Business Ethics

GROUP - VII

Private Matter
of
Public Employee
Group Members:
1882081
1882091
1882101
1882111
1882127
1882138

1
 PREFACE
Ethics means the set of rules or principles that the organization should follow. While in the business
ethics refers to a code of conduct that businesses are expected to follow while doing a business. Through
ethics, a standard is set for the organization to regulate their behavior. This helps them in distinguishing
between the wrong and the right part of the businesses. Code of conduct is another term that is used
extensively in businesses nowadays. It is a set of rules that are considered as binding by the people
working in the organization. Business ethics compromises of all these values and principles and helps in
guiding the behavior in the organizations. Businesses should have a balance between the needs of the
stakeholders and their desire to make profits.
Ethics and law are not the same. The distinction between them can be envisioned and explained from
multiple perspectives: from the viewpoint of law, from the viewpoint of ethics, or even from an
external viewpoint. Each of these perspectives, in their turn, open up several possible points of view.
Law's perspective, for instance, can be understood in at least in two ways: as normativity (or applicable
legislation), or as the production of secure or stable legal bonds. This contribution is concerned with
what happens when ethics and law are not distinguished but, on the contrary, merged, amalgamated,
fused, and when the notion of privacy is caught up in such coalescence.

We are very glad to present our project on “Private Matter of Public Employee”.

This project is a modest attempt to draw the concept of ethics and values and analyse their relevance
in the field of privacy of a public employee with reference to business ethics.

2
 CONTENTS
 Introduction
 Chapter 1: Legal Duties and Responsibilities of Employee
Representatives
 Chapter 2: Ethical Code of Practice
 Chapter 3: What is Privacy?
 Chapter 4: Employment Privacy Rights
 Ethical Gap
 Conclusion

3
 INTRODUCTION
The ethical and legal dimensions of privacy are sometimes clearly defined. One of the most
illustrative embodiments of the distinction between ethics and law in relation to privacy is probably
the figure of the ethical hacker. Hackers are, by definition, people using computers to gain
unauthorised access to data, and thus responsible for unlawful activities that can be legally described
as encroachments on others' privacy. This, however, is not perceived as an obstacle to the idea that
their actions might nonetheless be regarded as ethical, or morally correct, at least from the hackers'
perspective. Crucially, in many cases hackers will argue that, by unlawfully interfering with the
privacy rights of some, they are actually aiming to put on the table the need for effective privacy
protection for many, and to bring to the light potentially dangerous vulnerabilities. They invoke the
same kind of relation between means and end as the hero who steals to honestly redistribute wealth.
The notion of the ethical hacker thus encapsulates the possibility to deal with divergent conceptions
of privacy, and to accept that what is from a legal perspective privacy-compliant is not necessarily
something that, from an ethical perspective, can be described as ethically sound. Is privacy to be
regarded as a legal issue? Or is privacy an ethical issue? Is it maybe both Are privacy issues
something to be found in legislation besides potential ethical and societal issues, which are thus also
elements of legislation?

The implications of the tendency to mix up ethical and legal considerations of privacy are many.
Some of them could be described as strategically disadvantageous, insofar as the amalgamation of
ethics and law ties them both to a category of issues that is not only ill-defined, but also consistently
granted a secondary role in research agendas. In the area of security research, this recurrent blending
translates into a de facto downgrading of both ethical and legal issues to a non-security, and thus
inessential, peripheral category of aspects. In this marginal set of issues, ethics and law might as well
coexist with any other similarly shadowy matters, ranging from often fuzzy ‘social’ aspects to any
‘related’ issues that ‘related’ researchers might deemed fit to consider. Their eventual relevance is in
any case in a way pre-empted by their placement at the margins of the research agenda, where the
sharpness of disciplinary contours does not particularly matter. Additionally, the risk of ending up
with only a consideration of ethical issues instead of legal issues, or the opposite, is high.

4
 Chapter 1: Legal Duties and
Responsibilities of Employee
Representatives
Section 42 of the Industrial Relations Act 1990 makes provision for the preparation of draft codes of practice by the
Labour Relations Commission for submission to the Minister for Enterprise and Employment. The main purpose of
this Code of Practice is to set out for the guidance of employers, employees and trade unions the duties and
responsibilities of employee representatives (frequently referred to in trade union rule books and employer/trade
union agreements as shop stewards) and the protection and facilities which should be afforded them in order to enable
them to carry out their duties in an effective and constructive manner.

When preparing this Code of Practice, the Commission held meetings and consultations with the Irish Congress of
Trade Unions and the Irish Business and Employers Confederation. It also consulted with the Departments of
Enterprise and Employment and Finance. The Commission has taken account of the views expressed by these
organisations to the maximum extent possible in preparing this Code. It has also had regard to the procedures and
practices applied in undertakings and establishments which have pursued sound industrial relations policies and to
the provisions of trade union rule books.

The principal duties and responsibilities of employee representatives include -

a) representing members fairly and effectively in relation to matters arising within the undertaking or establishment
in which they work and which concern employment and conditions of employment

b) participating in negotiation and grievance procedures as provided for in employer/trade union agreements or in
accordance with recognised custom and practice in the undertaking or establishment in which they work

c) co-operating with the management of the undertaking or establishment in ensuring the proper implementation and
observance of employer/trade union agreements, the use of agreed dispute and grievance procedures and the
avoidance of any action, especially unofficial action, which would be contrary to such agreements or procedures and
which would affect the continuity of operations or services

d) acting in accordance with existing laws and regulations, the rules of the union and good industrial relations
practice; liaising with and seeking advice and assistance from the appropriate full-time trade union official

e) having regard at all times to the safe and efficient operation of the undertaking or establishment

f) subject to any other arrangements made between an employer and a trade union, employee representatives should
conform to the same job performance standards, company rules, disciplinary conditions and other conditions of
employment as comparable employees in the undertaking or establishment in which they work.

5
 Chapter 2: Ethical code of
Practice
A code of ethics is a guide of principles designed to help professionals conduct business honestly and with
integrity. A code of ethics document may outline the mission and values of the business or organization, how
professionals are supposed to approach problems, the ethical principles based on the organization's core values and
the standards to which the professional is held. A code of ethics, also referred to as an "ethical code," may
encompass areas such as business ethics, a code of professional practice and an employee code of conduct.

Both businesses and trade organizations typically have some sort of code of ethics that their employees or members
are supposed to follow. Breaking the code of ethics can result in termination or dismissal from the organization. A
code of ethics is important because it clearly lays out the rules for behaviour and provides the groundwork for a
pre-emptive warning.

Regardless of size, businesses count on their management staff to set a standard of ethical conduct for other
employees to follow. When administrators adhere to the code of ethics, it sends a message that universal
compliance is expected of every employee.

Compliance-Based Code of Ethics

For all businesses, laws regulate issues such as hiring and safety standards. Compliance-based codes of ethics not
only set guidelines for conduct, but also determine penalties for violations.

In some industries, including banking, specific laws govern business conduct. These industries formulate
compliance-based codes of ethics to enforce laws and regulations. Employees usually undergo formal training to
learn the rules of conduct. Because noncompliance can create legal issues for the company as a whole, individual
worker within a firm may face penalties for failing to follow guidelines.

To ensure that the aims and principles of the code of ethics are followed, some companies appoint a compliance
officer. This individual is tasked with keeping up to date on changes in regulation codes and monitoring employee
conduct to encourage conformity.

This type of code of ethics is based on clear-cut rules and well-defined consequences rather than individual
monitoring of personal behaviour. Therefore, despite strict adherence to the law, some compliance-based codes of
conduct do not promote a climate of moral responsibility within the company.

Value-Based Code of Ethics

A value-based code of ethics addresses a company's core value system. It may outline standards of responsible
conduct as they relate to the larger good and the environment. Value-based ethical codes may require a greater
degree of self-regulation than compliance-based codes.

Some codes of conduct contain language that addresses both compliance and values. For example, a grocery store
chain might create a code of conduct that espouses the company's commitment to health and safety regulations
above financial gain. That grocery chain might also include a statement about refusing to contract with suppliers
that feed hormones to livestock or raise animals in inhumane living conditions.

6
 Chapter 3: What is Privacy?
Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves, or information about themselves, and thereby
express themselves selectively. The boundaries and content of what is considered private differ among cultures and
individuals, but share common themes. When something is private to a person, it usually means that something is
inherently special or sensitive to them. The domain of privacy partially overlaps with security (confidentiality),
which can include the concepts of appropriate use, as well as protection of information. Privacy may also take the
form of bodily integrity.
The right not to be subjected to unsanctioned invasions of privacy by the government, corporations or individuals is
part of many countries' privacy laws, and in some cases, constitutions. All countries have laws which in some way
limit privacy. An example of this would be law concerning taxation, which normally requires the sharing of
information about personal income or earnings. In some countries individual privacy may conflict with freedom of
speech laws and some laws may require public disclosure of information which would be considered private in other
countries and cultures. This was a major concern in the United States, with the Supreme Court passage of Citizens
United.
Privacy may be voluntarily sacrificed, normally in exchange for perceived benefits and very often with specific
dangers and losses, although this is a very strategic view of human relationships. For example, people may be ready
to reveal their name, if that allows them to promote trust by others and thus build meaningful social relations.
Research shows that people are more willing to voluntarily sacrifice privacy if the data gatherer is seen to be
transparent as to what information is gathered and how it is used. In the business world, a person may volunteer
personal details (often for advertising purposes) in order to gamble on winning a prize.

Chapter 4: Employment
Privacy Rights
Employee privacy rights are the rules that limit how extensively an employer can search an employee’s possessions
or person; monitor their actions, speech, or correspondence; and know about their personal lives, especially but not
exclusively in the workplace. The nature and extent of these protections have become a greater concern in recent
years, especially with the rise of the internet and social media. Many of these means of communication may seem
private, but in truth, there is hardly any real privacy to be had with them. Employers can usually search through
anything that appears on company computers, and they can conduct searches of social media and the internet, as
well.
Employment law covers all the obligations and rights concerning the employer-employee relationship, regardless if
one is a current employee, former employee, or job applicant. This type of law involves legal issues
including wrongful termination, discrimination, workplace safety, taxation, and wages. Many of these issues are
governed by applicable federal and state law. Where the employment relationship is based on a valid contract made
between the employer and employee, state contract law alone may dictate the rights and duties of the parties
involved. The rights of public employees, on the other hand, may differ from the rights of private employees.

7
Employees may have subjective expectations of privacy due to passwords, information segregation, or the use of
electronic lockboxes, but an employer’s policies may eliminate any objective expectation of privacy, and some
technology might simply not be considered private. Because laws related to employee’s privacy expectations have
not caught up with the technology available to employers, privacy claims have to be evaluated carefully case-by-
case within the workplace.
Employee privacy rights include an employee’s activities at work and personal information, but company policy will
often dictate those rights. Technology lets employers keep tabs on many aspects of employee workplace activity.
Numerous kinds of monitoring are legal, and most employers do monitor their employees’ activities on some level.
Many technologies allow employers to observer their employees’ "digital footprints" and thereby gain insight into
employee behaviour. Nearly any activity on your office computer can be monitored, almost completely without
regulation. The employer may watch, read, and listen to most of the employee's workplace communications.
Employees should remember that when they use an employer's equipment, there expectations of privacy should be
limited.

Internet and Email Privacy at Work

Since employers typically don't have the time or resources to monitor every employee, they often block access to
websites deemed irrelevant to the work at hand or improper in general, or they use tracking software that alerts
them to violations. Employers can also use various programs that let them see their employee’s screen in real time
or what is in the employees' hard drives and computer terminals. Employers can also keep tabs on internet usage,
including email, which includes private messages sent outside the context of work. While it may not be checked
regularly, it is often archived in case it must be searched later. Additional monitoring includes technology that
tracks idle time at the terminal and how many keystrokes an hour each employee performs, the latter of which can
even show if employees are below or above the expected number of keystrokes.

Video Surveillance and Employee Privacy

Companies have the right to monitor their employees by camera, including in a parking structure for both security
and employee safety. However, employers are required to notify employees, customers, and all others in range of
the cameras that their property is under video surveillance. By law, video recordings must not include audio, as this
violates federal wiretap law regarding oral communications.

Drug Testing
Companies have the right to test their employees for drugs and alcohol, but records of these tests cannot be legally
released, and many states restrict an employer's ability to enforce drug screening of existing employees. There are a
few exceptions, however, and they include:
 Employees working in jobs that carry substantial safety or health risks for themselves or others.
 Injured employees whose job-related accident is suspected to have involved the use of drugs.
 Employees suspected of using drugs on the job, such as slurred speech or bloodshot eyes.

Policies regarding the when, how, and why of these tests do not fall under law enforcement. That said, any
company should clearly state its drug policy to protect itself from lawsuits.

Monitoring of Social Media

Numerous companies have policies regarding social media that restrict what the employee can post about the
employer on social networking sites. Compliance Building is a website that provides a database of social media
policies for many companies. In some states, there are laws that bar employers from punishing an employee
because of activity on social networking sites outside of company time, unless said activity can be shown to be
damaging to the company. Generally, posts that refer to work can be considered damaging, and so should be
avoided by employees.

8
 ETHICAL GAP
Law, as a practice, as a regime, as a mode of existence, or even as a social system, actually does not coexist with
other practices, regimes, modes, or social systems. They do however highlight that law can only grab things
legally. From this viewpoint, studying privacy from a legal perspective is not about identifying lists of binding
norms, sets of principles, or series of sources that determine what must be done. It is not about focusing on the
norms that must be imperatively respected. It is rather about assessing how law grasps privacy issues, giving
special attention to the hermeneutic specificity of this seizing, as well as to the distance that separates this seizing
from other ways of grasping issues, such as ethics. In other words, practising law is always about anticipating how
and what a judge might decide when confronted with the issue at stake, knowing at the same time that it is
impossible to predict what will be decided.

Law cannot be concerned with anything else than law. Of course, we might take a step outside, and adopt an
external viewpoint from which we venture to understand how law as a practice interacts with other practices.
Nonetheless, from a legal perspective, such interaction can only be apprehended as something that still happens in
law.

From a legal perspective, the ethical hacker is not ethical, or unethical, or even a hacker, but the legal subject to
which are attributed some unlawful actions. In the opposite sense, from an ethical perspective it will never be
possible to assess the legality of the actions of the ethical hacker, because that would require entering the realm of
law by adopting its own constraints.

Embracing the distinctiveness of law and ethics as different practices, regimes, modes of existence, or even social
systems, opens up the question of how to conceive of their coexistence. Thus, there are different modes of
existence of privacy, and the notion will have different meanings depending on such mode. Sometimes such
differences are particularly manifest, and almost palpably linked to the keynote or character of the mode. In this
sense, some descriptions of privacy in law may depict it as a means at the disposal a claimant; in ethics, it is
possible to underline it constitutes a value necessary for emancipation, or for introspection; in politics, still another
mode of existence, privacy can be depicted as a residual area of freedom, self-determination and autonomy, where
individuals are protected against steering of conduct by the State and by others. But even when conceptions from
different modes of existence appear to meet each other, or even overlap, they remain separate.

Disentangling practices and modes of existence obliges to recognise the permanent existence of a gap, a
discontinuity between them. Different modes of existence are never fully coincidental. Privacy can only be reached
by one of the existing paths, or by creating a new road, but that in any case to move from one path to another one
will be forced to jump. When one moves from the study of privacy as a legal issue to its study as an ethical issue, a
gap is crossed, and in this crossing the parameters of the study are altered. Crossing the gaps is however to a
certain extent also a way of folding, or of opening up to the possibility of new knowledge, as long as the reality of
the gap and the folding are recognised.

9
 CONCLUSION
Case Study:
Dev Anand is working as an under Secretary in the pension department. One day, his friend GuruDutt, an SBI PO,
narrates following incident:
For last two years, a retired Government employee Mr. Ashok Kumar is giving away 30% of his monthly pension
to Mrs. Bindu Chopra every month through cheque. I found Mrs.Bindu Chopra happens to be the wife of Mr. Prem
Chopra, a section officer in the pension office under you (Dev Anand). I feel something is fishy- may be this is part
of a large bribe scam where senior citizens are forced to pay money to clear their pension files from Prem Chopra,
and have to submit bribes in his wife’s account.
DevAnand visits Mr. Ashok Kumar’s house but he is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, unable to give coherent
answers. Frustrated Dev Anand directly confronts Prem Chopra. But Prem says “Mr.Ashok Kumar was a friend of
my father. He has no relatives or children and my wife Bindu has been taking care of him like daughter since a
long time. Therefore, Mr.Ashok Kumar gives us money out of good will, so we can send our son to an expensive IIT
coaching class @Kota, Rajasthan. Besides this is a personal family matter and none of your damn business.”

Keeping in mind the legal perspective of the duties and responsibilities of an employee, we think Dev Anand
should not have involved himself in the above matter as the fact that Mr. Ashok is giving away 30% of his monthly
pension to Mrs. Bindu Chopra is entirely his personal matter and is in no way interfering with the Company. Had
this contribution of money been in any way threatening to the organization, Dev Anand’s involvement would have
been justified.

However, from the ethical point of view, what Dev Anand did can be correct as he was trying to help Mr. Akash
Chopra. He had a good intention and moreover he did not hurt anyone in the process.

So, in any situation, the decision made by an employee can be legally correct and morally incorrect or vice-versa.
The employee needs to properly understand what are the duties and responsibilities that he needs to fulfill and act
accordingly, with his values and morals guiding his decisions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books:
 Corporate Governance, Dr. Neeru Vasisth
 Business Ethics, S Prabhakaran

Web:
 http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/mobile/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195370805.001.0001/acprof-
9780195370805-chapter-14
 https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/off-duty-conduct-employee-rights-33590.html
 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/career-advice/experts/lines-blurred-between-
employees-work-and-private-life/article21388887/
 https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/employee-privacy-during-off-work-hours.html

10