Be an Ethical Business

It’s a natural thought that doing the right thing in the workforce is what you should do. However, many do not see the wrong that they do and the consequences it has on the economy and environment. Businesses are beginning to learn that the more good you do, the larger the positive affect on your business reputation and income.  If we treat our people right, our people will treat us better.

In my previous blogs, I talked about how unethical efforts affect companies by false advertising, sweatshops, animal cruelty and discrimination These practices can be avoided a number of ways and with the help of human resources it can be achieved easily to ensure the employee, employer and customer is satisfied.  There are many laws set in place to protect human, animal and environmental rights and safety. Unfortunately, these are not as enforced as they should be and laws vary depending on which province or country you are in. We should aim to support humanity and the things we are surrounded by, not destroying it. 

The first way a company can succeed to be a more ethical business is by exemplifying the “Due Care Theory”. Companies should take time planning the:

1.       Design: ensuring the safety of the product is up to standard and will cause no harm to consumers

2.       Materials: securing it is of good quality but has no harmful effect to the environment and consumers

3.       Production: product is produced in an environmentally-friendly way and safe for employees

4.       Quality Control: product is of expected value

5.       Packaging, labels, warning: ensuring the negative effects of a product is known factually

6.       Notification: honest advertisement of product

Apart from the Due Care Theory, companies must also ensure that the work environment is completely fair, that is, there is no racism, bias, discrimination or anything else of this sort. Employees must feel comfortable in their work environment as this is where they spend the majority of their day. However, if employees do feel uncomfortable they should be able to go to their manager or human resource representative to express their concerns. The happier your employee is, the better your line of productivity.

If businesses want to be the best they can in society’s eyes, they should partake in not only economic and legal responsibilities, but ethical and philanthropic as well. Participating in these responsibilities does not mean spending more money; it can simply be done by providing service and time in events that promote goodwill. Businesses which give back to their community get more in the long-run.

We tend to exclude fairness and trustworthiness when we think about the “business world”, but, wouldn't you prefer one big selfless world? 

Discrimination

Discrimination is known as unequal treatment based on one’s ethnicity, race, gender, age, disability, religion or any other characteristic that makes an individual. In today’s society discrimination is highly frowned upon, especially if it is in the workforce. Unfortunately, this bad practice still occurs and has a number of negative affects to employees, employers and the community.

Women not getting high positions, young people being looked down upon, disabilities seen as being incapable of doing anything, people being stereotyped due to color and race, and religion being judged are all examples of discrimination to employees. The above examples cause employees to become very discouraged about their future career in that organization and creates a negative effect to how they see the business world. This negative affect can hurt the employee’s confidence and will cause him or her to be unhappy in the workforce. Consequently, after a period of time this leads to resignation. Due to the employee now becoming unemployed the society’s economy will be affected as they will most likely be discouraged to attain another job. Discrimination can also lead to detrimental events as it is a form of bullying. After a certain age and period of time, a person who is being bullied constantly can cause him or her to harm themselves or others.

Employers who encourage and pursue discrimination do not seem to realize the long-term effects of it. We tend to categorize these employers as unethical leaders who don’t have a high standard of doing what is right in the workforce. This causes their credibility to go down, along with their business which contributes to lack of employees because no one wants to work for such a company. These company advocates can also be sued for millions and will barely be able to defend themselves. However, if the employer and business has a valued reputation in society it can change the entire community’s mindset to be unethical.

As a female, I strongly believe in equality. Males and females get the same education; no one has a better chance of being more qualified, all races have the same ability as the other, all ages are capable of bringing positive outcomes to a company and people who are disabled have the fair chance of doing something the same way as an average person. So why aren't we given the fair chance? The workforce has improved thus far, but people who continue to discriminate aren't doing his or her community any favors. Don't you want a fair running community? We should aim to improve our society to create a better environment for everyone. Until that prospers, we should protest against companies that treat their employees unfairly. It only takes one person to make a big change.

Animal Cruelty

Humans can be rather cruel to each other, so imagine what they can do to animals that can’t defend themselves. Animals were put on this planet to aid humans. In the olden days when technology was not as advanced, animals use to help people get to where they needed to go, work in the farms and were a source of food. We were put on this planet to take care of animals and to ensure that they have rights.

Unfortunately, we do the opposite by taking advantage of the fact that they can’t talk and say what needs to be said in order to save their habitat and life. Shampoos, cosmetics, medicines and much more are all the things that we use in our daily routine. How do we know if these products are safe? We need to ensure that our lives are not at any risk at all. Therefore, we need to use some other source of life to ensure that ours is in no harm… right?

Animals are constantly used in replacement of ourselves to test drugs and other products to ensure of its safety.  This means to avoid women’s lips from doubling in size due to the wrong combination of chemicals, the lipstick is applied onto an animal to see what happens.  If the animal’s skin shows irritation, loses hair, or any other sort of unnatural signs and symptoms, then the product is not safe and will not be released for people to use.

Does this make any sense? Such cruelty to animals can be rather pointless. Just as humans react to things differently from each other, animals are quite the same. Animals are created in such a way that causes them to either be more or less affected by something. For example, a pharmaceutical drug which may help a person may kill an animal, or a shampoo that may burn a person’s scalp may not affect an animal at all.

After contributing to animal endangerment and extinction, animal’s rights have improved tremendously in recent years. Contrarily, some laws still allow animal cruelty to the limit of abuse and torture. Is that good enough? Would you still buy products that tortured an innocent creature? Would you still support the company of that product? Click on the link and watch the short video, I'm positive you won't think about using animal cruelty products after.

 

11 Outrageous Facts about Animal Testing:

https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-animal-testing

 

WARNING: Harsh visual content!

Stay tuned for reference to the ethical issues of discrimination and why it is important that companies discourage this sort of behavior and judgment.

Sweatshops

The times of slavery are one of horror and suffering that is now illegal worldwide. However, after all of the disgust and hurt, many inhumane practices are still being done today.

Many clothing workshops try to find a cheap way to produce numerous amounts of clothing in a short amount of time. In order to do this, clothing companies have taken some notes from their ancestors. Unfortunately, it’s a bad note and they use people of all ages (from children to the elderly) to work in poor conditions for very long hours at very low wages. These places are called sweatshops.

A famous story of how bad some sweatshops can be is the collapsing of a garment building in Dhaka, Bangladesh on the 24^th April 2013, killing over three hundred people.  Imagine if you heard that your favorite clothing designer was producing clothes from sweatshops that mistreat people without a second thought. Would you buy something again from that store without having a second thought?

Video of Dhaka, Bangladesh Sweatshop collapse:

 

Clothing stores often use the excuse of “we don’t know the working conditions of the employees who make our clothes, we aren’t in the same country as they are”, but how do we –the customers, find out? I’m sure the company had an idea of who they were employing to make their clothes.

This leads to a counter-productive result for the sweatshop advocate clothing store. While the clothing store may think they’re making a great decision by producing clothes at a cheap cost and making a high profit by selling, they’re actually going to lose more in the future. After the information becomes known that they are sweatshop advocates, loyal and potential customers will stand completely against it, causing the store to not only lose their impressive profit but any kind of sale they wished to make. Who wants a shirt made out of the blood, sweat and tears of another human being?

These sweatshop advocates need to realize that everything comes to light, and no one wants to support anything that has to do with mistreating life, including animals, which I will address in my next blog.                             

 

False Advertising

 

To determine whether something is right or wrong, we use moral principles which we learn from our society and environment. However, many of us tend to do wrong things, not because we are bad, but maybe because we need a little boost to get something beneficial for ourselves. “It’s all about me.” “I’m going to do what makes me happy.” “Why should I do that, it doesn’t benefit me.”  You’ve probably heard all of these statements before, maybe even said them and to meet justice, you say “nothing is wrong with that, we’re all human”. It is said that we live in a selfish world, but why is it said so often?

In order to boost sales and make a larger profit, companies may tell little ‘”white lies” to their potential customers. This is detrimental to the company in the long-run, but for the short-term profit making- it’s great! A popular scenario is a new weight loss discovery that says if you take this pill three times a day, you will shed pounds in weeks. So what do you do? Instead of losing pounds by exercising and changing your diet, you run out to the store to buy the easiest way to your weight-loss. The first time you use the pill (which has several side effects), you feel as if it is working great. Therefore, you continue to use it regularly as directed. About three weeks later you decide to weigh yourself after looking in the mirror and seeing no results and with much surprise you have gained five pounds.  You have now come to the realization after spending about one hundred bucks for a couple of pills that you have been scammed, and the product was falsely advertised.  

The company has now earned a large profit, and is getting ready to release another misleading product. But will they get as much sales as the previous one? Of course, NOT, in fact they’d be lucky if they get any sales at all. Due to the company being ethically wrong by releasing the deceptive drug, they have lost their customer’s trust and degraded their once high reputation.  

Stay tuned, there are many other ways that ethics affects businesses.