Published in the Financial Post, March 10, 2005.
No Ethics in Boeing Sex Firing
by
Pierre Lemieux
The ousting of Boeing CEO Harry Stonecipher for an office romance sin should be a shock to those who, in the 1960s, believed that a sexual revolution was happening.
Just read a 1991 Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled “At work, sexual electricity sparks creativity,” by Helen Gurley Brown, then editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine. Although arguing against sexual harassment by “bullies” and “creeps,” Ms. Brown related what happened at a Los Angeles radio station where she had worked as a young woman. There, a game called “scuttle” was regularly played. “All announcers and engineers who weren’t busy would select a secretary, chase her down … catch her and take her panties off. Once the panties were off, the girl could put them back on again. Nothing wicked ever happened. Depantying was the sole object of the game. … [T]o my knowledge,” adds Ms. Brown, “no scuttler was ever reported to the front office. Au contraire, the girls wore their prettiest panties to work.”
Of course, a corporation like Boeing would not be keen on its employees playing scuttle every day, nor would it want its CEO to entertain a situation where his judgment could be impaired at the expense of efficiency. But one would think that this could be let to the judgment of the executive himself who, after all, is not a bully or a creep. It is not especially surprising to learn from a Reuters dispatch that “[t]he company said the affair between the woman and Mr. Stonecipher, 68, … was consensual.” In other words, he did not rape her in the board room.
Not only is the company’s reaction reminiscent of pre-sexual-revolution times, but the ouster of Mr. Stonecipher also smacks of a strange business ethics that intrudes into employees’ private lives. In fact, what is at play is not ethics - in the sense of voluntary morality principles conducive to the good life - but the sort of arbitrary, coercive rules that have to come to pass for business ethics.
Edward Bardelli, an American lawyer specialized in labour law, confirms that what corporations fear in such cases are lawsuits under the guise of preferential treatment, that is, under the laws and regulations that forbid all sorts of private “discrimination.” It is true that corporations don’t want to make headlines because of their executives’ affairs, but this fear is motivated by the compulsory business “ethics” that a multitude of laws and regulations have imposed on business. It’s not the ethics, it’s the cops, stupid!
The shibboleth of business ethics is analyzed in a recent Independent Review article by Richard W. Wilcke, an executive-in-residence at the Univeristy of Louisville College of Business and Public Administration. Mr. Wilcke argues that a business enterprise “has the same rights as the individuals who compose it to act in its own self-interest.” But if the corporation wants to take the moral “high road,” what it should do is to support the free market.
“Ethics should be taught in business schools,” he writes, “but the subject should deal with the meaning of a free and open market, economic competition, private property, and wholly voluntary exchange. A student upon whom that version of ethics has been impressed will want to take the high road and will oppose government intervention. Instead, students are provided with no understanding of any ethical barometer other than market agnosticism, undergirded by altruism.”
In this perspective, the high road for Boeing would have been to stand behind Mr. Stonecipher, assuming of course that his affair did not impede his value for the company. As long as men are men (even at 68), we can safely assume that sex and efficiency are not inconsistent.