ONE of the gravest threats to the thousands of western firms that buy or make goods in China is located at an address in Hong Kong’s Kowloon. A scrap of paper behind the door grille identifies the tiny flat as the Asia Monitor Resource Center, perhaps the most influential watcher of working conditions in mainland China.
Two of the centre’s recent reports have been on Disney and on China’s toy industry. The Disney report, released by the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee on February 24th, alleges that some workers making Disney products are forced to work up to 16 hours a day, seven days a week and are paid almost no overtime. In the report on toys, four of the 12 plants singled out for criticism are subcontractors to Mattel, the world’s largest toy maker. What have come to be known as “sweatshop Barbie” assembly lines are accused of a range of abuses, from long hours and low pay to heavy fines for workers’ infringement.
Business ethics refers to contemporary standards or sets of values that govern the actions and behavior of an individual in the business organization. Apparently, the behavior of disney is inconsistent with the ethical issues. The reason behind it is simple, the certificate of workplace and working condition standards are much lowerthan the western countries, also, the massive labor numbers lower the labor cost. As a result, to save the cost, those multinational companies that set up business in asian coutries usually exploit their labous by force them work overtime and pay less. The less concerned altitude asian people towards human rights and undeveloped working condition certificate enable those multinational companies to keep exploiting labors.
Business ethics issues are included in not only human resource management but also many other business activities, such as marketing and production. For example, Ethical marketing issues include marketing redundant or dangerous products/services transparency about environmental risks, transparency about product ingredients such as genetically modified organisms possible health risks, financial risks, security risks, etc.
As we can see, some business activities that are not consistent with eithical standards do have some good points. In this case, disney reduced their cost by increase the workload of labor, which possibly made the profit level rise. And sometimes obeying the ethical issues will perhaps make the company less efficient and lead to a fall in profit or sales. If disney shorten the labor’s work time to a right level, the operational efficiency will decrease. But for a huge company like disney, they cannot ignore the publicity and business images. Setting up a high standard for labor working condition and work time will enable them gain publicity.