沃尔玛血汗工厂涉及的商业道德层面分析

ETHICS AND WALMART CLOTHING SWEATSHOP

Introduction

With the development of economy, many large number of multinational companies establish their sweatshop in developing countries resulting in many unhuman consequences. Take Walmart as an example, the Rona building collapse killed 1130 workers with low salary and long working hours. This essay outlines the whole accident occurred and demonstrate literature review from human rights, political role of companies and sustainable supply chain aspects. Finally, recommendations of various stakeholders can be seen to improve the ethical condition in multinational corporations business environment, which is the main purpose of the essay. That is, cheap labors are able to get their access to their legal and basic ethical human rights while working for clothing industry and other areas.

Background

Case: Walmart and Rana plaza collapse in Bangladesh

1.General introduction of Walmart.

Walmart stores, as an US biggest retailor company in the world, aims to provide goods at low prices to its customers. Due to minimizing the cost of manufacturing, supplies of Walmart are located mostly in developing countries with cheap labors (The Economist,2013)

2.E mployee’s working condition in Bangladesh.

Salaries of workers are highly low in Bangladesh. Month wages of clothing employees range fron 70 to 100 dollars which is just one fifth of workers’ salaries in China and many children as works in the damp little dark room doing embroidery or dyeing.

3.The Rona plaza collapse.

At 24,April 2013 , an 8-story commercial building named Rona plaza which is located several miles away from Bangladesh capital collapsed with death of 1130 garment workers for Walmart clothing industry and 2500 injured(Huffington Post,2014). It is noticed later that cracks of the building was found and all the staff of plaza was evaluated immediately including employees of a bank and shops. However, garment works was ordered to go back to keep working by the building owner ignoring the danger of cracks with a threat of losing salary of one month the second day when the deadliest garment-factory accident happened.

Besides, brands like Nike, H&M, Gap, Victoria’s Secret, Disney, Sears, Joe Fresh as well as Liz Claibourne are all reported to own their textile sweatshops like Walmart mainly in south-east Asia and southern and central part of the US during recent years.

Literature review

Human rights.

Corporations of global influence develop economy worldwide in a great deal. However, it can be seen clearly that many social challenges occur due to corporations such as human right violations and environment pollution. modern society, corporations are expected and required to address these issues through following government laws and regulations and social ethical morals to ensure labors with safe working conditions, fair wage and ethical treatment). Specifically, literature theories include social contract theory, social justice theory, stakeholder theory, deontological theory and market theory by professional researchers (Wilson,2005).

Social contract theory.

Wilson(2005) states that corporations agree to enter a contract with various stakeholders to exchange natural resources products with ethical mutual benefit. However, in fact, irreversible natural pollution, unhuman sweatshops, wildlife extinction and so forth are obvious proof of the break of previous aggrement. Walmart employed children labor breaking local labor laws, providing unsafe working conditions like a Rana building with crackers and paying less wage.

Social justice theory.

Social justice theory offer protection for the weaker stakeholders such as workers in sweatshops in developing countries who is highly possible to be treated as slaves by their bosses to in actual markets to create efficiency gains.

Theory of rights.

Theory of rights reflects multinational corporations today does have rights such as property rights. Friedman (1970) also states that business aims to maximize its profits