Ethical Issues with Sweatshops

Ethical issues regarding Sweatshops Michelle Rice Business Ethics Jacqueline Newkirk Remember when you were at the mall the last time and saw a pair of Nike shoes that you just couldn’t live without? You had to buy them, for a pricey cost, and just loved them, right? We all have owned a pair or two of Nike shoes in our life. They were the â€Å"cool† shoes to have back when I was in school. The thing that we may not have known is that Nike has been using â€Å"children as young as fifteen years old† (Jennings, 2012) as employees to make these shoes.In the following report I am going to go over some major ethical issues regarding using underage children and women in foreign countries for labor. I will tell about what the conditions that these people have to work in to get paid barely enough to survive from one day to the next. The first topic that I would like to talk about is a quote coming from Nike when questioned about the conditions of their facilities and th e employees that they had working in them. The quote was â€Å"We’re damned if we do because we exploit.We’re damned if we don’t because these foreign economies don’t develop. Who’s to know what’s right? † (Jennings, 2012) Well, let’s answer that question. First of all you are not damned if you make your product out of the country. Sure, as Americans we would like the opportunity to have the business be here where we could benefit from the jobs that it would create, but we also understand the need to help these other countries build and grow. Second, how is it helping these other countries if you are taking their children out of school at the age that they are able to work in a factory? Jennings, 2012) Wouldn’t the better way to help these countries be to pay them a fair wage and help their children get a good education so that they can grow up to help build their country the way that we are wanting them to? And finally, I don’t know who to say is right in this case, but I do know that Nike was found to â€Å"make women run laps around the factory for wearing no regulation shoes to work; payment of subminimum wages; physical beatings, including with shoes, by factory supervisors; and most employees were women between the ages of fifteen and twenty eight years old. (Jennings, 2012) After having that information, I think I can safely say that Nike cannot possibly think that they should be the ones that people think are right in this situation. Now, let’s go over child labor in general and if it should be allowed. I personally could never employ a child that was under the age of 15 whether it was legal or not. By making these children work in the conditions that they make them work in, for the pay that they give them for this work is not an ethical decision that I could ever live with.In a story about child labor that I found it stated that â€Å"In the 1990s, child labour has found a new niche in the rapidly expanding export industries of some developing countries. In one small carpet factory in Asia, children as young as five were found to work from 6 in the morning until 7 at night for less than 20 cents a day. † (Child Rights, 1995) Can you imagine you five year old child going to work and working for 13 hours? These children have absolutely no childhood and are giving up their education to work so that their families can survive.I think that it is important to have a limit to the hours that a person is allowed to work in one week and that there should be a required minimum wage. Even if it were not a law, if I owned my own company I would have these standards in place for every employee that I hired. While it is important for a company to make a profit, I believe that it is also important for their employees to be healthy and safe in their working environment. When it comes to the wages that are being paid, if you are not up to a standard of income tha t is expected or needed from employees, they are going to go and try to find work somewhere else.If this happens the turnover rate at the company would be incredibly high, therefore causing the company to lose money in the long run. If you are constantly having to hire and train more people you are taking time away from the product that should be being made. So, if you want to keep happy employees that are devoted to the company that they are working for and making a product that is up to standards that are wanted by the company then they should pay them a respectable wage and keep the hours at the amount that you would expect to work yourself.One of the things that I have stated a few times in this report already is that children are not getting the education that they should be getting because they are being taken out of school to work in these factories or they are just not being sent to a school to begin with. I would make it a top priority to make educational opportunities for these children in these countries if I had a business there. I think that it is important that these countries continue to grow and prosper to get as close to the conditions that we live in here in the United States.There is no way that this can happen if we are not sending their children to school. They will have no way to know what to do to run a successful business, only to work nonstop in them. How are they ever going to learn the necessities this way? In today’s businesses they are not thinking about this. They are thinking that they can continue to send the employees here from the United States over there to run the businesses. In which case they will never be an independent society able to function on their own.I think that the reason that society focused so much on the Kathi Lee Gifford and Nike issues are because of the fame that they already have and the popularity of the products that they are selling. We see Kathy Lee Gifford as a wholesome all American Actress th at we all love. We all loved the fact that she made a clothing line, and then sold it in an affordable place such as Wal-Mart. Then we realize that the clothes that we love and are finding affordable are being made in sweatshops in Guatemala. Of course this is going to upset people because it is something that no one would have suspected.When it comes to Nike, it is the company that every athlete endorsed and wears most of the time. It is probably one of the most recognizable shoe companies in the United Stated today. I think that the thing that upsets people the most is that it is such an â€Å"American† known shoe, that people feel that it should being produced in America. So as we have learned in this report is that if you want happy, healthy employees, you need to treat them right and pay them the wages that they are actually earning.Also, children are our future and if we want our future to be prosperous and continue that way we need to make sure that they are getting th e education that they need to run things when we are no longer here. Bibliography Child Rights. (1995). Retrieved 4 1, 2012, from Children pay high price for cheap labour: http://www. unicef. org/pon95/chil0016. html Jennings, M. M. (2012). Business Ethics. Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning.