Markel Chapter 2- Ethics and Legal Considerations

Markel chapter 2 was actually really helpful to read while writing our ethics paper! The chapter talks about ethics and legal considerations. It sets us off to think about what is important to us when we enter the job world and how to cover ourselves in all different fields.

In this chapter Markel talks about the four major ethical obligations an employee has to the company or employer they work for.

The four duties:
1.) Employee must be capable of fulfilling their job duties and also be honest about their capabilities in performing those duties.
2.) The employee must be truthful at all times- this should help all ethical dilemmas that could potentially happen.
3.) The employee must maintain confidentiality- if others were to find out certain things about the company or potential plans it could affect business.
4.) Employee must be loyal to their employer

I believe that these guidelines are very broad and that most employers would wish for their codes of ethics to be written a little more throughly. These codes however cover a broad range of jobs and help for people learning about ethics! By following guidelines like these we can all determine and should already have the sense to do what is right and wrong. Markel talks about how these can sometimes get skipped over or forgotten when we are technically communicating.

In this chapter I really like how it talks about working against each other and how ethical lines can get crossed very fast like! This is really important as many businesses are competitive with each other and sometimes forget about ethics to one and other when they're working for a similar goal. In my career this is important because people can choose a wide array of event venues or planners. people often can easily cross each other by steeling each other's clients or claiming others work for their own. They can also lie about their services such as the price or quality to gain a client they think will go to one of their competing event planners. It can also get messy because of technical communication because we don't always know when we are taking others clients or claiming their work because we now have to do research on this. It is important to study ethics before going out into the workforce and double checking our own values.