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US engineering professional societies have been influential institutions that propagate a constricted understanding of the roles and responsibilities of an engineer within society by upholding an alignment of industry over engineering reflective of a hegemonic adherence to business professionalism. The ideology of business professionalism advances beliefs that engineers are, and should be, unshakably beholden to capitalist corporate owners and the industries they extract profit through. In this paper, we examine the historically anti-union attitudes and actions of the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE), and their adherence to the ideology of business professionalism, through analysis of ethics case studies published by their Board of Ethical Review (BER). As an advocate of professional engineering licensure and as leaders in engineering ethics standards, NSPE’s consistent anti-union stance lays bare a clear bias to the needs of industry and the capitalist mode of production at the expense of the collective bargaining power of engineers as workers. NSPE is an influential organization in the codification of engineering rules of practice, so it is valuable to deconstruct their application of their code of ethics to justify anti-union arguments. 

According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, union density amongst engineering workers within the US hovers around 7%. Despite hundreds of thousands of US engineers participating in the labor movement, engineering education on labor unions has been virtually non-existent within US higher education engineering programs. US higher education engineering programs are critical junctures in the making of engineers that have long histories of ensnarement by corporate industries with vested interests in undermining organized labor. This stark and significant absence of labor education coupled with decades-long denunciations that many engineering professional societies have made to discourage participation of engineers in building labor unions and the labor movement interrupt engineers’ capacity to collectively leverage our power for safer, healthier, and more just workplaces and worlds. An imperative task in the (re)development of the US engineering workforce is to build and strengthen union density amongst engineers by expanding unionization pathways. This paper offers a preliminary report back on a broader engineering workforce development project to nurture relationships between an unorganized (i.e. non-union) engineering research center and organized labor. Herein, we uplift stories from union members describing their pathways from higher education engineering programs to labor unions. Group interview conversations illuminating these stories offer broader contextualization for the sparseness and rarity of the paths from engineering programs to labor unions. Dialogue from group interviews further pointed toward opportunities to expand unionization pathways for engineering workers. 

Background: Studies of changes in engineering students’ perceptions of ethics and social responsibility over time have often resulted in mixed results or shown only small longitudinal shifts. Comparisons across different studies have been difficult due to the diverse frameworks that have been used for measurement and analysis in research on engineering ethics and have revealed major gaps between the measurement tools and instruments available to assess engineering ethics and the complexity of ethical and social responsibility constructs. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this study was to understand how engineering students’ views of ethics and social responsibility change over the four years of their undergraduate degrees and to explore the use of reflexive principlism as an organizing framework for analyzing these changes. Design/Method: We used qualitative interviews of engineering students to explore multiple facets of their understanding of ethics and social responsibility. We interviewed 33 students in their first and fourth years of their undergraduate studies. We then inductively analyzed the pairs of interviews, using the reflexive principlism framework to formulate our findings. Results: We found that engineering students in their fourth year of studies were better able to engage in balancing across multiple ethical principles and specification of said ethical principles than they could as first year students. They most frequently referenced nonmaleficence and, to a lesser degree, beneficence as relevant ethical principles at both time points, and were much less likely to reference justice and autonomy. Conclusions: This work shows the potential of using reflexive principlism as an analytical framework to illuminate the nuanced ways that engineering students’ views of ethics and social responsibility change and develop over time. Our findings suggest reflexive principlism may also be useful as a pedagogical approach to better equip students to specify and balance all four principles when ethical situations arise. 

This paper uses the critical incident technique to analyze how early career engineers experience ethics in the workplace. Our results build off a previously developed framework that categorizes critical incidents related to professional engineering ethics, but we expand the framework to address its gaps. Though there was significant overlap between our findings and the existing framework in the types of critical incidents reported by participants, in some cases the severity of a negative ethical experience was not captured by existing categories, especially when describing sexual harassment in the workplace. Many incidents also required multiple categories to accurately describe them as opposed to a single overarching descriptor. Additionally, we observed a connection between personal morality and professional ethics that was present in some critical incidents. Our observations suggest that similar types of critical incidents related to ethics may often be experienced by engineers, but more work needs to be done to expand the classification of these situations and better understand how engineers develop ethics-related competencies, especially early in their careers and in a workplace context. 

This paper uses the critical incident technique to analyze how early career engineers experience ethics in the workplace. Our results build off a previously developed framework that categorizes critical incidents related to professional engineering ethics, but we expand the framework to address its gaps. Though there was significant overlap between our findings and the existing framework in the types of critical incidents reported by participants, in some cases the severity of a negative ethical experience was not captured by existing categories, especially when describing sexual harassment in the workplace. Many incidents also required multiple categories to accurately describe them as opposed to a single overarching descriptor. Additionally, we observed a connection between personal morality and professional ethics that was present in some critical incidents. Our observations suggest that similar types of critical incidents related to ethics may often be experienced by engineers, but more work needs to be done to expand the classification of these situations and better understand how engineers develop ethics-related competencies, especially early in their careers and in a workplace context.