by Feed your head with a play by Pamela Olson

Created on: August 27, 2008

Clerk Fired For Saving Lost Dog. Compassion in business, compassion in marriage.

On Thursday, January 5, 1989, there was an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, "Checker Fired For Saving Lost Dog." I still remember the public outcry. The clerk felt a moral duty to the dog that was higher than the ten or so minutes of her employer's time she took to save the dog. Her manager fired her for her act of mercy. The manager felt he had a moral problem with the clerk not performing her job as he interpreted it.

Morality and social responsibility are unavoidably a matter of degree and interpretation. In this case, the forces outside the grocery store, the owners as well as the author of the article, and the resulting public uproar, interpreted the manager's actions to be socially unacceptable.

In Business and Society, Joseph McGuire argues that an organization must "act justly" as a proper citizen should. Certainly, it was astonishing to me that the manager fired the clerk for the 5 - 10 minutes. But then, I have been too often astonished at and hurt myself by lack of kindness - the cruel and coarse level gone to in many situations that did not even remotely justify it - if anything ever does. The owners wisely decided against their manager; apologized, tossing in a $500 donation to the Humane Society for good measure.

Peter Drucker alluded that a useful way to distinguish behaviors in organizations is first to see what an organization does to society, and second what an organization does for society. In this newspaper article, the grocery store is providing needed groceries, employment and paying and collecting taxes, which is good for society, yet found out it was in error to society when its manager's bottom line overruled human compassion.

Oliver Sheldon, in his writing, A Professional Creed for Management, wrote that business is determined by an interplay of internal and external forces, both of which represent a potential change to a business. With internal forces being labor and science; and external forces being state actions, public attitudes, education, financing, and foreign/domestic competition and trade conditions. Sheldon felt this relationship resulted in a triangle of interactions between management, the political environment and the social world. The grocery store manager in this article felt he was responsible for the direction of his organization's mission. That probably went something along the lines of providing the groceries to his area and making

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