BUSINESS WRITING

The case of the income distribution dilemma.

You are the manager of a bottle manufacturing plant that produces bottles of varied sizes and shapes on specified orders from other corporations.  Because of a recent recession during which the demand for bottles decreased, you are considering laying off 30 percent of your workers, nearly a thousand people.  The plant is located in a small city and is one of the chief employers in the community.  A recent article in the local newspaper claimed that your plant was directly responsible for the incomes of 30 percent of the community and indirectly for another 20 percent of people who depended on your workers spending their paychecks in local businesses and for local services.

As an advocate of utilitarianism, you are troubled by the impending layoffs and hope to find a way that might ease the crisis.  Your dilemma is this: Your corporate overseers have told you to cut payroll costs by 30 percent and have suggested that the easiest route to that goal is layoffs.  Meanwhile, the leader of the local union has got wind of the coming crisis and is threatening a shutdown of the plant if layoffs go so high.  If the union does that, you’ll have to hire and retrain replacements whose processing and training will cancel the savings of the layoff.

What should you do?

• 1.       Refuse to lay off anyone, risking your own termination by the corporation.
• 2.       Bite the bullet: lay off 30 percent of your workers, the simplest solution.
• 3.       Negotiate with the union leader, telling him that if the remaining workers will take a 15 percent cut in pay, you will lay off only 15 percent of the workers. That way, the crunch won’t be felt as hard by the community.
• 4.       Call all of your client companies, begging them to place orders for bottles.
• 5.       Raise the price of the bottles 15 percent to cover some of the costs not covered by sales.
• 6.       Lower the price of the bottles 15 percent to generate more sales.
• 7.       Discuss with your management team taking a 15 percent cut in salary to show goodwill with the workers.  If everyone sacrifices, the workers will be more willing to go along.
• 8.       Raise the union’s share of paying for health and life insurance.
• 9.   Cancel all holiday and vacation pay.

In a brief essay, explain your choices and why you made them.

BUSINESS WRITING

The case of the rapacious lender.

You are a loan officer in a bank.  The president of the bank wants more loans, more mortgages, more credit cards sold.  He has raised the commission on all these financial tools and has promised bonuses to the top sellers; in addition, he has placed ads promoting these products in local newspapers and TV stations.  Furthermore, as a leading officer, you know you are in line for a promotion to vice president if you make lots of sales.

Potential customers stream into the bank the next week.  You are busy every day processing loans, mortgages, and credit card applications.  Many of the customers don’t have good credit, but are allowed to take out risky mortgages at high interest rates, car loans with little down, and credit cards with high fees and interest rates.  You know that many of these customers will fail to cover their loans, so the bank will be able to repossess the homes and cars, and freeze the credit cards, and take out liens against their possessions, leaving the borrowers destitute and in need of government assistance.

You have always practiced egoism, which allows you to do anything that gets you ahead.  You believe in caveat emptor (let the buyer beware).  You are looking forward to the increased commissions, the fat bonus, and the promotion to vice president.

What should you do?

1. 1.       Explain to the president how risky the loans are and the damage he will probably be doing to the community.
2. 2.       Warn the customers away from taking on more than they can afford.
3. 3.       Accept the commission, but give the bonus to a local charity that takes care of homeless people.
4. 4.       Refuse to process any unreasonable loan.
5. 5.       You only live once: go for broke, get the high commission, take the bonus, and accept the promotion.  How the customers handle the loans is not your problem.
6. 6.       Decline the promotion because you can’t help manage a bank that pillages working class people.
7. 7.       Resign from the bank immediately.
8. 8.       On Thanksgiving, give turkeys to all your customers who owe $50,000 or more to the bank.
9. 9.       Start lining up all the things that you will buy with the extra money you’ll be making: (1) new car, (2) new clothes, (3) new landscaping.  Besides the money will trickle back down to auto workers, textile workers, and lawn maintenance workers.
10. 10.   After the money comes in, take a long vacation and forget about the misery you will have had a hand in creating.

In a brief essay, explain your choices and why you made them.

BUSINESS WRITING

The case of the inspired genius and the idiot savant.

You are the newly appointed supervisor of a data-entry section of a pharmaceutical company.  You have two shifts with 24 data-entry clerks on each shift.  Your company has a competitive research and development department that is involved in creating and testing drugs; most of the data entry concerns entering the data from experiments with the drugs and testing of the drugs.  Accuracy is paramount; speed is desirable.

Most of your clerks are graduates of for-profit technical schools and have certificates in computer literacy and keyboarding.  Their keyboarding speeds are between 30 and 45 words per minute, although a few can type 60 words a minute.  To make up for absences and resignations, you often use a temp agency to fill in the 24 data-entry stations.  One day, two of the temps prove to be exceptional.  One is an idiot savant with nimble fingers and a gift for remembering lines of data that would be meaningless to anyone else.  He routinely types 100 words a minute and never makes a mistake.  His only fault is that he doesn’t keep track of time and has to be told to take breaks and to keep away from the machines during that time.  The other is a young woman with a genius IQ.  She is shy but is a friend of the idiot savant, and they always sit in adjoining cubicles.  She can type 80 words a minute and is such a fast reader and a perfectionist double-checker that if she makes a mistake, she immediately notices it and corrects it.  However, she is inspired to create virtual reality fantasy games, and if an inspiration penetrates her consciousness, she feels compelled to sketch the idea on the computer.  Between the two of them, they produce as much work as any five of the other employees.

You have succeeded in your job because you are a strict nonconsequentialist; for you “a rule is a rule” and you expect everyone to abide by the rules. You are famous for enforcing time and work proscriptions.  You have a problem because your two most productive clerks are not following the rules.  The idiot savant misses breaks and end times and is on the clock for more than the prescribed 32 hours a week for temps.  Meanwhile, the genius sometimes passes some of her work to her friend so she can create fantasy game sketches which she saves to a flash drive that none of the clerks are supposed to bring into the area for corporate security reasons.  You know that if one temp is forced out, the other will go, too.

What should you do?

• 1.        Find a way to make the savant time conscious and the genius comply with the rule that clerks cannot use their computers for unassigned personal work or pass assigned work to another clerk without your approval.
• 2.       Provide rewards for their compliance with the rules: candies and cookies.
• 3.       Request the temp agency not to send them again because they will never fit into your system.
• 4.       Get some of your more dependable regular employees to apply peer pressure and act as mentors to the two temps in order to have them adjust to the company rules.
• 5.       Convince the savant to stay and provide an alarm watch that buzzes when he should take breaks and again when he should return from breaks and again when he should wrap up work for the day.  Let his friend go because she is uncontrollable.
• 6.       Begin the termination process as proscribed: 

a.       talk to the employees about their violation of rules;

b.      if they don’t comply, send them a warning memo;

c.       if the violations continue, send them a letter with copies to your department head and human resources;

d.      if the violations continue, let them go. 

You have done your duty.

• 7.       For the sake of productivity, ignore their violation of rules.  Pay the savant for the extra hours he works and let the genius sketch out her ideas and save them.  Although you will have violated your own standards, you will be rewarded for the increased productivity.
• 8.       Threaten to resign your position if those two continue to work for the company.
• 9.       Consult human resources and training and ask them to come up with a way to convince your two “stars” to comply with the rules.
• 10.   Explain the situation to the department head and ask for advice.

In a brief essay, explain your choices and why you made them.

Stoned Boss

BUSINESS WRITING

The case of the stoned boss.

You completed your degree in business, but because of the bad economy, the only job you can get is a manager trainee position with a convenience store chain.  You take the job because it will do two things for you: (1) it will pay your living expenses, so you can survive without going home to live with your parents; (2) it will give you real-world experience running a retail business that will pad your resume.

The store you are assigned to is in a poor neighborhood with high criminal activity, and you know that working there could be dangerous.  However, for the time being, you keep your cheap apartment near the university and take the bus to work (you have a car, but you don’t want to park it in that neighborhood).  You also bring your lunch because the only eateries near the store are fast food or ethnic-centered restaurants, and you are a health food advocate. 

You work hard and impress your boss, the store manager.  He tells you that you will probably succeed and advance within the company.

However, a few weeks after your starting there, you realize that your boss is a little loose with the rules.  He goes into an alley behind the store and smokes marijuana during his break time.  Although you know he is stoned for at least half of every shift, his performance doesn’t seem to be affected.  You also have seen him take sandwiches from the cooler, but have never seen him pay for the sandwiches.  In fact, he tells you that you can eat anything you want from the store as long as you keep track of the items, which can be deducted from your next paycheck.  You suspect that he doesn’t keep track of what he eats and just writes it off as shoplifting.  Once you caught him having sex with a woman from the neighborhood in the storage room.  He laughed off the incident.

You have always been a consequentialist, so as you think about your predicament—a new employee who knows that the boss is operating against company policy and doing something that is illegal—you worry about whether you should do anything or tell anyone else.  No one seems to be being harmed by the boss’s actions, although he sets a terrible example for the employees.  The store is popular in the neighborhood and sales are good.

1. What should you do?
2. Quit the job and accept dependence on your parents.
3. Report your boss’s degenerate behavior to his boss, the regional manager.
4. Begin having sex in the storage room, too.
5. Report your boss to the police.
6. Keep your mouth shut and do your job and hope for an early promotion.
7. Smoke marijuana with your boss.
8. Discuss your concerns with the boss.
9. Ask for a transfer to another store.
10. Accept the situation, realizing that upper management might know about your boss’s behavior, but because the store makes money for the corporation and getting a good manager for that particular store in a dangerous neighborhood is not easy, his behavior is overlooked.
11. Pig out at the store but don't report what you eat because no one cares anyway.

In a brief essay, explain your choices and why you made them.

Salacious Rumors

BUSINESS WRITING

The case of the salacious rumors.

You are the director of the graphic artists in the marketing department of an insurance company.  A recently hired employee is personable, industrious and quite attractive.  Although you are pleased with her work, you begin to hear rumors that she is bisexually promiscuous.  You ask your secretary if she has heard these rumors.  She says she has, but has heard no specific incidents discussed.  Later that same day, you overhear several employees talking about the new employee’s having been seen interacting with the vice president of the sales department.  From what you hear, the new employee had made salacious comments to the vice president.  At a meeting at the end of the week, you notice that the new employee is isolated from the other employees who either ignore her or look at her with disapproval or amusement.  You realize that the rumors are getting out of control and are affecting the morale of the department.

 

You practice a form of virtue ethics, so you are concerned about not only the conduct of this new employee but also her character.  You know that her sexual conduct is her business as long as it doesn’t disrupt the department or occur on company property.  However, you worry that her character may not be suitable for the conservative environment of an insurance company.  Nevertheless, you have no evidence that the rumors are true.

What should you do?

1. Call a department meeting to discuss the situation.
2. Dismiss the new employee since she is still in the probationary period of employment.
3. Reprimand the gossipers.
4. Ask the vice president of sales about his or her relationship with the new employee.
5. Confront the new employee.
6. Wait, investigate the situation, and then act if action seems necessary.
7. Consult the Human Resources Department to see what a counselor recommends.
8. Guide the new employee in choosing sexual partners.
9. Recommend the new employee be counseled in sexual behavior.
10. Discuss the situation with your department chairperson.
11. Write a memo to the new employee.

In a brief essay, explain your choices and why you made them.

EXPLANATION:

I recently attended a workshop on ethics, and from that experience, I have developed some writing assignments based on various ethical points of view.  This is the first. Feel free to borrow or develop your own ideas for writing assignments based on an ethical viewpoint.

A Night of Record Sex

Under Orgasmic Neon Lights

I became the blue boy

Krishna coming on earth,

And you were black Kali

Swathed in heat and fire,

In the guise of a cow girl.

The satyric door opened and closed;

The Olympian floods began—

Our bodies arching

Over time and reason

To pound and smooth

Ourselves into ecstasy.

We were all opened and entered,

Pushed and pulled, until

We became indistinguishable

From a tangle of night crawlers

Up gorged from plutonic depths.

Our energies flowed into each other

And accepted novice time

As perpetuity.

We had no clue

We were setting records

In a motel room

In Tallahassee

That one night

Of love forever.

September 2010

This is a tribute to a person who will remain unnamed although if she reads this, she will know the poem concerns her and one night we had together.  I haven't discussed the poem with her and do not feel I should name her without her consent.

By the way, I finished the mystery and it was published last month: Secret Partner.