Canvas.

Consider a small company whose policy about sick days reads like this:

Employees are allowed a maximum of 12 sick days each year. After the 8th day, employees receive a verbal warning. After the 10th day, employees receive a written warning. Any employee exceeding the 12 days will be terminated.

Many companies have similar policies, and everyone is usually pretty satisfied with them. One year, however, the company faced a difficult problem. Two employees, Hal and Roger, had used all 12 of their allotted sick days. Hal had been with the company for 2 years. He was a so-so workernot great, not terriblebut his boss suspected that most of Hals sick days were not legitimate and that he was just taking additional time off when he felt like it.

Roger was a very good worker who had been with the company for 10 years. His child has become seriously ill during the past year and Roger frequently needed to take him to the hospital for treatments. He was using his sick days to care for his child. Both men were called in and warned that they had reached the maximum allowance for sick days. The following week, both took another day off.

Imagine that you are the executive who has to decide what happens to the two workers and think about the situation you face. Please type your answers to the following questions by number.

1 How would you describe the problem?

2 What facts and issues in the case are most important, and how do they bear on what you do?

3 Do you see this as an ethical problem? Explain.

4 Is it right or wrong to fire the two men? Explain.

5 What justification is there for keeping Roger and firing Hal?

6 What implications does your action have for all the other employees of the company?

7 What decision would you make? Why?