influence in the decision making process that make, me take decisions in their favor. It will be less than unethical decisions. The third factor is taking decisions that is preferred by the company's management. It will cause take the decision that will suit to the company, but not an ethical decision.