The core of business is the relationship between a business and its customers. While both sellers and buyers can defraud each other (e.g., sellers can misrepresent their products, and customers can knowingly write bad checks), most discussion of the moral problems in the business/consumer relationship focuses on more complex issues of advertising, the use of bluffing and bribery in negotiation, the setting of prices (e.g., worries about price fixing, "monopolistic" and "cutthroat" pricing), and drawing the line between caveat emptor and product liability.
In a free market, the relationship between employers and employees is a voluntary exchange of values on terms acceptable to both sides. However, the thrust of much of the business ethics literature has been that employees are in an inherently weaker bargaining position compared to employers, and so there has been a push for governments to mandate special favors for employees. These have included granting monopoly power to some unions, pushing for affirmative action for women and members of minority groups, and making mandatory such benefits as minimum wages, paid vacation time, and health insurance. Other issues include privacy rights (e.g., whether employers have the right to test employees for drug use), how to protect whistle blowers (employees who expose their company's illegal activities), and how to deal with problems of sexual harassment, bosses who take credit for their subordinates' achievements, and so on.
Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers is an eye-opening sociological study of the world inside several large corporations. Jackall is overly cynical in his conclusions about the nature of corporate life, but he presents much good data on the often turbulent world inside corporations, including many examples of feudal thinking, backstabbing, and the usual office politics. Tibor Machan's Commerce and Morality is a philosophical anthology that collects several solid articles by philosophers and political scientists discussing the moral dimensions of managing, advertising, employer/employee relations, and affirmative action.
