108 SITUATING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
of regarding one’s employees as mere commodities can have far more reaching
effects than such a mode of regard on the part of the employee.
If we translate these musings into the language of rights and responsibilities,
then we may conclude that employees and employers have a responsibility
not to allow the environment of the market to lead them to regard their
opposite numbers as mere opportunities for the acquisition of reward or
wages.
The import of all of this for our more general discussion is that it makes an
ethics of the workplace possible at the same time as recognizing the inherent
moral hazards associated with work undertaken in the environment of the
market.
Exploitation and just profit
A second moral concern that might lead one to doubt the very possibility
of an ethics of the workplace involves the idea of exploitation. One might
be worried about the pursuit of profit by employers and the consequences
that such pursuit might have for their relations with employees. It might
be argued that pursuit of the profit motive is immoral becauseex hypothesi
profit can only be achieved through the exploitation of wage–labour. If this
is true then it would seem that an ethics of work is indeed impossible in the
market elements of a market economy. Furthermore, the analytic orientation
of HRM is towards profit, as has been noted by many HRM theorists. Take
John Ivancevich, for instance, who says that one of the distinctive features
of HRM is that it analyses and solves problems ‘from a profit-oriented, not
just a service-oriented, point of view’ (Ivancevich 1992: 9). Given such an
analytic orientation then the foregoing criticism, if it holds true, would be
highly damning of the discipline of HRM.
Thelocus classicusof this claim of exploitation is to be found in the works
of Marx. Marx argues that profit (or surplus value) is simply the difference
between the cost of production, including the cost of labour of a good and the
price the capitalist obtains at the market for it. Thus, although the commodity
is produced by the worker (or proletarian), that worker is not paid the full
worth of his work. At the heart of the wage–labour contract is a fraud that
systematically exploits the worker. One can, according to the Marxist, pro-
vide a precise and systematic account of exploitation following this analysis;
exploitation is simply the difference between what the worker is paid and what
the commodity he or she produces sells for (once other costs are taken out).
Profit is necessarily exploitative given that it is achieved through a failure to
pay the worker a just price for his or her work.