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A Corporate Code of Ethics?
Ethically Challenged asks: "Under the guise of recent legislation everyone at the publicly traded software company I work for is being asked to sign a 'Code of Business Conduct and Ethics'. In part, we have to swear to the following: we should not use company resources for any non-business purposes (I probably can't even write this); we must disclose to the CFO any relative that works for a customer, competitor or vendor; and, we are required to narc on coworkers who we suspect violate the code in any way. Are developers at other companies being asked to do this? Does it bother anyone that lowly workers like me are being asked to sign these things because executives are too immoral to behave themselves? Isn't all of this a colossal waste of time since most of it is common sense and it's pretty clear that the bad guys will ignore it anyway?" Most of this stuff sounds like the boilerplate protections most companies put in their employee agreements in the first place. Since you generally have to sign such agreements before you get your first paycheck, this new initiative seems rather redundant to me. Can someone more clued-in explain the justification behind this one?
"He didn't have to steal those plans like he was asked--in fact, it violates our code of ethics, and he would have promptly been helped, and his supervisor relieved." Yeah, and donkeys fly.
Sometimes you see companies doing this in order to make the rules more strict or to communicate to the employees that you are about to enforce them.
For example, we once had to sign a similar agreement about patents we held or had been granted at a previous job--even though we had already signed something similar when we came to work in the first place. (We were not granted any stock options unless we signed the new agreement.) The idea was that my current company wanted to ensure that their list was valid so that they would be justified in defending their own patents, or going after any that employees were granted during employment there.
It's just a lot easier to enforce an existing rule after you remind everyone that the rule is in place. That's why you hear around the holidays that the highway patrol will be cracking down on [insert your favorite violation, most often seat belt wearing where I'm from]. The law is already in place, and it is probably *possible* to enforce, but it is *easier* to enforce and subsequently prosecute if no one has an excuse of being ignorant of the law.
... a better model and more universally ethical would be for the US government to scrap the laws that made corporations "persons". All that did was obfuscate human responsibility. "Corporations" are allowed to pay "humans" profits-they get the fruits of their labors, but when it comes time to dispute some manner in court it becomes a "corporate" problem and it's extremely hard to pin down which exact "humans" are at fault or liable. Extremely hard. Magnify this by daisy chaining,especially offshore/internationally- where corporations are created on the fly on paper using yet again another front corporation of "lawyers" ad absurdum, so they can lease stuff to themselves, use one corporation to "lose" money at to avoid taxes, use another corporation to pay for "expenses" that regular old single individuals can't deduct as expenses, etc etc it becomes -enron and worldcom.
What they are doing now is a pre-CYA effort with these ethics agreements. It's already theoretically illegal to break the law. This contract agreement is duplicating what already exists in yet another fashion. It might have a marginal effect. It's "feel good" legislation and effort, a facade move.
What would be interesting is if employee "guilds" (can't use the U word, that is considered swearing in IT land for some weird reason) would band together and force employers to sign personal accountability statements with serious fines held in third party escrow accounts for violations of breach of contract with their employees, for instance for issuing orders that are illegal, insuring open honesty in accounting, promotions, business models, etc, but that ain't happening any time soon, the PHBs and cartel lobbyists (the PHB unions) and polytickshuns would through a hissy fit.
Go ahead and sign it. From then on, with every decision you make, ask yourself, "Is this good for the company?"
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
I suspect literally every person I work with of, at least, taking the occasional personal phone call or surfing the web. Thus, I would have to report everyone who works for my firm, presumably every day.
I wonder how many days it would take before they let me stop.
I Can't Believe It's A Law Firm, LLP does not necessarily endorse the contents of this message.
Walk by his office frequently until you catch him on a personal phone call. You'll be obligated to show him how stupid the new policy is. Better yet, if he fires you for pointing it out you'll probably have grounds for a lawsuit.
Would anyone EVER start any kind of busisness, if when it failed, or had an accident, they could be sued barefoot and out of thier own house? With corporations, there is less personal risk involved. If they did away with corporations, something else identical with a different name would pop up, or the entire worlds economy would die in about a day.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.