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Ethical Decisions in the Workplace
After reading your background readings, please review the following scenario and address the questions at the end.
Jerry Stevens heads up an excavation crew for the municipal utilities
district in a city in Nebraska. A sewer line needs to be replaced and it
has been excavated with a back-hoe. The trench is 7 feet deep. The
municipality’s safety rules indicate that employees should not go into
the trench without a trench box. This rule is to prevent employees from
being buried if the trench walls collapse. People die every year from
trench cave-ins.
The trench box won’t arrive on site for another 6 hours and the city
promised residents that the sewer would be fixed by the end of the day,
which now seems impossible. The City Administrator called Jerry on his
cell phone and indicated that it was imperative that the sewer be fixed
as soon as conceivably possible because a City Council member is served
by that sewer line and will raise a fuss if it’s not fixed by the
promised time.
One of the more experienced workers states, “It’s only going to take 30
minutes to dig under the pipe and loosen the fittings. We don’t need the
trench box. We used to do this all the time before we were required to
use one of those darn things.”
Jerry knows he’s right. He used to do it himself before the rule was put
in place. Also, the soil is clearly a cohesive soil and it’s highly
unlikely that it will collapse. And although there is an organizational
policy to use a trench box for trenches deeper than 5 feet, the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) does not have
jurisdiction over municipalities in Nebraska because municipalities are
political subdivisions of the State. The only entity regulating safety
policies is the City’s Safety Director and he took the day off.
In this scenario, to what extent do you think allowing the crew into the
trench without a trench box would be pushing (or exceeding) the
limit? Discuss any ethical grey areas in this scenario? What in your
mind is the right thing to do? What is the value of having an ethics
program (and related programs like safety programs) and what are the
responsibilities of front line leaders/supervisors and the workers when
they face dilemmas such as the one described?
SLP Assignment Expectations
Please take some time to review the materials and take a position on the
issue. Write a 2- to 3-page assessment of the authors’ claims, and your
assessment of what might be done in a place of business to prevent the
“moral amnesia” phenomenon from taking a foothold in a place of
business.
Your paper should be double-spaced and in 12-point type size.
Your paper should have a separate cover page and a separate reference page. Make sure you cite your sources.
Use APA style, and proofread your paper.
Upload your paper by the end of the module.
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