Dash A BUS 206 Module 4 Assignment

Jeremy Simmons Southern New Hampshire University BUS 206: Business Law I Dr. Jerry Noah June 7, 2026 Ethics are the moral principles that govern a person's behavior and choices. In business, “ethics is what provides the social legitimacy for markets, what distinguishes markets from the life of jungle”. The law and ethics are closely connected, but they are not the same thing – law tells us the minimum standard of behavior that is required, backed by the possibility of legal consequences if we fall short, while ethics goes further by asking what a person (or company) should do, even when no law forces them to. In other words, sometimes simply following the law is not enough because the law does not and cannot provide the answers to all ethical questions and dilemmas, that an action can be entirely legal and still be wrong. Corporate social responsibility, often called CSR, is the idea that a company owes more than profit to its investors. It has responsibilities to its employees, its customers, and the broader community it operates in. CSR is directly connected to ethical business behavior. When a company embraces CSR, it asks whether that action is fair, respectful, and good for the people involved. In the context of Apex Retail Corp, CSR means that the company should treat its workers not just as resources to be managed, but as full human beings with private lives that deserve protection. In our case, company that genuinely practices CSR would have recognized the harm of 24/7 employee tracking before it became a complaint. The situation at Apex involves several overlapping legal and ethical problems. First, Apex required all employees to install the WorkWhen! GPS tracking app on their personal phones. The app runs continuously, evn when employees are completely off duty and supervisors have access to this data. When Darius Jones discovered that his supervisor can see he attends a weekly alcohol recovery meeting and disabled app's tracking during his personal time, he was reprimanded for violating company policy. He then filed a complaint with the state labor board, claiming invasion of privacy and retaliation. The people most directly harmed by this policy are Darius Jones and the other employees of Apex. Their most personal activities are being recorded by their employer with no clear connection to any work-related purpose. Jones's situation is especially serious because recovery from alcohol use disorder depends on confidentiality and a sense of safety, and knowing that an employer can see exactly where he goes could discourage him from continuing a program that may be essential to his health. Beyond that, his manager’s response that employees "represent the company on and off the clock" suggests that leadership never thought carefully about where the company's authority ends and employee rights begin. Regulators now involved in the case are also stakeholders, and the outcome of Jones's complaint could affect how other employers in the region use tracking technology. Turning to the legal side, there are several laws that Apex's policy may be violating. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act ECPA restricts the unauthorized interception or monitoring of people's electronic communications and movements. While employers sometimes argue that employees consented to monitoring by agreeing to a company policy, courts have consistently questioned whether that kind of “broad” consent is legally sufficient, especially when monitoring extends into personal time that has nothing to do with the job. Many states go further than federal law, requiring specific written notice before employers may electronically monitor workers, and some states restrict what employers can do with location data collected from personal devices. Additionally, since alcohol abuse can qualify as a disability under the ADA in certain circumstances, and the law prohibits employers from seeking out information about employees' health or disabilities (Americans with Disabilities Act, 1990), the Americans with Disabilities Act is also relevant. The fact that WorkWhen's AI can identify the type of facility an employee visits and that supervisors can access this information creates a genuine risk that Apex is collecting health-related information it has no business having. In addition to that, when Jones was reprimanded after speaking up about his privacy concerns, the situation became a potential retaliation case. Federal and state laws protect employees who assert their workplace rights from being punished by their employers. On the ethical side, even setting aside what the law requires, Apex's policy does not hold up under any reasonable ethical standard. The company's stated justification for the GPS app is employee safety during work-related travel and monitoring of vehicles for delivery tasks. Tracking an employee to a recovery meeting on a personal evening has nothing to do with either of those purposes. When a company collects far more information than its actual business needs require, it is a sign that ethical thinking was never applied to the decision. The basic idea of treating people with dignity means recognizing that employees have full personal lives outside of work, and that those private lives are not the employer's business unless there is a clear, legitimate reason connected to the job. Apex has offered no such reason for off-hours monitoring. Speaking of potential implications, if Apex does not change its approach, the consequences could be severe. On the legal side, the company can face potential lawsuits for invasion of privacy, violations of the ADA, and unlawful retaliation, along with possible regulatory fines. On the human side, employees who know they are being watched every hour of the day are more likely to feel stressed, mistrusted. That kind of environment leads to lower morale, higher turnover, and difficulty attracting new workers, all of which carry big business costs. If the story receives media attention, Apex's reputation with customers can suffer more. To address these problems, Apex should take quite a few steps. The most important change is to restrict GPS tracking to working hours only. The app should activate when an employee clocks in and automatically deactivate when they clock out. Employees should be able to see in the app's own activity log that no off-hours tracking is taking place, as there is no operational reason why a retail or delivery company needs to know where its workers are during their personal time. Another approach proposes an idea that Apex can provide company-owned devices for any employees in roles where tracking during work hours would be necessary, such as delivery drivers. One more thing Apex can do is disabling the AI feature that identifies the type of establishment an employee visits. To addresses the ethical test or framework that Apex should use going forward when evaluating decisions like the use of employee monitoring tools. The framework selected here is the ethics of care, one of the theories covered in Appendix 2A of the course textbook, Dynamic Business Law (Kubasek et al., 2020). The ethics of care is a moral framework that asks us to make decisions by focusing on our relationships with others and the responsibility we have to protect and support the people who depend on us. Rather than relying on abstract rules or calculating outcomes for the greatest number of people, the ethics of care asks a more personal question: how will this decision affect the real people involved, and what does genuine care for them require? In a business context, this means that before implementing a policy, a company should ask how it will affect the individuals it touches — not just in terms of legal risk or operational efficiency, but in terms of their well-being, dignity, and trust (Kubasek et al., 2020, p. 38). One of the strengths of the ethics of care is that it naturally focuses attention on the human consequences of business decisions. It does not let a company hide behind abstractions like "policy" or "operational needs" when real people are being harmed. It takes seriously the fact that relationships — between employers and employees, between companies and their communities — are built on trust, and that trust can be damaged or destroyed by decisions that show a lack of genuine care. For Apex, a company that depends on its employees to serve customers and run its operations, maintaining that trust is not just an ethical obligation; it is a business necessity. The framework does have some limitations. Because it focuses on relationships and context rather than fixed rules, it can be harder to apply consistently across a large organization. A manager might genuinely care about a few employees they know personally while still failing to consider the impact of a policy on workers they never interact with. It also does not provide a simple formula that produces a clear answer in every situation, which can make it feel less concrete than other frameworks. For these reasons, the ethics of care works best when combined with a regular practice of asking employees for their perspectives and building feedback mechanisms into decision-making. Despite these limitations, the ethics of care is particularly well suited for Apex because the core issue in the WorkWhen! situation is a failure to care about employees as people. The company focused entirely on what the technology could do operationally and never seriously asked what it was doing to its workers. An ethics of care lens would have required Apex to pause and genuinely consider: How does it feel to have your employer track your location 24 hours a day? What happens to an employee who is in a vulnerable situation — like someone working hard to maintain sobriety — if their employer has access to that information? Would employees feel supported and trusted under this policy, or surveilled and mistrusted? Those questions would have led to very different conclusions than the ones Apex actually reached. Applying the ethics of care to the Apex scenario works as follows. Before deploying WorkWhen!, Apex's leadership should have started not with the question "What does this app allow us to do?" but rather "How will this affect the people who work for us?" Genuine care for employees would have led the company to recognize that requiring 24/7 tracking on personal phones goes far beyond what any of those employees consented to when they took a job at a retail store. It would have prompted conversations with workers about how they felt about being monitored, and those conversations would have surfaced concerns exactly like the ones Darius Jones eventually raised. A company operating from a foundation of care would have built in safeguards from the start: limiting tracking to work hours, using company devices, and giving employees full transparency about what was being recorded. The ethics of care would also have produced a very different response when Jones raised his concerns. Rather than dismissing him — with the claim that employees represent the company on and off the clock — a manager guided by this framework would have listened, taken the concern seriously, and treated Jones's discomfort as a signal that the policy needed reconsideration. Jones disabled the app during his personal time not to undermine the company, but to protect his own privacy and health. A caring employer would have recognized that and responded with understanding, not a reprimand. The ethics of care reminds us that how a company responds to employee concerns is just as important as the policies it creates in the first place. Apex failed on both counts, but it now has the opportunity to change course and build the kind of trust-centered workplace culture that genuinely looking after its people requires. References Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, Pub. L. No. 101-336, 42 U.S.C. § 12101 et seq. (1990). Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, Pub. L. No. 99-508, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510–2523 (1986). Kubasek, N. K., Browne, M. N., Herron, D. J., Dhooge, L. J., & Barkacs, L. L. (2020). Dynamic business law (5th ed.). McGrawHill Education.. References Comstock, F. (2026, February 3). Sarbanes-Oxley act of 2002. In Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved May 31, 2026, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sarbanes-Oxley-Act United States Department of Justice. (2024, March 28). Samuel Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years for his orchestration of multiple fraudulent schemes. Retrieved May 31, 2026, from https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/samuel-bankman-friedsentenced-25-years-his-orchestration-multiple-fraudulent-schemes