Women often receive reports of positive Pap smears when, in actuality, the results are negative. Newspaper accounts detail an industry utilizing overworked, undersupervised, poorly paid technicians to perform Pap smear tests. Some labs allow workers to analyze up to four times as many specimens per year as experts recommend for accuracy. Workers may be paid $.45 to analyze a smear when patients are charged $35.

a. Discuss the cost-volume-profit relationships that exist in this case.

b. Discuss the ethics of the laboratories’ owners who allow technicians to be paid piecework for such analysis work.

c. Discuss the ethics of the workers who rush through Pap smear analyses.

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