ETHICAL DECISION MAKING IN DIFFICULT SITUATIONS
Ethical Decisions in the Workplace
After reading your background readings, please review the following scenario
and address the questions at the end.
Jerry Stevens heads up an excavation crew for the municipal utilities district in a
city in Nebraska. A sewer line needs to be replaced and it has been excavated
with a back-hoe. The trench is 7 feet deep. The municipality’s safety rules
indicate that employees should not go into the trench without a trench box. This
rule is to prevent employees from being buried if the trench walls collapse.
People die every year from trench cave-ins.
The trench box won’t arrive on site for another 6 hours and the city promised
residents that the sewer would be fixed by the end of the day, which now seems
impossible. The City Administrator called Jerry on his cell phone and indicated
that it was imperative that the sewer be fixed as soon as conceivably possible
because a City Council member is served by that sewer line and will raise a fuss
if it’s not fixed by the promised time.
One of the more experienced workers states, “It’s only going to take 30 minutes
to dig under the pipe and loosen the fittings. We don’t need the trench box. We
used to do this all the time before we were required to use one of those darn
things.”
Jerry knows he’s right. He used to do it himself before the rule was put in place.
Also, the soil is clearly a cohesive soil and it’s highly unlikely that it will collapse.
And although there is an organizational policy to use a trench box for trenches
deeper than 5 feet, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)
does not have Jurisdiction over municipalities in Nebraska because
municipalities are political subdivisions of the State. The only entity regulating
safety policies is the City’s Safety Director and he took the day off.
1. In this scenario, to what extent do you think allowing the crew into the trench
without a trench box would be pushing (or exceeding) the limit?
2. Discuss any ethical grey areas in this scenario?
3. What in your mind is the right thing to do?
4. What is the value of having an ethics program and what are the responsibilities of front line readers/supervisors and the workers when they face dilemmas such as the one described?
