Ethics, Human Rights, and Human Resource Management

Ethical or morally “good” behavior of organizations toward their employees is generally associated with reaching a certain level of equality. A very basic organizational approach to equality is to confer human rights to all employees in equal measure, irrespective of whether they are working for the organization directly or indirectly. A more advanced approach to equality takes into account that, within organizations, minority employees often face different layers and intensities of racist, nationalist, and ethnicity-based processes of marginalization and discrimination (among other things). Within the workforces these processes are responsible for the prevalence of persisting inequalities in terms of organizational status, access to resources, and compensation. Thus organizations that want to overcome these inequalities have to apply human resource management initiatives that counteract these processes. This can be done, for example, through appropriate diversity management initiatives that explicitly integrate race, nationality, and ethnicity as key dimensions of an organizations' workforce diversity.