Question

An employee has come to you with a request to take on a part-time job. The employee would be working for Price Waterhouse as a contract employee during tax season. The employee has assured you that she will not work more than 20 hours a week, primarily on weekends. Price-Waterhouse is one of the five accounting firms that has put a bid in to do the auditing for G-BioSport.

Possible Solutions:

Allow the accountant to work as long as a confidentiality agreement is signed.

Allow the accountant to work as long as the company does not choose PW for the audit work.

Do not allow the accountant to work for PW or any other accounting auditing company but do allow other part-time work.

Do not change the policy and allow the employee to work with no strings attached.

Now, using the tool of reflective equilibrium, which option gives the best advantage to the least advantage without unduly burdening those who are the most advantaged. Which option best meets this requirement. Discuss why the other options do not maintain reflective equilibrium as well.

Answer 1

Reflective equilibrium is basically choosing one belief out of a set of beliefs by mutual adjustment among various principles and judgements.

Now, in this question the option that gives the best advantage to the concerned person is 'option 1'. Here, the accountant is allowed to work part-time with the company and Price Waterhouse, both. The only thing that is done is to get a confidentiality agreement signed from the employee. This helps in stopping the accountant from furnishing any information to PW legally, and his is the best possible way. Even if the clause is broken by the employee, the liability in such a case would his and he would suffer a big loss of being fired from the job and dragged to the court. Hence the risk is reduced a lot.

In second option the company loses out on a good auditing company just because a part-time employee of theirs is working with PW too. This neither seems logical nor fair.

I third option, the concerned person would be stripped off working for a good company and hence doesn't seem fair, and in no way is this option a legal way to handle the situation.

Option 4 puts the company in a loss-loss situation and hence should be avoided.