2 Understanding Ethical and Legal Considerations

Your Ethical Obligations

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Your Ethical Obligations

In addition to enjoying rights, an employee assumes obligations, which can form a clear and reasonable framework for discussing the ethics of technical communication. The following discussion outlines three sets of obligations that you have as an employee: to your employer, to the public, and to the environment.

OBLIGATIONS TO YOUR EMPLOYER

You are hired to further your employer’s legitimate aims and to refrain from any activities that run counter to those aims. Specifically, you have five obligations:

Competence and diligence. Competence refers to your skills; you should have the training and experience to do the job adequately. Diligence simply means hard work. Unfortunately, in a recent survey of 10,000 workers, the typical worker wastes nearly two hours of his or her eight-hour day surfing the web, socializing with co-workers, and doing other tasks unrelated to his or her job (Malachowski, 2013).
Generosity. Although generosity might sound like an unusual obligation, you are obligated to help your co-workers and stakeholders outside your organization by sharing your knowledge and expertise. What this means is that if you are asked to respond to appropriate questions or provide recommendations on some aspect of your organization’s work, you should do so. If a customer or supplier contacts you, make the time to respond helpfully. Generosity shows professionalism and furthers your organization’s goals.
Honesty and candor. You should not steal from your employer. Stealing includes such practices as embezzlement, “borrowing” office supplies, and padding expense accounts. Candor means truthfulness; you should report to your employer problems that might threaten the quality or safety of the organization’s product or service.
Issues of honesty and candor include what Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, calls trimming, cooking, and forging (Sigma Xi, 2000, p. 11). Trimming is the smoothing of irregularities to make research data look extremely accurate and precise. Cooking is retaining only those results that fit the theory and discarding the others. And forging is inventing some or all of the data or even reporting experiments that were never performed. In carrying out research, employees must resist any pressure to report only positive findings.
Confidentiality. You should not divulge company business outside of the company. If a competitor finds out that your company is planning to introduce a new product, it might introduce its own version of that product, robbing you of your competitive advantage. Many other kinds of privileged information—such as information on quality-control problems, personnel matters, relocation or expansion plans, and financial restructuring—also could be used against the company. A well-known confidentiality problem involves insider information: an employee who knows about a development that will increase (or decrease) the value of the company’s stock, for example, buys (or sells) the stock before the information is made public, thus unfairly—and illegally—reaping a profit (or avoiding a loss).
Read more about whistle-blowing.

Loyalty. You should act in the employer’s interest, not in your own. Therefore, it is unethical to invest heavily in a competitor’s stock, because that could jeopardize your objectivity and judgment. For the same reason, it is unethical (and illegal) to accept bribes or kickbacks. It is unethical to devote considerable time to moonlighting (performing an outside job, such as private consulting), because the outside job could lead to a conflict of interest and because the heavy workload could make you less productive in your primary position. However, you do not owe your employer absolute loyalty; if your employer is acting unethically, you have an obligation to try to change that behavior—even, if necessary, by blowing the whistle.

OBLIGATIONS TO THE PUBLIC

Every organization that offers products or provides services is obligated to treat its customers fairly. As a representative of an organization, and especially as an employee communicating technical information, you will frequently confront ethical questions.

In general, an organization is acting ethically if its product or service is both safe and effective. The product or service must not injure or harm the consumer, and it must fulfill its promised function. However, these commonsense principles provide little guidance in dealing with the complicated ethical problems that arise routinely.

According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission a, more than 4,500 deaths and 14 million injuries occur each year in the United States because of consumer products—not counting automobiles and medications. Even more common, of course, are product and service failures: products or services don’t do what they are supposed to do, products are difficult to assemble or operate, they break down, or they require more expensive maintenance than the product information indicates.

Who is responsible for injuries and product failures: the company that provides the product or service or the consumer who purchases it? In individual cases, blame is sometimes easy enough to determine. A person who operates a chainsaw without reading the safety information and without seeking any instruction in how to use it is to blame for any injuries caused by the normal operation of the saw. But a manufacturer that knows that the chain on the saw is liable to break under certain circumstances and fails to remedy this problem or warn the consumer is responsible for any resulting accidents.

Unfortunately, these principles do not outline a rational theory that can help companies understand how to act ethically in fulfilling their obligations to the public. Today, most court rulings are based on the premise that the manufacturer knows more about its products than the consumer does and therefore has a greater responsibility to make sure the products comply with all of the manufacturer’s claims and are safe. Therefore, in designing, manufacturing, testing, and communicating about a product, the manufacturer has to make sure the product will be safe and effective when used according to the instructions. However, the manufacturer is not liable when something goes wrong that it could not have foreseen or prevented.

OBLIGATIONS TO THE ENVIRONMENT

One of the most important lessons we have learned in recent decades is that we are polluting and depleting our limited natural resources at an unacceptably high rate. Our excessive use of fossil fuels not only deprives future generations of them but also causes possibly irreversible pollution problems, such as global warming. Everyone—government, businesses, and individuals—must work to preserve the environment to ensure the survival not only of our own species but also of the other species with which we share the planet.

But what does this have to do with you? In your daily work, you probably do not cause pollution or deplete the environment in any extraordinary way. Yet you will often know how your organization’s actions affect the environment. For example, if you work for a manufacturing company, you might be aware of the environmental effects of making or using your company’s products. Or you might help write an environmental impact statement.

As communicators, we should treat every actual or potential occurrence of environmental damage seriously. We should alert our supervisors to the situation and work with them to try to reduce the damage. The difficulty, of course, is that protecting the environment can be expensive. Clean fuels usually cost more than dirty ones. Disposing of hazardous waste properly costs more (in the short run) than merely dumping it. Organizations that want to reduce costs may be tempted to cut corners on environmental protection.