With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1332052
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 BCBUSINESS 19 ISTOCK ( the informer ) Y ou're a large business with an international clientele. You've landed a lucrative contract with a government accused of human rights violations. Your employees oppose this move—and have made their displeasure known. Do you take the deal? So your staff have "con- cerns" about a new client, eh? Listen, you're not in this to win any popularity contests. You pay the peons to keep their noses to the grindstone and their opinions to themselves. This isn't a group therapy ses- sion! Business is business. And you call the shots. Am I right? In an extremely limited sense, that's true: a corpora- tion is not a democracy. But neither is it a totalitarian dic- tatorship, or some holdover from the early Industrial Revo- lution, when human capital was an expendable commod- ity and workers mere factory fodder in the unbridled pur- suit of profit. From the drones at Facebook, who rebelled at facilitating White House disinformation campaigns, to locally based Hootsuite, whose staff grew positively owly at the prospect of getting between the sheets with U.S. Immigration and Customs En- forcement ( ICE), employees are increasingly expecting that the organizations for which they toil hew to baseline ethical standards—profit be damned. Basically, it's the new lay of the land. "Companies hire people, and people have moral judgment," says David Silver, Chair in Business and Profes- sional Ethics at UBC Sauder School of Business. "You're morally bound as a manager to listen to the people in your organization to see what their concerns are." This doesn't suggest that employers are obliged to bend to their employees' will. It does, however, mean that they should give valid objections a fair hearing. But what happens if they're still determined to ink the deal? "The answer is, 'You know what? We're go- ing to do this anyway—here's why,'" Silver says. If the em- ployee can't accept the situa- tion, emphasize that they're highly valued but that if they feel they have to resign, they can leave with "a great letter" of recommendation in hand, he adds. Increasingly, though, a com- pany's ethical positioning is critical not just for workers but also for those who choose to buy—or not buy—what it's sell- ing. (That juicy contract might come back to bite you, by way of odious PR.) But when does providing a good or service to morally suspect organizations cross a line? "That's a good question," Silver says. "First off, there are cases where you clearly would be aiding and abetting human rights violations." Context is key. Is the con- tract facilitating the abuse? Mitigating it? Or is there no significant tie-in at all? There's very little grey area when it comes to providing riot equipment or weapons to an oppressive regime, say, or building detention centres used to jail and torture politi- cal opponents. However, says Silver, some situations are more complex: selling a rogue regime medicine, for example. "So that would be a difference in kind." Perhaps more textured still is the often dubious claim that nurturing relationships with human rights abusers could eventually bring about changes in behaviour. Take Google's tol- erance of censorship in China as quid pro quo for doing busi- ness there. "They've had those conversations," Silver notes of the tech giant. "'Do we engage, or do we withdraw when they tell us to censor our results?' And so in a way, you're part of the oppression, right?" (The fact that Google has quietly dropped the longtime directive "Don't be evil" from its code of conduct is interesting, at least.) The interconnected nature of the global economy compli- cates things further. Do you boycott a South Korean–made computer if a critical compo- nent was constructed with Russian palladium? Do you toss your subscription to the Globe and Mail because its sister company provides information services to ICE? The choice is ours, but the wickets are sticky and the rabbit holes run deep. "We cannot be involved in this economy and be morally pure," Silver says, "but that's not the goal." (Fictional scenario. Not in- tended as legal advice.) n S H I F T H A P P E N S Foreign Affairs When employees accuse their own company of bad behaviour, management had better listen—to a point by Guy Saddy