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ABSTRACT. There has been widespread emphasis on the importance of trust amongst parties to the employment relationship, associated with a call for increased "integrative bargaining". Trust is bound up with ethical action, but there has been some debate about the ethics of deception in bargaining. Because it is possible for cooperative bargainers to be exploited, some writers contend that deceptive behavior is ethical and established practice. There are several problems about that view. It is questionable how clear and uniform such a practice has been. An appearance of deceptive bluffing can often be explained as exchange of genuine concessions. Recent trends have seen increased devolution of bargaining from professionals to non-professionals, which dilutes any shared understandings there have been in the past, while practices that do exist may not be freely or voluntarily accepted and the existence of such practices is not enough to compensate for inequalities of power and skill. It is questionable to what extent bluffing and deception are necessary for self-defense. There other techniques available by which parties can guard themselves against exploitation.
KEY WORDS: deception, honesty, labor relations, negotiation, trust
Robertson notes in regard to business ethics that much research has been from the "normative perspective", which is aimed at determining ethical standards. She suggests avenues for empirical research, but notes that "probably the most important source of reluctance to investigate ethical behavior empirically is uncertainty as to what exactly constitutes ethical conduct" (1993, p. 585). The topic of investigation in this paper is an issue of that sort, about deceptive behavior in labor negotiation. It attempts a contribution to the field from "the normative perspective", building on some basic assumptions and bearing in mind some relevant empirical material. The starting point is discussion in the literature about the ethics of labor relations bargaining; in particular, the ethics of bluffing and deception (Carson et al., 1982; Post, 1990; Adler and Bigoness, 1992; Carson, 1993).
The course of the following argument is this. There has been widespread emphasis on the importance of trust amongst parties to the employment relationship. Trust seems to be bound up with ethical action, but there is some question about what is ethical in bargaining, particularly where deception and bluffing are concerned. Because it is possible for...