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Engineering Ethics and Unionization: Challenging NSPE's Positions on Engineers' Relationship with Labor Unions

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Conference

2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Portland, Oregon

Publication Date

June 23, 2024

Start Date

June 23, 2024

End Date

July 12, 2024

Conference Session

Engineering, Ethics, and Community Engagement

Tagged Divisions

Community Engagement Division (COMMENG) and Engineering Ethics Division (ETHICS)

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/47282

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Paper Authors

biography

Lazlo Stepback Purdue University

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Lazlo Stepback is a PhD student in Engineering Education at Purdue University. His current research interests focus on engineering ethics, the connections between personal morals and professional ethics, and how students ethically develop as engineers. He earned a B.S. in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines (Golden, CO) in 2020.

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biography

Joey Valle Purdue University

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Joseph 'Joey' Valle is a queer Latine Ashkenazi Jew employed as a postdoctoral worker in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. Dr. Valle received a Ph.D in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. They were awarded an NSF STEMEdIPRF Postdoctoral Fellowship: Advancing Engineering Education in Universities on Labor and Unions to study intersections of engineering and labor.

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Abstract

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.

Stepback, L., & Valle, J. (2024, June), Engineering Ethics and Unionization: Challenging NSPE's Positions on Engineers' Relationship with Labor Unions Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/47282

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