An engineering firm just lost one of their larger customers. The firm president says that the solution to this problem is to fire three engineers to balance the firm's workforce with the current level of business. He says it is a simple problem with a simple solution. a) The three engineers disagree. Why? b) What are the ethical factors form the perspective of the firm president and the engineers?

Question

Case Hampton

Engineering

22 November, 05:03

An engineering firm just lost one of their larger customers. The firm president says that the solution to this problem is to fire three engineers to balance the firm's workforce with the current level of business. He says it is a simple problem with a simple solution. a) The three engineers disagree. Why? b) What are the ethical factors form the perspective of the firm president and the engineers?

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Eden Key · Answer 1

The engineers disagreed because their jobs were on the line

The ethical factors are:

The reason for the customer dumping the business is yet to be figured out

The need to keep cost to the lowest ebb in order to keep maintain profitability at the expense of employees' welfare

The are several ways of growing customer base which are yet to be exploited.

Explanation:

The engineers disagree because there is no direct connection between the company's loss of the customer and their proposed layoff of the engineers, at least no one strong evidence has been given by the president.

The ethical factors inherent in this case are as follows:

The reason for the customer dumping the business is yet to be figure out

The need to keep cost to the lowest ebb in order to keep maintain profitability.

The are several ways of growing customer base which are yet to be exploited.

There is a need for a fact-finding exercise to establish the main motive behind losing such customer, without which the company can run into more troubles in future, otherwise the company would keep firing its good hands each time a customer dumps it.

Also, the president had resulted into such decision in order to maintain company's margins, where then lies ethics of welfare economics? Welfare economics is about looking beyond margins and looking at issues from a wider perspective of fulfilling the needs of employees in order for them to put in their best performance, at least by granting them job safety.

The company could have also grown business by investing in new technology that sets it apart from competitors instead of just jumping into the conclusions of sacking employees in a business where the company's strength lies in quality of engineers that it has.