Marissa Mayer was officially hired as the CEO of Yahoo back in 2012. Yahoo has been struggling for a little over a decade to its arch rivals such as Google and Bing. Mayer has reportedly been facing pressure about cutting costs in the organization internally before she was even officially named CEO. It has been recently reported that many employees have been losing their jobs at Yahoo. Mayer never doubted the fact that cutting employees could be part of the plan for cost saving efforts, but the understood plan was to eliminate employees due on a score card basis and the lowest performing would be cut, it was a classic case of a "survival of the fittest" mentality. However, with the recent report on sudden layoffs from Yahoo, there seems to be a change of plans.
This dilemma raises an ethical issue because it challenges the pure fundamental notion of fairness. As I mentioned in a prior blog, issues similar to this raise larger ethical scenarios considering the level of compensation that CEO's have become accustomed to receive. The same people that are making the decisions that the company cant afford to pay a certain amount of employees or labor, are the individuals that are making often times more than 25 times the salary. Does the CEO of a company put in 25 times the work as say, a senior engineer? Its difficult to make a case that they do, and it essentially creates a broken system that often times results in people getting taken advantage of.
The utilitarian outlook seems to come up often when it comes to ethical issues such as this one. Whenever ethical decisions are made that will directly or indirectly effect a large amount of people, those decisions become increasingly more difficult to make. The perspective of utilitarian ethics as well as consequential ethics makes it more tolerable to make such profound decisions because it is solely reliant on the results of decisions, in my opinion, this makes it easier to throw people under the bus along the way to achieve the ultimate goal, while in the meantime providing a means to justify it (Again the results).
My recommendation of how this ethical dilemma should have initially been solved begins with the criticism of the use of utilitarian ethics in the modern world. It just seems that it is too easy to harm people of a good or goods (some consider to be privileges) to benefit the greater good. It just doesn't sit well with the way the world works today, it encourages and promotes even further levels of pride and greed and even further, a heartless society. I would press for the use of virtue ethics in making these decisions even in the modern world. There are different solutions for cost saving strategies in a company rather than just getting rid of people, its just the easy way out.
Source: Business Insider
URL: http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-is-firing-people-at-yahoo-2015-2
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