[sixmayes]

I need ideas for a speech on an ethical business violation case study that would involve a supervisor's actions being unethical. I need the story, who was affected, the outcome, etc

Thanks

[dontknownuthin]

I can share one...

Three other people and I all worked about 4 years ago for a major US bank, through a temporary agency. Our role was unusual for the temporary service as we were telephone sales reps for a commercial credit card program. Our job was to sell credit card programs over the phone to employers, with company credit lines ranging from $5 to $10 million, who in turn would provide company charge cards to their sales force or executives.

We were hired on the basis of an hourly rate, which worked out to $50,000 per year, plus incentive based on our performance comparable to our sales goals. Both the temporary agency and the bank where we were assigned to work presented this as our pay arrangement, and presented that they would get us the written incentive plan "soon", that it had been already "approved" by their senior management and legal departments and it just needed to be "published" to staff.

They never produced the printed incentive plan, but it was discussed in many meetings - formal job interviews, at the point of hiring each of us for our assignments, in group sales meetings, and in many emails between the four reps and both the temp agency and the bank.

After each of us had earned several thousands of dollars in commission under the verbal agreement, the bank told us that they were not going to pay us commission and that because they never put the plan in writing, didn't have to. The temp agency, instead of insisting we be paid as promised, told us to go along with it and not bring it up or argue the decision, or we would be fired.

We took our chances and wrote the CEOs of both companies, forwarding email correspondnce we had received from their management explaining the way we were to be compensated, as well as our sales figures, to demonstrate that we had earned the commission. We offered to stay on without commission moving forward but stated that we were owed the commission we had earned to date, that they could not retroactively cut our pay when the work was already done. All four of us were fired the next day and they claimed the reason was only that the assignment was "over".

I was ultimately paid my commission - I filed for unpaid wages through the State and won my claim. I don't think the other people ever saw their commissions though - I had no way of reaching them as we weren't friends outside of work.

The temp agency admitted to us that they knew it was wrong but could not afford to loose the bank as a client. They then refused to assign any of us to new jobs, and severed their relationships with us, so we also lost the reference and future employment opportunity.

[joypulv]

Good story, dontknownuthin.
I found this late but want to add my stories.
Years ago I worked for an animal testing lab. I had to watch mice squirm in harnesses while they had tobacco stuffed in their mouths, and I wrote down when they died. Some foreign business people came through with a supervisor and they were told a completely different story from what was being done. I kept quiet. I quit the third day anyway.

In 1980 I did statistics for a psych dept of a world renowned institute of higher learning. The studies were all brain insult, either surgery or injury. I noticed that they had declared significant results/changes in testing of subjects after a few years, but that the reason for the differences was a new tester, who graded people on many subjective tests differently. But NIH threw a ton of money at them, so I was ignored. I was also ordered to do statistics in all sorts of configurations until something significant was found. That was a grey area of ethical behavior. Since then I'm in the camp that believes that you can get statistics to do whatever you want, most of the time.