Work and Wealth - Ethics for the Information Age - page 486

25. Do you agree with Martin Ford (interviewed at the end of this chapter) that countries
need to introduce guaranteed income schemes to preserve the market for goods and
services?
In-Class Exercises
26. A multinational corporation transfers a foreign employee to the United States on an L-1
visa. The foreign employee is a computer programmer, working alongside an American
computer programmer doing the same work. Both programmers joined the company
five years ago after graduating from college. Their training, skills, and experience are
virtually identical.
Divide the class into two groups, pro and con, to debate the following proposition:
“The salaries and benefits of the two computer programmers should be roughly equiv-
alent.”
27. You lead a group of five software engineers involved in the testing of a new product.
Your manager tells you that because of a company-wide layoff, you need to give notice
to one member of your team. From your interactions with the team members, you can
easily identify the two members who are least productive, but you are not sure which of
them you should lay off. You know that the company keeps track of all Internet traffic
to each person's computer, although you have never shared this information with your
team. You could use this information to determine how much time, if any, these two
employees are spending surfing the Web. Is it wrong to access these records?
28. A company runs a large technical support office. At any time, about 50 technical support
specialists are on duty, answering phone calls from customers. The company is consid-
ering paying the technical support specialists based on two criteria: the average number
of phone calls they answer per hour and the results of occasional customer satisfaction
surveys. Debate the pros and cons of the proposed method of determining wages.
29. In this role-playing exercise, students weigh the pros and cons of working for companies
with different philosophies about work.
Company A is a large, established hardware and software company. Employees have
a reasonable level of job security, although there have been layoffs in the past few years.
Salaries are highly competitive. The company offers stock options, but the stock price is
not rising rapidly, and employees know they are not going to get rich from selling their
options. The typical programmer works about 45 hours a week.
Company B is a medium-sized, mature software company that plays a dominant
role in a specialized market. The company has never had to lay off employees. Salaries
are a little low by industry standards, but programmers get paid overtime when they
work more than 40 hours a week. The company discourages managers from resorting to
overtime work on projects. Many employees are involved in community activities, such
as coaching their kids' sports teams.
Company C is a small start-up company trying to be the first to bring a new
kind of shopping experience to the Web. Salaries are not high, but all the employees
have a lot of stock options. If the product is successful, everyone expects to become a
multimillionaire when the company goes public in a couple of years. In return for the
stock options, the founders expect a total commitment from all the employees until the