HRM—LIMITS OF ETHICAL ACTION 231‘You were going to tell me about the new situation you are in.’
‘Thanks. I actually felt in a recent board meeting that I had to get up and say that the
currently proposed redundancy exercise is quite immoral. It’s not often that one is able
to do this, is it?’
‘Why not?’
‘Come on, you’ve been there. We are not meant to talk like that are we? We are meant
to be hard-headed businessmen in that room’.
‘But can’t you be hard headed and ethical?’
‘Precisely. That’s exactly it. I always try to be hard-headed and moral. What I am
struggling to say here is that making these managers redundant is only hard-headed in
City investor terms. Our board know damn well that our share price will suffer—and
everything that follows from that (customer confidence and so on and so on)—if we
don’t cut costs somewhere. And people, especially middle managers these days, are an
easyoption,atfirstsightanyway.I...er...’
‘Go on.’
‘I can’t say I was completely surprised but the CEO himself said he agreed with me that
the cost-cutting was, as he put it, a “bit of blood letting” for the city. It was not really
necessary for the business, given the orders that we feel fairly confident we are going to
get in the next year. And, he went on, he could not see how we could make the sort of
savings required in any other way than by cutting the managerial head count. “Right
or wrong in our own eyes, we have got to do it”, he said. That’s it.’
‘That was the end of the argument?’
‘It was. “It’s the system that we live in, like it or not”, he went on. At least I’m gratified
that he admitted that he didn’t like it. I just had to go along with the idea of forces
beyond our control.’
‘But you are left uncomfortable?’
‘Very.’
‘So what will you do?’
‘I think you know very well what I’ll do. We do it a lot in HR, don’t we, when we have
to implement decisions we don’t like.
‘OK, I think I can guess. But please put it in your words.’
‘Yes, I deal with my conscience by doing my damndest to make the redundancy as
painless as I am able to do. I’ll argue for the best possible terms and do as much as I
can to help people find other jobs—before they actually leave here if I possibly can.’
As with the other HR managers we have heard from in this chapter, we see
clear indications of ethical concerns on the part of the HR manager. We also
see indication of Kevin Musson’s desire to act ethically, within his own terms,
as far as he is able to do. (We must note though that Kevin, although keen