SOCIO-POLITICAL THEORY AND ETHICS IN HRM 25who have interests which are quite legitimately different and distinct. The
employee in the labour market has the interest of selling their labour for the
best possible price and conditions. The employer in the labour market has
the interest of buying labour on the best terms, and on conditions that will
enable the labour time which has been bought to be turned into productive
output, in terms of the employer’s organizational goals. Modern economic
theory recognizes that there are quite distinct and varying interests at work
and in the labour market. There will inevitably be pluralism in the interests of
different people within the work organization, and therefore there will not be
a unitary, common interest that can be expected to totally eliminate all moral
dilemmas arising from interpersonal conflicts of interest at work.
Modern economic (and democratic, political) theories start with an accep-
tance that there are plural interests in social organizations which will make
interpersonal conflict inevitable. Conflicts of interest in the workplace, and
ethical dilemmas on how to handle them, should be expected, they may even
be constructive in terms of making people consider complex issues, adjust to
market realities and work through mutually acceptable accommodations.
Given the existence of plural interests between employers and employees
in work organizations, how should they be managed? In the nineteenth
century, when industrialization was sweeping through Great Britain and
the new economy was taking hold, the unitary claims of management
prerogative were attacked by people who were unwilling to legitimize the new
mill-owners’ right to employ child labour or set pay rates or hours of work
in their own interests. To counter the unitarist arguments of employer rights,
radical theories were developed by those who believed the growing economic
power of the new capitalist entrepreneurs was unethical, and rested on their
illegitimate exploitation of human labour. Theoretical debates abounded,
and Marxists developed the most powerful ideological attacks, arguing that
the new employment relationships were unethical because they involved
the exploitation of human labour and that there was a wide discrepancy
in the power relationship between the owner of capital and the owner of
labour. Workers lost human dignity as their skills became commodities
in the capitalist’s accumulation of personal wealth. The radicals’ proposed
solutions still had a unitarist slant. They argued for revolutionary political
action to eliminate private property rights. If private property was forbidden,
and workers owned the organizations that used their labour, then it was
argued, there could be no exploitation. The major conflict of interest between
sellers and buyers of labour would be eliminated, and organizations could be
managed in the interests of all, in a visionary return to a unitarist utopia.
Many European early trade union movements mobilized around these
ideas, and of course the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the spread of Com-
munism in the early twentieth century were based on theories that ethical
relationships at work required, and could be guaranteed by, transferring the