Baoyi Chen’s Blog

Yeqi Yang’s blog post on finding a balance between profits and the corroborative ethics really interests me as it reminded me another news article that I read about indian workers having poor living conditions in Singapore. Although these two articles are not describing the similar situation, they are all link to one issue, ethics.

In Yeqi’s blog post, she mentioned that “The reason that such numerous brands choose Bangladesh is obviously the cheap labor, however, it cannot be ignored that the limit investment has more possibilities to cause a worse working condition.” I think this would be common to any developing countries that offers cheap labour, for example, China, India, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippine, etc. These countries have numerous migrant worker all over the world to work either in factories or constructions to produce goods to another foreign company. However, their working conditions are normally poor as they are receiving low salary and their employers would concentrate more on profit instead of their working environment. I think this issue has to be emphasis as labour is essentially one of the most important parts to a business. Yeqi also said that “some managers only show the CSR (corporate social responsibility) in some superficial forms like doing charity or advertising on the media because they do not think the costumers would not pay for their social responsibilities“. This is also an issue as some company made themselves look beautiful publicly but actually they are doing unethical practices. For example, L’oreal, the French cosmetic who does animal testing before they launch their products. I think that is very unethical since the products are not for animal to use, furthermore, it would give significant damage and would be dangerous to the animal. Linking back to Yeqi’s blog post, I think companies should find a balance between profit and the corroborative ethics, in this way the consumers would be more happy and comfortable when buying and consuming the products, and the companies could established a relatively excellent brand image to avoid protests from the workers or from the pressure groups, also, good brand reputation would motivate employees as well!

Yeqi Yang’s Blog Post: https://blogs.ubc.ca/yeqiyang/2014/09/08/finding-a-balance-between-profits-and-the-corroborative-ethics/