COMPROMISING STANDARDS: A VITAL FORCE DEADENING THE MORAL ETIQUETTE IN THE NATION.

INTRODUCTION

Both individuals and organizations ought to comply with widely accepted moral and ethical principles in the society. In order for any organization to be viable, sustainable, long term profitable and socially responsible, the shareholders, leaders, employees, including safety managers, ought to embrace these principles. Findings from general society, governance, government, regulators, organizations, health research, companies, human resources management, software development and health and safety management suggest that the distinction between what is good and what is bad starts from values. Values relevant to society are the respect for human life, privacy, dignity, freedom, fairness, truth, reciprocity, safety, security and common good.

Ethical Principles Important for Health and Safety:

The need for safety is not being debated now and is not expected to be in the future. As Hollnagel puts it: “That safety is important needs little argumentation”. There is a broad consensus on what safety is about. At the core of safety-related ethics is the notion of “not wanting to see anybody hurt”. This notion is taken up in several international declarations, charters and covenants

Ethical Concerns and Issues in Safety Management:

There are many more ethical concerns and issues affecting safety though. Frequently mentioned are: the provision of safe and risk resilient workplaces and avoiding societal harm, ethical cost-benefit analysis, consent to risk and ethical aspects of paying workers extra for more risky work.

Misconduct and Transgression Types:

Several types of misconduct and transgression are reported in literature. Immoral and unethical conduct might be found in many places in organizations relevant to health, safety and environment, e.g. providing unsafe workplaces, using poor research study designs or fabricated data, euphemistic labelling, presenting false information about services, paying workers more to let them follow a more risky and more profitable procedure, underestimating or ignoring risks, creating incentives for unethical conduct, and pursuing personal gain.

Wrong or Misleading Information:

Both individuals and organizations can engage in working with faulty study design, wrong test subjects, too few samples, poor statistics, fabricated results, misinterpretation, biased conclusions, administrative process flaws, poor risk assessments, wrong handling of uncertainty, misinforming stakeholders and poor uniformity. Examples are: false descriptions of goods or services, false price indications, less weight than stated being delivered, poor food safety, substandard product quality, poor hygiene and incorrect labelling.

Reducing Moral Awareness:

Organizations can engage in reframing of moral consequences of damaging behaviors and dampening moral awareness among employees, which is used to reduce the uneasy feeling among workers when a company is transgressing. This effect can be achieved by using Bandura’s eight mechanisms of moral disengagement:

1. Moral Justification

2. Euphemistic Labelling

3. Advantageous comparison

4. Displacement of responsibility

5. Diffusion of responsibility

Workers Risk Exposure:

Companies might be presenting employees, third party workers or the general public with unsafe workplaces, health and safety risks or environmental hazards. Allowing the people involved remain ignorant about such risks is often mentioned in literature. This involves informing them about the hazardous nature of chemicals.

Fraudulent Practices:

There are many ways fraudulent actions can affect safety, and harm people and the environment. Examples are bid cutting, bid shopping, bribery, bullying, carelessness, collusive tendering, facilitation payments, corruption, cover pricing, deceptive practices, discrimination, dishonest actuations, dishonest social behaviour, environmental fraud, exert pressure to win at all costs, financial irregularities, artificially inflate profits misrepresentation, negligence, racial discrimination, sexual harassment, under bidding, extortion and withdrawal of tender.

Countermeasures:

Many of the sources found mention countermeasures. These are presented in a variety of ways and aim at a variety of aspects. Six interconnected groups of measures emerge:

1. Ethical management policy.

2. Ethical leadership.

3. Ethical risk assessment.

4. Ethical climate.

5. Ethical decision making.

6. Ethical behaviour.

WRITTEN BY: MICHAEL