http://www.economist.com/node/21551498
Should companies try to maximize their profits at any cost?
What factors make a company successful?
Should companies abuse their employees in order to satisfy the customers’ demand?
Producing the goods on time without controlling working hours may bring short-term profits to the companies, but is this really a foresighted way to make business successful?
In February 2012, Fair Labour Association checked APPLE’s factories in China, and the result was less than satisfactory, which meant that workers’ abusage existed in those factories. Not only APPLE, but also other big, global firms (such as Nike) have this phenomenon.
Here is the problem, on the one hand, we know from old experiences that reputation is really important to international companies, because a well-known brand can easily be destroyed by unfavourable rumours, but on the other it seems that the customers nowadays are not affected by these rumours very much (for example, people continued to buy APPLE’s iPhones and iPads without being influenced by all the rumours about APPLE’s abusage of Chinese workers). Besides, associations like FLA (Fair Labour Association) try to avoid abusage because they want to protect workers’ rights, however, in some situations, in which the workers are migrants who want to save as much money as they can, workers collaborate with their employers to cheat the associations.
Thus, the question is, to what extent should companies pay attention to the workers’ working conditions?