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Decent Work: The Moral Status of Labor in Human Resource Management

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Abstract

In this paper, I aim to critically examine a set of assumptions that pervades human resource management and HR practices. I shall argue that they experience a remarkable ethics deficit, explain why this is so, and explore how the UN Global Compact labor principles may help taking ethics seriously in HRM. This paper contributes to the understanding and critical examination of the undisclosed beliefs underlying theory and practice in human resource management and to the examination of how the UN Global Compact’s ideal of “decent work” may offer some promising avenues for the development of ethics in HRM.

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Notes

  1. The United Nations Global Compact (UNGC hereafter) is a principle-based framework used to conduct business while meeting fundamental responsibilities in the domain of human rights, labor, environment, and anti-corruption.

  2. A recent UNGC’s Good Practice Note (2014) warns companies that in order to meet their corporate responsibility to promote and realize decent work they should decide how to organize the human rights function internally “to effectively drive the process of embedding respect for human (including labor) rights.” https://www.unglobalcompact.org/library/921.

  3. The intended contribution of this paper lies at the level of the ideas and ideals underlying HRM rather than at the level of the implementation of the UNGC labor principles, which has been thoroughly reviewed in recent special issues of Business Ethics Quarterly (Vol. 21, No. 1), Business and Society (Vol. 52, No. 1), and Journal of Business Ethics (Vol. 122, No. 2), among others. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this clarification.

  4. http://www.shrm.org/Research/SurveyFindings/Pages/CorporateEthicsSocialResponsibility.aspx.

  5. http://www.shrm.org/Research/SurveyFindings/Articles/Pages/EthicslandscapeinAmerica.aspx.

  6. A careful reading of the most influential publications in HRM suggests these five principles. But, typically, these “undisclosed assumptions” are not explicitly discussed or argued for. Rather, they are taken for granted as the starting point of HRM theories. They may be considered to be so obvious that they do not need to be defended.

  7. Georgescu, P. “Capitalists, Arise: We Need to Deal With Income Inequality” The New York Times, August 7, 2015. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/opinion/sunday/capitalists-arise-we-need-to-deal-with-income-inequality.html.

  8. “Inequality and Its Perils”, The National Journal, 09/28/2012.

  9. A serious discussion of this issue goes beyond the scope of this paper but see Arrow (1973) and Stiglitz (1989).

  10. Again, I cannot do justice to the issue of labor market failures here but see Cohen (1985) and Pindyck and Rubinfeld (2001).

  11. Some scholars argue against workplace democracy appealing to what they consider important disanalogies between the polity and the firm, in terms of different costs of exit, levels of consent (whether they are voluntary associations or not), asymmetric management skills and knowledge, and alienability of voice and decision-making power. See Narveson (1992) and Mayer (2000).

  12. The eight Core Labor Conventions are: (1) Freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining (Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize Convention No. 87, 1948; Right to Organize and Collective Bargaining Convention No. 98, 1949); (2) Forced Labor (Forced Labor Convention No. 29, 1930; Abolition of Forced Labor Convention No. 105, 1957); (3) Child Labor (Minimum Age Convention No. 138, 1973; Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention No. 182, 1999); and (4) Discrimination in Respect of Employment and Occupation (Equal Remuneration Convention No. 100, 1951; Discrimination [Employment and Occupation] Convention No. 111, 1958).

  13. Available at http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/lang--en/index.htm.

  14. This has resulted in a loss of public trust and support from important constituencies in civil society to the point that some authors suggest the UNGC should admit the problem and dissolve itself (Sethi and Schepers 2014).

  15. “Bolivia's child labour law shames us all” The Guardian, July 25, 2014. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/jul/25/bolivia-child-labour-law-exploitation-slavery.

  16. https://www.unglobalcompact.org/what-is-gc/our-work/social/labour.

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Alzola, M. Decent Work: The Moral Status of Labor in Human Resource Management. J Bus Ethics 147, 835–853 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3507-5

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