Choosing Between Business Ethics And Business Performance

I am glad that me and my group had chosen this topic regarding sweatshops. Before we started this report, I had known that sweatshops usually happened in undeveloped country which suffer from poverty like Bangladesh and Vietnam. In addition, sweatshops workers earned extremely lower wages and working in socially unaccepted condition. For example, Nike sweatshops scandal goes viral on social media as it has been accused of using sweatshops to produce footwear and clothing items.

Therefore, this real-life example showed us that decision making related between business ethics and business performance is very important in this business world. This is due to decision making will greatly impacts on company overall performance by either increasing company profit in short term or developing company’s images and reputation in long term. In this report, we agreed that sweatshops are unethical because it contradicts with Kantian’s theory that we should treat everyone with dignity and this includes sweatshop workers. In this case, sweatshops workers who were exploited by the companies were overworking and receiving extremely low wages. Reason being the companies would like to achieve effective cost saving strategy to generate higher profit and this action is contradicting with Kantian’s view (Sollars, G. G. , & Englander, F. , 2018).

According to Utilitarianism theory, every decision made should resulted good outcome to majority and the act would be considered as ethical. Even though it required to sacrifice happiness of minority in order to maximize the expectable utility. On the other side, utilitarianism theory supports that government should come out with strict law and regulation to provide protection to every sweatshop workers. Thus, every company must follow and offer condition beyond the average which including the wages, working hours and working condition (Driver, 2009). Every organization should apply narrow and broad view of Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSR) in their operation system. The narrow view focus on earning more profit while the broad view focus on contributing to the society. Freidman argues that a profit-making schemes of business organization should be in accordance to the law that made in an open and freely competitive market without any fraudulences and deceptions.

Moreover, the broad view of CSR consists of improving the quality of labour force and their families as well. Upon completion if this assignment, I found out that theories that I learnt throughout this assignment are useful in debate of sweatshop and also applicable in our real life too. In my opinion, I think that company should implement utilitarian theory, therefore an ethical company should always listen to their voice and believe in every decision made could make everyone’s life better with the maximum level of joy. Moreover, in Malaysia we are using progressive taxation system where higher tax income payer has to pay more than lower income payer. By using utilitarianism, it can be explained that people with higher income level has higher ability to contribute larger portion of tax amount to support lower income level to get access to various civil amenities. Therefore. utilitarian is proved to be applicable in political along with economic decisions and actions.