This issues study is aimed to explain the importance of ethical business practices which also include social responsibilities and will be compared to an example of an unethical business practice. It will explore the different unethical issues in business, the benefits of running an ethical business and this will be done with reference to a certain case study.
Ethics are moral guidelines which govern good behavior. For a business to behave ethically, it must follow strict guidelines which ensure the health, safety and human rights of every employee within that business. Unfortunately, there are many cases were certain companies will not follow any ethical guidelines and may often lead to sickness and or/death of some or all employees. One unethical issue which will be the focus for this issues study is sexual discrimination. .
Employees are protected from all kinds of discrimination, which include the discrimination of age, disability, race and sex, at all stages of employment including employment, dismissal and all stages in between.
Sexual discrimination is that of people on the grounds of sex and can affect their employment, pay or opportunities within the business and mostly affects women. Sexual discrimination can include:
• not hiring a women because the employer believes she will not fulfill the traditional role of a male in the workplace
• offering women different amounts of pay and certain benefits as opposed to those offered to men
• not promoting women to a higher position because of her being a women and employer believing the other staff will not respect her level of authority
• initialising that the women in the workplace wear a different kind of uniform
• and simply not considering women for particular roles
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...ract and retain employees and it makes it easier to access capital. It may disadvantage the company by increasing the cost of production and loss of revenue, but it would keep Wal-Mart running ethically.
Ultimately, ethics are of great importance within a company as they determine the long range success of the company. Wal-Mart should reevaluate what they consider ethical standards as they may not succeed in being the huge retailer they’re aiming to be.
Works Cited
http://www.tutor2u.net/business/strategy/business-ethics-introduction.html https://www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/know-your-rights-sex-discrimination-and-sexual-harassment. http://smallbusiness.chron.com/kinds-unethical-behavior-business-20479.html http://smallbusiness.chron.com/advantages-ethical-behavior-business-21067.html. http://www.walmartclass.com/staticdata/12Fla.%20WalmartNR.1004.pdf
Wal-mart is currently the world’s largest company. It has seen continuous growth and financial success since it was founded in 1962. Today it is living off of a previous reputation of solid ethical business practices that are no longer being exercised. Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-mart, was considered to be “freakishly cheap… Cost-cutting was an obsession in the Wal-mart culture… on business trips, everyone, including the boss, flew coach, and hotel rooms were always shared.” (reclaimdemocracy.org. 2006). This was only part of the reason for Sam Walton’s success.
In conclusion, I agree with the noted shortcomings of Wal-Mart. But, I don't think people can argue that it's unethical to shop at Wal-Mart, that anyone who shops at Wal-Mart is unethical or believe it is ethical to point the figure at those who do shop at Wal-Mart. I suggest everyone first check their values and then their investments, and they'll discover they probably are supporting Wal-Mart, a company they believe is evil, via 401Ks or mutual funds.
Some people raise a concern about employment practices with Wal-Mart. There are definitely two sides to this argument. Wal-Mart has been sued recently for allegedly making employees work overtime, off the clock, in order save money in payroll expenses. There has also been concern of the amount of money that Wal-Mart pays employees. Many employees have complained of being paid only minimum wage for extended periods of time. On the other hand, Wal-Mart has created thousands of jobs in small communities when stores open up. This has helped many communities that struggle with high unemployment rates. Another thing that Wal-Mart has done is allow anyone displaced by hurricane Katrina to be placed in a job at any other Wal-Mart in the country. One other questionable employment practice that has been brought up by employees is discrimination. Wal-Mart has been the plaintiff in many discrimination law suits in recent years, claiming that Wal-Mart discriminates in many ways against women and minorities. I guess the employment practices of Wal-Mart could be looked at as favorable or unfavorable depending on how you look at it. However, one has to wonder if Wal-Mart creates programs like the hurricane Katrina program just in order to create positive publicity.
The Wal-Mart Corporation is a multi-billion dollar low-cost retail organization, consisting of 6400 stores and 1.8 million sales associates worldwide. Wal-Mart’s influence on the retail world and the enormity of their corporate size is unparalleled. Wal-Mart can easily report sales of $312.4 billion dollars per fiscal quarter and net profits of $3.8 billion dollars. Wal-Mart promises her customers "Always low prices. Always!" and upholds this motto by providing low prices to her customers and high return on investment to her stockholders. One way that Wal-Mart has managed to maintain a competitive edge over other low cost retail giants and provide low prices is by cutting wages and by not offering too many company benefits to their employees. Full-time employee working at Wal-Mart only make $8 an hour, while only 45% of the workers can afford to be covered by health insurance. Wal-Mart also increase part time employees from 20 percent to 40 percent so that they do not have to cover all of their employees for health insurance . Although Wal-Mart may not provide excellent benefits to her employees, it successfully performs as a legitimate business operating in a capitalistic society. Wal-Mart upholds the primary fiduciary duty to satisfy her stockholder and follows free the market libertarianism model, which states that a business should not interfering with the free market. In a free market Wal-Mart has a direct responsibility to her primary stockholders rather than the employees of a company.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects against employment discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin” (Moran, 2014, p. 164). This helps ensure fair treatment to all workers. To ensure the safety of all workers, Title VII also protects against harassment, which includes quid pro quo harassment, hostile environment harassment, religious harassment, and racial harassment.
Today Wal-mart has a higher GDP than the entire country of Switzerland, but don’t worry they’re pretty neutral about it. But there has also been news about how they treat there employees. In 2004 an article was released entitled Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We All Pay for Wal-Mart, and soon after Washington got involved. The bad publicity took a toll on Wal-mart and in fact is still today, Maryland passed a law in January, 2006, that said larger employers, such as Wal-mart, must spend at least 8% of their payroll on health benefits for their employees, and now many other states have followed suit. The bad publicity also made it so 8% of customers shop elsewhere because of what they’ve heard, this has caused lower expected sales around the holidays during 2004, and 2005. Some things they’ve done is in 2006 they paid employees on average 9.36 dollars, while other major retailers like Target and Sears pay on average 11.08 dollars. While this can be easily denied by Wal-mart, another way they have gained bad publicity is from something called off-the-clock work. If they had not finished their job they had to clock out and then still finish their job, meaning they wouldn’t get paid for
Gender, as socially constructed differences between men and women and the beliefs and identities that support difference and inequality, is also present in all organizations (Gender & Society). It has been known that most women have continued to stick to the traditional jobs because it is just easier to do so. They do it to avoid any hardship in the work place and discrimination when applying for a job or working for a company. Non-traditional careers and jobs for woman are hard to find and when hired woman are segregated to the wage gap. Class relations in the workplace, such as supervisory practices or wage-setting processes, were shaped by gendered and sexualized attitudes and assumptions (Gender & Society). For example, in the work place managers were almost always men; the lower-level white-collar workers were always women (Gender &
...ir employees without their knowledge at all. Because of their prices being low, wage is even lower to make an over decent profit. Wal-Mart is a growing competitor to those who have enough trouble just surviving. It is easier for everyone just to back-off and let them do what they want, but they have taken advantage of that and the people do not like that.
Employment Discrimination laws seek to prevent discrimination based on race, sex, religion, national origin, physical disability, and age by employers. A growing body of law also seeks to prevent employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. Discriminatory practices include bias in hiring, promotion, job assignment, termination, compensation, retaliation, and various types of harassment. The main body of employment discrimination laws consists of federal and state statutes. The United States Constitution and some state constitutions provide additional protection when the employer is a governmental body or the government has taken significant steps to foster the discriminatory practice of the employer.
Walmart is a company that can be seen from many different perspectives. Due to its vast size; it can be easy to identify its faults and environmental issues surrounding the company. However, they are well aware of these problems and criticisms and have made many efforts towards issues around the world. The motivation and desire Walmart have to improve the world we live in today can be seen through their treatment of employees, suppliers as well as their efforts towards the environment and other humanitarian issues. Given this, there is still endless resources on the web proving the company to be one of a negative burden on society.
In order for a company to be successful it must sell products above the cost to produce the item. In Wal-Marts case, they have revolutionized the retail industry because they have put in place a business plan that simply sells products at the lowest price possible that will still make a profit. Therefore, this business practice cannot be viewed as unethical, because it has the
sex·ism: (n) discrimination or devaluation based on a person's sex, as in restricted job opportunities; especially, such discrimination directed against women.
The institutionalized discrimination of women in the work place is nothing new or unheard of. The brunt of it has happened fairly recently as women began to enter the labor market in force less than a century ago. The affect of this discrimination has had long lasting, generation spanning affects, but as time has passed and feminism spread, the gender-gap has slowly begun to shrink.
Throughout the course of day-to-day business life, the business professionals come in contact with quite a sum of ethical dilemmas. There are various ways to handle these ethical dilemmas, but failure to follow the appropriate manner could result in an unethical outcome. The ethical guides related to the book definitely help students develop an ethical character that is sure to stand out for highly ethical companies. In addition, there are companies that test how ethical applicants are before hiring them, this in turn makes getting the job more difficult and costly. However, despite the high cost and difficulty said companies stay firm to ethics, guaranteeing they get top-of-the-line employees who will act in an ethical manner. Ethics is defined
Wal-Mart definitely makes their shareholders money. The fundamental question is whether the shareholders care about Wal-Mart’s scrutiny. Shareholders should have some concern on how the world views Wal-Mart and how long they will hold up under the scrutiny.