The Ethics of Paternalism

Going over my notes last week, I ran across an interesting question regarding the ethical responsibility a company has to its employees. It seems there was a case (which eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court) in which a company that manufactured batteries of various kinds had systematically avoided hiring women for certain positions that involved a significant chance of exposure to lead. The company’s thinking was that since lead exposure can lead to birth defects, they would simply keep anyone who was (or could conceivably become) pregnant away from their manufacturing stations that used lead. We should note that the positions in question were not highly-paid or especially desirable, nor would experience in any of them result in promotion or any other form of career advancement. One could in fact argue that the only special treatment associated with these jobs was who would be hired to fill them…

As you might imagine, when this situation was finally made public a huge firestorm of protest broke out. The company’s defense – that they were acting in the best interests of their employees, to keep anyone from having to choose between their job and their future children – did not placate any of the parties responsible. Several of the company’s opponents roundly condemned this position, in fact, pointing out that men can also suffer significant health consequences from lead exposure, and that assuming that a female applicant wanted children (or was even capable of having them) constituted both gender discrimination and massive condescension on the part of the company. Although the company’s motives may have been well-intentioned, the paternalism it displayed was intolerable – and also illegal…

Now, you might think that I’m dredging this case up from the mists of time; that all of this happened before women were commonly accepted in the workforce, maybe even before they received the right to vote. If so, I regret to inform you that these events are less than 20 years old as of this writing; the Supreme Court decision was handed down while I was in business school in the early 1990s. But while it’s doubtful that anyone would attempt to institute this specific policy today, echoes of the situation described live on; people are still more likely to assign hazardous duty to men than women; single people are more likely to sent into harm’s way than those who would leave a widowed spouse and bereft children; women are still barred from most combat position in our military, and so on. Which to me begs the question: to what extent, if any, should an employer place the welfare of its people ahead of their legal right to die (or be genetically damaged) in unpleasant ways while on the job?

Obviously, there are OSHA regulations and similar laws that attempt to keep everyone safe on the job. And even more obviously, this is a very slippery slope indeed; the line between keeping women off a specific job category because they might get hurt and keeping them off any specific job because you’re a bigot and you don’t believe they can do that job as well as a man could is so fine I can’t imagine how to measure it. In theory, all work assignments should be made regardless of the applicant’s personal characteristics, on merit alone – but does that mean that an employer has no special responsibility for any of its employees? That if one of their people wants to do something with potentially harmful long-term effects, the company should just ignore the possible repercussions and let them go on ahead? Does our responsibility as managers to treat all of our people as even-handedly as possible supersede our very human desire to protect our people from harm?

It’s worth thinking about…