HRM AND THE ETHICS OF COMMODIFIED WORK 103making such claims this is not to deny that the capitalist workplace is free
from moral concern. To the contrary. Below, I argue that the market, as a
central organizing principle of work, presents human agents, and especially
employers, with certainmoral hazardsthat must be avoided if work is to be
conducted in an ethically acceptable manner (Walsh and Lynch 2002). Such
moral hazards in this context involve circumstances where the interests of
employees and employers separate, a possibility that so-called unitarists—who
do not believe that there are any legitimate conflicts of interests at work—
would deny (Boxall and Purcell 2003: 15–16).
If we accept that an ethics of the capitalist workplace is possible, the second
question to ask concerns how we might ground such an ethics. What rights
and responsibilities do employees and employers have? From where do we
derive our list of rights and responsibilities? In this chapter I do not attempt
to provide a list of concrete rights and responsibilities, rather I consider some
general or abstract guidelines for such an ethics. These general guidelines are
grounded in, or based on, the moral hazards with which the market, by virtue
of its commercial character, presents us. The moral hazards of the capitalist
workplace provide the general contours, as it were, for the formation of such
an ethic. There are, of course, points where the interests of employees and
employers correspond and thus where the mere pursuit of self-interest leads
harmoniously to the furtherance of the interests of all. However, such ‘invisible
hand’ components of the workplace in a market economy need not concern
us here in developing an ethics of work, since the interests of all are served
without conscious ethical action or ethical motivations. Ethics is redundant in
such circumstances. Accordingly, I focus solely on those circumstances where
the interests of employees and employers might come apart.
I turn now to those moral hazards that arise for work in a commodity con-
text; my three areas of primary concern being our attitudes towards sources of
wealth, economic exploitation, and the content of work.
Regarding asmerecommodities
Let us now consider the view that as a consequence of the inherent commod-
ification of labour, there is some considerable tension between the treatment
of employees in the marketplace and the proper ways in which we should treat
human beings.
Moral concerns with the commodification of labour are of course the tradi-
tional domain of Marxists and similarly inclined socialists. Marx, for instance,
discusses the way in which capitalism drags the worker and his family beneath
the wheels of the juggernaut of capital (Marx 1954: 604). Marx’s objection here
is primarily with the attitude of the capitalist to the proletarian worker and the