It might be a bit much to require employees to break a law as it might expose individual employees to some legal consequences. But there are plenty of laws that are immoral. There are a number of good examples in the peer comments (some of the laws of Hitler's Germany for example). Any company manager or officer that insists on enforcing such laws is themself immoral. But it takes some skill to craft a company policy that could address the situation adequately.
Is this even legal? Can a company prevent employees from talking about the company breaking the law. I don't see how this could be enforceable. Assuming they are indeed found to have broken the law.
>will be "required" by policies but not enforced in practice
That would seem to be extremely unethical and possibly at least borderline an OSHA violation. If a workplace is claiming that certain procedures are being followed and they are in fact not being followed, I think plenty of lawyers would be happy to take that lawsuit.
Sure, but the more likely way in which these things go is: "Do what you have to do to make us pass those emissions tests" and "Get rid of that industrial waste" and so on.
No clear command to do something illegal but the employee is left with two choices: do something illegal or end up not doing what they were told to do.
Culpability is a thing that can be smeared out effectively across the layers of a large organization where each layer only sees the delta between the one above it and the one below it, the people that know the law and the consequences are safely (or so they think) insulated from the hands that commit the crimes and the hands that commit the crimes typically don't know the law.
This situation has - as far as I know - never really been addressed explicitly in the law hence the institutionalization of 'the buck stops at the top'. Even if you don't know and even if you did not order it explicitly you are - and should - still be held responsible. The question at hand is if that should include criminal liability for all cases where the employees break the law and I think there are plenty of cases where employees breaking the law should not lead to culpability of management, for instance, those cases where employees gain an advantage for themselves at the expense of the company, the customers or the society they operate in. But in most other cases where the company gained an advantage the execs should be liable. That alone will get companies to behave like good (immortal) citizens.
Kind of a hard stance to enforce. If you work for basically any major corporate entity you are probably sacrificing integrity to do so. So it seems you are calling the kettle black here.
Well the law is changing to make failure to carry out your responsibilities as a specific officer in a company a criminal offence. But that’s got nothing to do with a companies limited liability.
There are plenty of other positions in companies that come with similar personal criminal liability. They mostly only exist in finance industry, but the roles of CEO, CRO, MLRO etc in most financial institutions come with personal criminal liability.
The liability in these cases is usually tied to competence and knowledge. It’s illegal to be incompetent at your role, and it’s illegal to be ignorant of the activities of your company that fall within your roles responsibilities. The expectation is that individuals in this role will setup policy and monitoring frameworks to make sure that nobody is doing any stupid, that might result in them going to prison.
All of these requirements came into existence after the 2008 financial crisis, after it became apparent that senior leaders in financial institutions we’re keeping themselves deliberately ignorant of the misbehaviour of their companies, and creating a situation where nobody could be held responsible for the mess.
I’m not sure that age verification for website meets the bar needed for applying this approach here. But there are certainly places where it makes sense.
You would have to demonstrate that this was an encouraged practice, and supported by management. At the very least, you would have to show the company was negligent in responding to accusations of extortion.
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