12Fonts, Times new roman, no more than 3 pages

12Fonts, Times new roman, no more than 3 pages

Facts

Kirat is a store manager in the Vancouver location of Pranav Fashions (PF), a moderately profitable international womens fashion store with over 100 locations in 65 countries around the world.

While PF has struggled in the retail industry with flat sales and heavy competition from other womens fashion retailers, for the first time in four years PF showed a modest rise of four percent in its annual net profit from its worldwide store sales. This prompted the company to reinstate its Christmas bonus of $200 for full-time and $100 for part-time employees in the profitable stores, a practice PF suspended during the non-profitable years.

Kirat initially secured a position as a sales clerk with PF Vancouver seven years ago. She was a very conscientious and diligent employee with a friendly personality that colleagues and customers loved. Her former store manager took notice of this and fast promoted Kirat to an assistant manager position.

When the store manager decided to move to PFs Toronto, Ontario location, she recommended Kirat to PFs Western District manager as her successor in the Vancouver store. The Western District manager met with Kirat and immediately took a liking to her. She hired her on the spot to replace store manager.

While Kirats promotion to the store manager position came with an increase in pay, it was only marginally more than the sales clerks she supervised made and certainly, not sufficient to allow her to comfortably support her family.

Kirat resides in Vancouver, British Columbia with her disabled husband and their twin fifteen-year old daughters. She is the sole breadwinner in her family. Kirats husband was injured at work in an industrial accident five years ago. He was permanently incapacitated and has been unemployed ever since. He receives a small disability pension, which partially pays for the familys very modest two-bedroom rental apartment.

The twins, both grade 8 students in the local high school, have friends and classmates who frequently wear the trendiest teen fashions and gadgets supplied by their well-to-do parents. The girls often asked Kirat to buy them expensive clothes, shoes and accessories but Kirat was unable accede to their requests. As the sole breadwinner in the family, Kirat has more pressing concerns to deal with such as unpaid bills for utilities, credit card debt and transportation costs for the family. Her income and her husbands disability cheque did not cover all of the familys costs and Kirat almost never had any money left over at the end of the month. In fact, she often had a deficit that she covered by using her credit cards. She found herself with mounting credit card debt and no way to pay the balances when they were due.

Kirat often had to rely on the charity of the local food bank and her friends and relatives to make ends meet. She received assistance from them in the form of non-perishable food items like canned goods, peanut butter, dry soups, pasta and the like. Her friends also gave her clothes their kids either grew out of or no longer wanted because they were out of style. The twins resented having to wear these hand-me downs.

As a store manager, Kirat was privy to the stores sales and knew that her store was doing very well relative to other PF stores. She approached the Western District Manager and requested a 10% increase in her salary but she informed Kirat that PFs head office set salaries and she had no discretion in the matter. The District Manager cautioned that it would be futile to ask the head office for a raise as past efforts by others had been met with swift rejection. As a result, Kirat retracted her request for a raise.

While the retail clothing industry is known to pay their staff relatively low wages, PF, in particular, has a deserved reputation for paying its staff the lowest salaries in the industry. Most of the employees at PF stores were transient part-time workers between the ages of 18 and 25 years looking to make extra pocket money. They did not have serious objections to making minimum wage working at PF because they did not carry the responsibilities of supporting a family like Kirat did.

With mounting debt and family pressures, Kirat was growing resentful. She felt that she had little to show after working for PF for seven years. She believe her prospects were limited at PF and felt unappreciated and undervalued.. Desperate to earn more income to support her family, Kirat came up with a fictitious refund scheme that involved processing a transaction as if a customer were returning merchandise, even though there was no actual return. She discovered a weakness in the automated payment system, which allowed her to process false returns and then credit herself using various pre-paid Visa cards.

After implementing the refund scheme for a couple of months and supplementing her income by $300 to $400, Kirat realized that each time she processed a false refund she had to enter her employee identification code. She was concerned that PF would find it suspicious that she processed a disproportionate number of refunds relative to other employees. As a result, she attempted to recruit three young and impressionable sales clerks, Sabrina, Skylar and Darcie, to join her scheme. Kirat felt that their involvement would divert attention from her and enable her to share in the proceeds of their fraudulent transactions while keeping the refunds she processed independently of them. She picked these particular employees because she had mentored them at PF. Sabrina, Skylar and Darcie viewed Kirat as a mother figure and often confided in her about their personal problems. Moreover, Kirat held firing and disciplinary authority over them and decided what shifts, if any, she would allocate them. Therefore, Kirat felt she could trust them to participate and not blow the whistle.

Kirat felt particularly confident that Sabrina would be a willing participant. She had mentioned to Sabrina, on more than a couple of occasions, an assistant manager position might soon be available to her along with an associated pay increase. However, while Skylar and Darcie, without any hesitation, joined Kirat in making false returns, Sabrina felt conflicted and told Kirat that she needed to think about it.

Sabrina very much liked Kirat and valued her mentorship, but she was brought up to respect others property rights. She often remembered the great hardship her parents experienced in uprooting the family from East Africa to immigrate to Canada with a view to providing her and her older sister safer and better lives and a good education. She did not want to disappoint her family.

Although Kirat assured Sabrina that there was no risk in participating in the refund scheme, Sabrina feared the likelihood of being caught and losing her job. She had greater aspirations than working for PF for her entire career. She wanted to go to university and eventually to law school and make her parents very proud of her. Working at PF was a means to that end, as she was saving tuition money from every pay cheque she received from PF. Sabrina did not want to jeopardize her job, future plans and potential career in law if she was caught, fired and received a criminal record.

Kirat, Skylar and Darcie are growing impatient. They are pressuring Sabrina to process the false returns, too.

ANSWER KEY

What are the ethical issues? [2 marks]

Who are all the stakeholders and what are their interests? [10 marks]

What are the alternatives available to Sabrina? ( 5 marks)

(i)Which one option above (under 3) is consistent with the Utilitarian approach?

(ii)Which one option above (under 3 ) is consistent with the Rights approach?

(iii)Which one option above(under 3) is consistent with the Justice approach? (Explain in detail your reasons for each approach below)

[please note, I am not asking you to copy content in your slides and readings to define each framework here. I am asking for your original analysis based on the facts in this case].

[5 marks each for a total of 15 marks for this question].

What would you do if you were Sabrina? Explain your answer using one or more ethical frameworks. If you can incorporate in your answer frameworks not already used in 4 above, that would be good as it will show your range of understanding of frameworks.

[Question is worth 3 marks].