Governance and Ethics

Running Head: GOVERNANCE AND ETHICS
GOVERNANCE AND ETHICS
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note:

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INTRODUCTION
Retail Food Group is a consumer oriented food and beverage company with its headquarter
located in Queensland, Australia. The company aims to contribute to the society in terms of
economic, social and environmental concerns. Such contributions shall be made in accordance
with the principles of honesty and integrity.
This Code of Conduct is adopted by the Board to provide guidelines to its personnels to
be observed at all times and failure to do so shall be held accountable on the grounds stated in
this guideline.
OUR PRINCIPLES:
All directors and employees of the Food Retail group shall be expected to act in
consistent with the following principles:
 No person shall be discriminated on the grounds of class, caste, color, creed
or sex or any other grounds in accordance with the law of Queensland:
It is illegal to discriminate any person on the grounds of age, sex, color, race, gender identity,
sexuality, relationship status, pregnancy, breastfeeding, family responsibilities and so on. this
Code of Conduct is at par with the Anti-Discrimination Act 1991 which governs discrimination
prohibition principle as every person’s right. According to Solanke (2016), the act of
discrimination has become a social stigma among people and their living in the society. Thus, the
law to prohibit discrimination recognizes the problem protects the interests of such people in
every aspect of life including workplace, and social recognition.

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 No employee or worker of the company shall be exploited by the terms of the
Code. Every employee or worker is entitled to equal opportunities and proper
payments:
The law prohibits exploitation of workers and employees in a workplace. In adherence to
such provision of law, this Code of Conduct prohibits any exploitation or exchange of favor by a
person having undue influence over the subordinate in exchange of an official favor shall be
prohibited. It is at par with the discriminatory prohibition where no person is allowed to
discriminate the other person on statutory grounds as mentioned above. In addition, such
discrimination should also not result in exploitation of workers in a workplace. It includes
principles like equal pay for equal work, equal opportunities to all irrespective of any ground
mentioned in law. According to Rawling (2018) it has been explained that the industrial
legislation passed by federal Parliament in Australia prohibits exploitation of workers and
employees in any workplace including exchange of undue advantage in return of professional
favor resulting in unlawful method of professionalism.
Wage theft (2019) is another form of exploitation and the company Code of Conduct shall
not tolerate such unlawful acts and practices. There are many forms of wage theft like failing to
pay superannuation, failing to pay for breaks, overtime, training periods or trials, shift
allowances, on-call periods, and other unlawful practices.

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 Every employee and worker shall respect and maintain confidentiality of
information at all times in relation with the company and its interests:
Every employee or worker and director of the company shall be responsible for the
information held by them with respect to the comoany. Hence, they should maintain secrecy and
confidentiality at all times so that the interests of the company is not affected.
In case of whistleblowers, the internal whistleblowers shall be protected by the management
against the revenge and anger of their seniors about him the whistle has been blown. However, in
case of external whistleblowers, the comoany shall be investigating into the matters of
confidentiality and the person responsible for its leakage to the external source. According to
Vandekerckhove (2016), it has been explained that whistleblowing is an organizational social
responsibility because it is the right of the subordinate to inform the seniors about the irregularity
within the organization and on the other hand, inform the Government organizations about the
statutory irregularity happening within the corporate organization. Such information if true,
would not be deemed as leakage of confidential matters as every employee or worker or director
owes a social responsibility to work with complete honesty. There has been Parliamentary
debates about the formal legislation protecting the whistleblowers however, the individual
legislations like Public Interest Disclosure ACT 2010 (Qld) section 12 provides remedy against
misconduct and Workers’ Compensation and Rehabilitation Act 2003 (Qld) on account of
confidential settlement (Brown 2013; Dixon 2016)