Workplace

Ethics Hero: “Good Day New York” Co-anchor Rosanna Scotto

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Screen-Shot-2014-06-27-at-3.52.23-PM

Rosanna Scotto had the professionalism, decency and the courage to step in and reprimand (and embarrass) partner Greg Kelly who engaged in on-air sexual harassment of a young colleague during today’s morning broadcast on the Fox affiliate.

Reporter Anna Gilligan was assigned to New Jersey’s Action Park to try out the new Tarzan rope swing. This required putting on a bathing suit, in Gilligan’s case a relatively conservative two-piece.

. When she completed the water ride,  wet and probably self-conscious (no fair TV exec should make a young woman expose herself like that on TV), Kelly leered, “Nice bathing suit.” He then began teasing her with questions about her temporary breathlessness, tilting into innuendo  Scotto reminded him him to “stay appropriate,”  but to no avail: Kelly was in full frat boy mode. When Gilligan ended her segment by saying she was going to put some clothes on, Kelly protested playfully, saying, “hold on a second, not so fast, Anna!”

When they  cut back to the news desk,  Scotto gave Kelly a disgusted look and asked, “What is wrong with you?”

I wish she had said more, but she was probably right: any more pointed criticism would be airing dirty linen in public. To answer her question though, here is what’s the matter with Kelly:

  • He’s unprofessional, a fool and a pig.
  • He clearly didn’t get the memo, and it came from the culture many years ago, that you don’t treat a female employee, colleague or subordinate like a sex object, a piece of meat or eye candy in the work place. The conduct is rude, it denigrates her as a professional and a human being, it gives a green light to other harassers in the workplace and creates a hostile environment not only for her but for every female employee who sees or learns of the incident. It is also illegal.
  • He is such a boor and a fool that he not only did this, but did it on live TV.

Greg Kelly owes Gilligan, Scotto and every other woman at at the station and in the audience an apology.

Then he should be fired.

Warped Values and Perverse Incentives: Banning Employers From Asking Whether A Job Applicant Served Time

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments
Sorry Hedley---it's unfair to ask a potential employees if they were rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers...and don't you dare ask if they are Methodists!

Sorry Hedley—it’s unfair to ask a potential employees if they were rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers…and don’t you dare ask if they are Methodists!

I was unaware that this was a trend: states and cities making it illegal for employers to ask job applicant’s whether they had been convicted of a crime and served jail time.

It is an unethical, foolish and illogical trend, an example of misplaced compassion being used to justify placing risks on law-abiding citizens for the benefit of those who are less trustworthy.

A news article regarding the problems faced by former prisoners re-entering society quotes Zach Hoover, executive director of LA Voice, a multiracial, faith-based organization working to get such a measure passed in Los Angeles:

“Sometimes people think of someone who’s been in prison and they think only of what they did instead of what they’re doing today. They’ve done their time. They served their sentence, and they’re looking for a job.It’s like double jeopardy. You’ve done your time, and now you get a life sentence of joblessness.”

What utter claptrap: Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz, “Naked Teacher Principle” Division: The Alleged Naked Naval War College Professor

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

schnitzengrubenA helpful reader submits this Ethics Quiz question based on the following news item:

The AP reported that U.S. Naval War College professor John Schindler was placed on leave after a photo of a penis with the professor ‘s name over it was posted on Twitter.  It was unclear who sent it and who posted it.

After a blogger sent a complaint to the War College’s administration, the college’s president, Rear Adm. Walter E. “Ted” Carter Jr., ordered an investigation. A college spokeswoman said that investigators would look into whether the photo was not really of Schindler.

Now THAT should be an interesting investigation.

Schindler, a professor of national security affairs and a former National Security Agency intelligence analyst, has deleted his Twitter account. He has said his criticism of NSA leaker Edward Snowden and others has caused him to be the object of harassment on various social media.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day  has two parts:

1. Is it fair for the War College to place Schindler on leave before it has even been established that he sent the photo or that the body part in question belonged to him?

and

2. If he didn’t send the photo himself but it is established that the body part in question does belong to him, should the Naked Teacher Principle* apply?

Continue reading →

Animal Abuse, Law, Ethics…And More Cognitive Dissonance

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Gothic pets

Some animal abuse issues are ethics slam dunks, some should be, and some are more complicated than the wo people posture over them seem to think. Here are three examples from the news:

1. Tattooed Kittens?

A law about to be passed in New York, S.6769, will make it illegal for pet owners to inflict tattoos or piercings on their pets except for medical purposes or when a tattoo is used strictly for identification purposes. Violations would carry fines of up to one year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

“I believe that if given the choice, animals would decline to having themselves undergo a painful procedure of being either tattooed or pierced,” said New York State Senator Mark Grisanti, a Republican who is supporting the measure introduced by Democratic Assemblywoman Linda Rosentha in 2011.

Ya think? The fact that a law would even be necessary to articulate that tattooing or piercing a pet for the owner’s amusement is horribly wrong and obvious cruelty foretells the approaching apocalypse.  That such a law would take three years to pass also tells us something bad about, oh, New York, politics, partisan warfare, human intelligence…just about everything. The problem, was brought to public attention by the prosecution of this idiot.

2. The Opossum Drop Continue reading →

Passenger List On The Deadly General Motors Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments
"Oops! There goes G.M again!"

“Oops! There goes G.M again!”

That great, big, all-American motor car company that the Obama Administration took bows for saving five years ago has been revealed as a thoroughly corrupt, incompetent and deadly enterprise. As the full extent of the General Motors safety scandal unfolds—and it could get worse—this is a good time to take stock of the ethics lessons and miscreants involved, on the off chance that we are interested in learning something.

Did that sound bitter? It is. There is little in this terrible story of corporate ineptitude and corruption that wasn’t known and understood decades ago. Yet here we are again.

The manifest:

  • G.M. management. It pursued the policy of paying large settlements with confidentiality agreements to those injured by ignition switch defects in their cars, never fixing the defect itself. This is the old Pinto calculation, reasoning that if it is cheaper to pay for the deaths and injuries from a design defect than to fix the defect itself, then it makes good business sense to keep doing that, indefinitely. There are three problems with this logic, of course. First, it kills people. Second, it is stupid: eventually the facts will get out, and the whole company will be endangered. Third, it is wrong.
  • The plaintiffs’ attorneys. The trial lawyers association, way back when I worked for it two decades ago, adopted the unofficial position that the practice of accepting settlements from large corporations in product liability cases that included agreements not to reveal the damages and the defects involved to regulators, the news media, and endangered consumers was unethical. Members were urged to make a rejection of such terms a condition of agreeing to represent injured parties. Speeches were given, pledges were made. All agreed that the practice undermined the mission of the plaintiffs’ bar to make America safer through the civil justice system. What happened? Greed, that’s what. Just as every plaintiff has a price, so do many trial attorneys, who received up to 40% of those secret settlements. Every single one of the lawyers who guided their clients to accepting hush money in exchange for letting unsuspecting owners of G.M. cars risk their lives and those of their families were members of the American Association for Justice, which changed its name from the Association of Trial Lawyers of America because a survey showed the term “trial lawyers” was too negative. This is why the term is negative.

Continue reading →

Of The Great Noodle Ordeal, Sweeney Todd, Stressors, and The Importance Of Ethics In Stopping Mass Killings

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I have a theory about mass killings, and it is neither original nor exclusive: in fact, it has been proposed in various forms for at least a  century But I think it is worth considering.

I think that the smart, creative, intense, ambitious, restless and entrepreneurial people in this country keep designing an environment, and forcing it on us whether we like or need it or not,  that is increasingly, and ultimately unbearably, hostile to those who are not smart, creative, intense, ambitious, restless and entrepreneurial. I think that as life becomes increasingly stressful and confusing for average people—remember, about half of the public is below average intelligence, and even average intelligence is nothing to jump up and down over—they are more likely to reach what the serial killer profilers on “Criminal Minds” call “stressors”—the final straw, the moment when they see red, and deadly fury takes over. On the TV show, of course, the stressor is the death of a child, or a firing, or the onset of an illness, or financial setbacks. But I can see it simply being the realization that life is hopeless…that it is always going to be a miserable, frustrating struggle, and that powerful, rich, meddling people are at work always finding ways to make sure it gets harder and harder, and ultimately futile, for normal human beings to get through the day.

I entertain delusions that I am smarter than the average bear, and I can barely stand it myself. Yesterday, stuck at La Guardia, I wanted to get some food in the a terminal’s food court. The place I chose had just added computerized self-ordering on iPads. I’m not intimidated by iPads; I use one. The woman in front of me, however, stared at the device—there were no readily available employees to guide her through it—as if it were a space alien. She pushed some buttons, sighed, and gave up. Continue reading →

When Ethics Alarms Fail: The (Almost Deadly) Return Of “Johnny”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

justkidding

In “Airplane!,” the late Stephen Stucker created an iconic comic character as the chaotic “Johnny,” a deranged but relentlessly cheery air traffic control employee who treated the life-and death emergency of an endangered airliner as an opportunity to pull practical jokes, like pulling a plug to shut off all the runway lights just as the plane was making its desperate approach with a volunteer pilot at the helm. “Just kidding!” he says. This week, we learned that Johnny, or at least his copycat, was alive and well. An air traffic controller at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport instructed the pilot of Delta Flight 630, just over 1,000 feet off the ground and preparing to land, to abort the landing and circle the airport. Seconds later, Johnny II said, “I’m kidding, Delta 630. After you land, I’ve got no one behind you. Expect to exit right.” Continue reading →

Ethical Conflict: The Case Of The Confused Cabbie

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

taxi1Heading to downtown Washington D.C. for an early morning ethics presentation for the Federal Bar (at the GAO building), I encountered an ethical dilemma that got the day off to a challenging start.

Traffic in D.C. is ridiculous, so I arranged to have an Alexandria cab pick me up at 8:15 AM for a 9:30 AM presentation, assuming that I would arrive close to 9:00. I would have too, except that my young, African-accented cab driver had no idea where he, or I was going. I should have foreseen the problem when the cab was ten minutes late (this company knows my address and typically arrives early), but it came into sharp focus when the driver asked “So you know how to get there, right?” (No, I don’t know how to get anywhere, which is why you are the cab  driver, and I’m not) and made it startlingly clear that he didn’t know how to read his GPS. As a result, he made multiple wrong turns, even though the screen in front of him was showing him the way, and I ultimately had to interpret the GPS directions for him. I barely arrived on time, and felt like I had done the driving.

My initial instinct was to call the company and complain. I even took down the cab number.

And my thinking went like this: Continue reading →

An Untrustworthy Study About Perceptions Of Untrustworthiness That Shows Something Else Entirely

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Research is frequently polluted by confirmation bias; personally, I believe this is the case more often than not. A particularly vivid example is the work on “vocal fry,” described as “slowly fluttering the vocal cords, resulting in a popping or creaking sound at the bottom of the vocal register.” Supposedly a 2011 study determined that two-thirds of college women were doing it, and now a paper by Rindy C. Anderson, Casey A. Klofstad , William J. Mayew, and Mohan Venkatachalam announces the results of further research showing how harmful it is. I admit: I’ve now read a lot of stuff about vocal fry, which I had never heard of until recently, and I’m still unclear on exactly what the hell it is, other than “talking in an annoying fashion.” The Atlantic tells us that this is vocal fry, which means it consists of talking like Zooey Deschanel does here:

Got it? OK, now you can explain it to me.

Anyway, what the exact phenomenon is doesn’t matter to the ethics issue; all you have to know is that a respected, serious, scholarly study has spawned lots of media attention by claiming that its data shows that women and men who exhibit vocal fry in their speech patterns will tend to be hired less often than job interviewees who don’t, because employers view them as untrustworthy, among other things. (The study’s catchy title is “Vocal Fry May Undermine the Success of Young Women in the Labor Market,” because, as we know, women are all that matter these days, having had war declared on them and all.) Continue reading →

No, There Is No “Absurdly Bearded Sociology Professor On A Beer Can Principle”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

follicle beer

This is just unfair, that’s all.

 Paul Roof, a professor of sociology at Charleston Southern University, a Christian school, learned that a photo of him taken by a professional photographer at a beard contest was about to appear on “Chucktown Follicle Brown” beer cans.  “I’m not compensated for the image, I don’t own the image, and the use of the image was a surprise to me,” the Roof told the media. His (amazing/ outrageous/ ridiculous—choose one) four-section beard has been used for other promotions, including for Christian services. Charleston Southern University never expressed any objection to its employee looking like an escapee from “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” Nevertheless, the school fired him, saying that a professor having his image on a beer can “was not representative of a Christian environment.” Continue reading →