Doing business internationally often involves confronting ethical issues that do

Question

Doing business internationally often involves confronting ethical issues that do not arise or that have already been solved to our culture’s satisfaction in domestic companies. An example would be manufacturing operations that use child labor and/or operate with unsanitary or unsafe working conditions. Your competitors may employ such operations, and in doing so gain a competitive edge in production costs. At the same time, wages in such operations often exceed those offered in the country for other forms of work, sometimes by a considerable margin. Finding solutions to such moral dilemmas and developing a position that you are comfortable with is one of the challenges of doing business internationally.

Initial Post Instructions

Many employees in sweatshops and even families whose children work in these shops having come from even more abject poverty view their employment as a means to a better life. Make the case for why this sort of employment is in the best moral interest of the workers. Having done that, do you agree or disagree with the position that you have just taken, and why?

400 Word Minimum, no copy and paste. Original words only. APA format, list in text citations and references

Explanation / Answer

While international businesses undoubtedly mint money through their operations in other countries, it is a boon that they also provide employment opportunities to thousands of skilled people.

Like every coin has a flip side, they also cut short the work force where their labor cost is high and save millions of dollars by employing labor that is cheaper in other continents.

While this is a universal scenario with global companies, there are a lot of ethical factors that come into the picture as these companies in their quest for profits, take decisions to fire employees who might be the sole bread earners and this is a common trend in both service and manufacturing companies.

Some manufacturing companies violate labor rules by bribing the labor ministries and governments in poorer countries such as African countries and get much cheaper labor to do their dirty work.

In order to fulfil their customer demands and maintain the quality, they penetrate into third world countries where poverty and illiteracy rule the roost and employ children for a very low wage where the hygienic conditions are totally out of the grid. In a quest to gain an upper hand over their competitors and maximize the revenues and profits, they compromise on basic ethics and stand as a road block against humanity.

Sad, but true, and one such case was Nestle. There were multiple reports in 2001, that Nestle employed around 600,000 children in Ivory Coast and made them work in substandard living conditions.

H&M has been involved in major humanitarian issues and in one of the sweatshops in Bangladesh in 2010, 21 workers were dead.

Phillip Morris, according to the reports, employed around 72 children to work on their farms in substandard and dangerous living conditions.

Few other companies were Walmart, Victoria Secret, GAP, Apple, Disney, Forever 21 and Hershey’s.

The only solution is to establish a universal rule that eradicates child labor and sweat shops and penalizing companies that resort to substandard living conditions. For this to be a reality, the governments should not accept any bribe from these global organizations.

Poverty might drive people to do things beyond their will and out of desperation to survive, but these global organizations should start taking their corporate responsibility seriously and walk the talk and they have a huge role to play for the welfare of their staff across the continents.

I firmly disagree and have no hesitation in stating that there is no moral interest or ethics the way these “Global Bigs” conduct their businesses and should stop playing with the needs of the people in poverty.

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