Last Friday on October 5th, Foxconn’s (world’s largest contract maker of electronics) employees began to strike causing potential harm to the leading electronic corporation Apple. The company Apple has recently released their newest innovation Iphone 5, but already the process of assembling the smart phone is at slack. With three to four thousand employees striking at Zhenzhou complex in central China, the Smartphone’s production has declined drastically; in other words, “paralyzed.” Apparently, the employees are unhappy with the strict demands on product quality, controversy and scandals within the organization, and demands to work during holidays.

This is a perfect example of why the stakeholder theory should be used following Freeman’s idea and not Friedman’s. The company Foxconn has dug its own hole by not listening to employee’s, resulting in a strike consisting of thousands of people.  A major issue was workers were not trained appropriately for assembling high quality products but were none the less punished. If the company had good relations with the workers (following freeman’s theory), the company would not have been hit with such a large impact during the peak season for producing electronic products. Foxconn wishes to produce at the lowest cost but has not questioned its own actions when trying to accomplish this goal. In the end, if the stakeholders are unhappy, the company will be impaired.

(Sources: Friedman, Freeman,Vancouver Sun,Foxconn Image)