No care without justice: A normative ethical perspective of the employment of people with disabilities in hospitality businesses

Abstract

People with disabilities (PWDs) face discrimination in the hospitality workplace. The aim of this paper is therefore to frame issues surrounding the employment of PWDs in the hospitality industry in normative ethical terms. To achieve this aim, we conducted twenty-eight semi-structured interviews with owners/managers of hospitality businesses and other relevant stakeholders. Drawing on the ethics of justice and ethics of care, our study found that when organisations demonstrated to their employees and other stakeholders the fairness in the procedures taken to implement PWD inclusion actions, the inclusion actions were significantly supported by coworkers, and the organisations were able to achieve distributive justice and care for PWDs. This study, thus, demonstrated that organisational members were willing to take part in caring actions for employees with disabilities (EWDs) not only when they perceived that inclusion actions for EWDs were procedurally fair, but also when they perceived that the PWDs deserved distributive justice outcomes.