Management of Labor Environment in Ethics Codes. Content Analysis in Companies from Argentina, Colombia and Spain

Abstract

Currently corporations must face ethical challenges in a globalized context. To cope with them, they have opted for designing ethical policies, mostly implemented by ethics codes. Amongst the most discussed topics in codes, the management of the labor context specially stands out. This environment may lead to troublesome and challenging situations from an ethical perspective. This study focuses on analysing the ethics codes from the largest corporations from Argentina, Colombia and Spain, with the aim of underlining the main ethical concerns referred to the management of the labor environment. A content analysis of the ethics codes of the main public companies from Argentina, Colombia and Spain has been developed. Further, a comparative analysis is undertaken. The selected companies are those quoted in the indexes Merval-20 (Argentina), Colcap-25 (Colombia) and Ibex-35 (Spain). The comparative analysis show that there exist some ethical aspects of common concern for companies, such as the promotion of a labor climate based on respect and no discrimination, the labor health and security, the conflicts of interests and the management of gifts and benefits. However, other issues, such as the balance between labor and personal life, are less displayed. In this regard, some differences in content and detail are identified among the countries. The study analyzes the main ethical concerns of the organizations in terms of management of the labor environment, evidencing some of the similarities in the globalized context and underlining the differences in the focus, approach, content and depth in the different ethical issues from the countries analyzed.