HR and Employment Law News
Category
Topic
Free Special Reports
Get Your FREE HR Management Special Report. Download Any One Of These FREE Special Reports, Instantly!
Featured Special Report
Claim Your Free Copy of
Top 10 Best Practices in HR Management
HR professionals have the opportunity to play a more strategic role in the business by keeping up to date with the latest HR innovations--technological, legal, and otherwise. This special report will discuss how HR managers can anticipate and address some of the most challenging HR issues this year.
Topics in this special report include:
- Healthcare in 2012
- FMLA Paid Leave Initiatives
- Ethics
- Social Media
- Environmental Responsibility
- Workplace Wellness
- Classifying Employees
- Retirement of Baby Boomers
- Identity Theft
- Communications
Make sure you have the information you need to know about these current HR challenges and how to most effectively manage them in your workplace.
Download Now!
January 29, 2002
Corporations Get Little Trust From Employees or the Public
<For a Limited Time receive a
FREE HR Report "Top 10 Best Practices in HR Management." This comprehensive special report will give you the information you need to know about these current HR challenges and how to most effectively manage them in your workplace.
Download Now
According to a new BusinessWeek/Harris poll, only 33% of Americans feel large companies have ethical business practices and just 26% believe they are straightforward and honest in their dealings with consumers and employees.
Even as two-thirds of Americans still think corporations make good products and compete well in the global economy, 79% of Americans believe corporate executives put their own personal interests ahead of workers' and shareholders,' as Enron officials are alleged to have done.
During the 1990s boom, Americans had mixed views about the world of business. Most applauded the bounty produced by the U.S. economy, support for deregulation was on the upswing, and many rushed to grab a slice of the pie by investing in the rising stock market.
Now the Enron Corp. scandal - coming on the heels of a sharp recession, a tumbling market, and an extended stretch during which many of the most vaunted business success stories of the late 1990s proved to be chimeras - anti-corporate sentiment could be revived.
"The backlash is beginning," warned General Electric Co. Chief Executive Jeffrey R. Immelt at a talk with BusinessWeek Editor-in-Chief Stephen B. Shepard in New York on Jan. 15. "Credibility and trust is everything (in business). And because of the recession, because of Enron, that trust has evaporated."
While the BusinessWeek/Harris poll shows that a core 16% of Americans have "a great deal of confidence" in people running major companies - up slightly from the 15% who felt that way in 1999 - the percentage who have "hardly any" confidence in business leaders nearly doubled to 24%, from 13% in 1999. Watchdogs for such companies fared slightly worse.
Of those surveyed, 28% had "hardly any confidence" in government agencies, 29% had similar feelings towards the accounting field. Lawyers were seen much less favorably; 47% percent expressed "hardly any confidence" in their effectiveness.
In light of the Enron debacle, the public mood could become increasingly at odds with big business and the culture of investing. A crackdown on the accounting industry seems likely, the Feb. 4th issue of BusinessWeek reports. Board directors may get hit with new rules about conflict of interest, as well as new responsibilities to oversee corporate audits. Companies also could face restrictions on the ability to fund 401(k)s with their own stock. According to the poll, 73% feel the government should regulate companies more closely to prevent a situation similar to Enron, where employees lost large sums of their 401K and retirement money as the stock crashed.
The BusinessWeek/Harris poll in the February 4th issue of BusinessWeek, was conducted by telephone between January 16 and January 21, 2002. The survey was conducted among a nationwide cross section of 886 respondents, 18 years and older. Results should be accurate within 3 percentage points.