Michelle Lee's Blog

‘Business Ethics‘ has always been a topic of considerate discussion across the business world; but being able retain that ideology has always posed challenges – even for big multinationals such as Body Shop.

Last year, one of their Palm Oil suppliers, ‘Daabon Organic‘ was attempting to evict local farming communities out of a ranch 320km north of Bogota, the country’s capital. But upon discovering this Body Shop terminated its contract with Daabon, in spite of the fact that Daabon produced an extensive 90% of the company’s Palm Oil stocks.

Is this Body Shop living up to its ethical codes and conducts? Or is it merely a gesture in order to retain the company’s moralistic image to keep customers coming? It’s hard to maintain competitive without keeping up with the ‘Green’ scheme of things, afterall.

But regardless of intentions, if Body Shop is going to retain its customers in terms of brand loyalty, it must continue taking measures like these can at least help to keep community stakeholders out of any negative externalities, in order to make sure it meet’s customer’s expectations of Body Shop being an ethical company in terms of production processes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/oct/03/body-shop-palm-oil-supplier

I was watching a film during the summer – a legally (or at least they claimed it was) streamed film downloadable from various P2P sites. Titled ‘Yes Man Fix The World‘, two American men set out to literally ‘fix the world’ – or at least the business and financial world – who’ve shown a huge (the word ‘huge’ is in itself a grand understatement) of sympathy for society beyond business walls. The movie basically runs on the concept that businesses have cyclically continued to exploit communities in exchange for profit, even at the communities’ expense. And the one case that the movie specifically covered in more depth was the Bhopal Incident case, which happened in Bhopal India roughly 26 years ago..

The Bhopal Incident (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Bhopal-Gas-Tragedy-Endless-nightmare/articleshow/5294330.cms) is literally the world’s worst industrial catastrophe to have occured thus far in history; not many incidences get to earn that as a title.

No compensation has been given to the victims of said incident, despite a horrifically enormous range between 4000-15000 deaths, and over 550000 injuries – which include permanent disabilities.

Thus, the question is when will the compensation be paid, Dow Chemical Company? What happened to Business Ethics?

Business Ethics was a topic that was always re-surfacing in my business classes back in High School, and nalright I never took it seriously back in my high school days. But today I guess we talked about this topic on a ‘deeper level’ so to speak.

From this article: http://www.metronews.ca/vancouver/local/article/636444–sexy-dress-code-spurs-complaint off today’s newspaper, I guess it sort of sparked a whole round of debating in our little 300-seated lecture room. Some say that it’s perfectly fine given the type of job, some say it’s wrong since it’s a policy that’s being forcefully and unlawfully (?) imposed on to the waitresses by the employers of that restaurant. One main, generalised opinion I got out of that class is that: “it’s totally up to the employees to speak up for themselves as to say what’s right and wrong under their own contracts – you sign up for a job understanding the company’s policies, right?”

I don’t think so. Most people end up signing a contract without even reading 10% of it’s contents these days! I  think I’m beginning to see why mum’s always nag about ‘reading the final print’ before signing anything now.

But I think this only enforces my view on our current business environment: There’s just too much exploitation to consider the positives of our current markets. And that applies for the entire global market.

Business ethics only works if there’s a system to enforce it. Education is a great start, and I have to thank good schools like my high schools and Universities like UBC in educating me about these topics – but I think that education has to go beyond just textbooks and lectures for the majority of folks to get the idea. Growing up, I guess I was living in an environment where ethics are constantly questioned and money was a little more scarce, so maybe that’s why people like me who’ve grown up in a dingier background sort of place more emphasis on ethical cases like these.

However, I guess if we want a better business world, we have to make sure that more people working in businesses can understand things from all perspectives and value that ethics plays an important place in not just making sure profits and other rewards get distributed back to all stakeholders equally; but to make sure we look at things outside our seat and try looking at how businesses can actually benefit and help fix today’s problems. We have to make sure we keep our ethics in tact whenever we’re making a business decision, and this is regardless of whatever background we all come from – we all share the same planet after all. It’s our shared liability.

I guess time will tell whether our generation will actually live up to that responsibility.

In terms of tonality I have no clue what sort of formality is used in to be used in this blogging exercise for my course.

So I’ll just go with the flow.

Basically our second lesson was:

• Another refreshener on big UK/EU businesses – RyanAir again specifically
• We touched on income elasticities of demand when talking about customer demand for airplane tickets of budget airlines versus premium airlines like BA.
• We also learned about business strategies in terms of the ‘SWOT’ Analysis technique (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) and we brainstormed a little with applications to Air Canada and their ‘extra charges’ pricing strategies on luggages on flights

It was another productive class where we got to use our clickers as well to answer questions related to the article from our reading homework.