After reading many classmates’ blogs, Yeqi Yang’s “Finding a Balance Between Profits and the Corroborative Ethics” caught my attention. I find it interesting that Yeqi Yang’s first blog post discussing business ethics was the same as what Tamar talked about in Class 15 (CSR & Sustainability.) This topic is clearly important in a globalized world.
Bangladesh factory workers.
Yeqi Yang contended that in outsourced labor, it is a corporate responsibility of the multinational corporation to ensure workers’ rights are enforced. However I disagree with her opinion as I believe that workers’ rights are the responsibility of the Bangladeshi factory owners. They should be the ones to ensure their workers are working in safe conditions and are not being underpaid.
The collapse of Rana Plaza.
We learned that sustainability is not solely about solving economical issues, but also about fixing social problems. One of the key social problems currently in Bangladesh is the unsafe working conditions faced by the factory workers. A recent audit of 1,100 factories by the Bangladesh Accord found that workers were threatened by over 80,000 safety problems (The Guardian). The factory owners are the ones who caused these hazards through their exclusive focus on profits and cutting costs to maximize them. The collapse of Rana Plaza that killed over 1000 workers became a wake-up call for these owners. It is time to for them to behave ethically and to solve the social problem they created.
image: http://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/bangladesh-factory-workers.jpg?w=880&__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1383769762681 http://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/opinion/commentary/2013/05/13/feel_bad_about_bangladeshi_factory_disasters_act_as_citizens_not_consumers_brender/bangladesh_factory_collapse.jpg