Catholic Social Justice

[david40]

Sorry, I move this thread to Social Justice forum.

 

[EasterJoy]

Hi all,

I have 2 cases which I need your objective moral opinion in light of Catholic Social Justice.

Here are the 2 cases…

Case #1: Firing the employee
During the interview I found out that she still was working for other company but she intended to quit due to her unsatisfaction with her employer’s work system.
After I accepted her, she immediately quit from her old job. I hired her and gave her the 3-month probation period…I warned her that her carelessness and her working speed were not acceptable and my message was that she needed to make some changes in order to stay working in my company. After 2 weeks, I observed that she still hasn’t made any changes and finally one day, still during the probation period, when she came to work in the morning, I told her that she’s fired that morning and I paid her pro-rated salary.
I was convinced that she had no hope of changing her working performance within the time frame of the probationary period.
In light of Catholic Social Justice teaching, was my action morally wrong?.

Unless bound by contract, you don’t have a moral obligation to let incompetent people keep working for you. You may have to pay some sort of severance pay beyond the hours worked, but that depends on your contract or understanding with them. The law may not hold you to verbal promises or “unspoken understandings”, but ethics does. God sees us when we wink, of course, so we need to let our “yes” mean “yes” and our “no” mean “no”.

In your case, IMHO, it depends on whether what you call a probationary period was explained to your new employee as the amount of time she had to come up to speed (in which case she would have reason to believe that a certain learning curve was expected and would be tolerated for the length of her training period, in the absence of violations of trust) or the time period during which her suitability remained to be seen and she could expect to be fired without having done the sorts of things that get an established worker fired, like habitual tardiness, untrustworthiness, serious insubordination, and so on. I would expect it to mean the latter; I would appreciate know explicitly which case I was dealing with. Since it is hard to ask this question without seeming to ask what one is going to be allowed to get by with, it behooves the employer to spell things out.

You warned her that she was on thin ice, which I think was something she deserved. Then you gave her 2 weeks to make some noticable changes. That sounds fair.

Still, when you say “the message was”…do you mean you told her that directly, or that you expected her to have read that message between the lines? I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say there is something morally wrong with that, but inescapable directness is probably a better policy with an employee that is flirting with a firing. That includes letting them know the procedures they can expect in the unfortunate event that they are fired, and the standards they will need to meet in what time period to prevent that.