Fair labor choices are critical for ensuring that the best people are hired for specific jobs. Hiring the proper individual for a task helps a company gain from new expertise, and revenues and profits will likely grow. Living wage involves the rate of pay per hour that helps a household to meet its needs. For its members, the subject of a livable wage remains a difficult one. A range of stakeholders, including customers, the media, and, not least, employees themselves, have shown an increased interest in the problem of salaries in recent years.
There are some significant shifts in thinking on the subject and the publication of several useful new reports. In various companies, the living wages and fair labor are compromised. The companies may engage in such unethical behaviors involving low pay and overworking their employees, which destroys the image of the company. Therefore, fair staffing and handling of employees is critical to your organization’s growth, and it can be an element of your corporate social responsibility. A legal and moral obligation is required to ensure that a company’s workers are recruited only based on their expertise, credentials, and personal qualities.
Ethical Issues Associated with Nike Company
The Use of Sweatshops
For this term paper, I will address the ethical issues that have been formerly associated with the Nike Company. Nike is a sportswear and Footwear Corporation that creates, develops, and markets various items for soccer, basketball, training, running, and other sports. Nike is the world’s leading seller of athletic apparel and footwear (Lehrer, 2017). However, the company has had several cases of conducting unethical behaviors that affect its workers. The first ethical concern is the use of sweatshops by a firm, where information workers are employed at shockingly low wages for long working hours and in poor working circumstances.
Nike has been chastised for more than a decade for sourcing its items from sweatshops in Indonesia, China, and Vietnam (Middlemiss, 2017). Many workers were discovered having been forced to work for minimum wage and to work multiple hours of overtime, both of which were found to be violations of labor laws. Despite denying the existence of such problems, the organization continued to receive negative press for starving workers and the production of cheap labor.
Supporter of Child Labor
In addition, the Nike Corporation was found to be a supporter of child labor. Small children as young as 4 to 5 years old have been working in deplorable conditions for extended periods. Surprisingly, Pakistan has regulations and laws to ban child labor and enslavement, but the authority has done nothing to address the problem on a national scale (Alhoff et al., 2016). Nike Company was accused of engaging children to work for long hours and giving them very little pay. This practices denied many children the right to get educated as they spent most of their time working for the company (Peretti & Micheletti, 2017). In this regard, the company portrayed its unethical traits that ruined various law regulations that prevent child labor.
Bad Labor Conditions
Moreover, Nike Company has also been accused of conducting bad labor conditions. Notwithstanding the circumstance that Nike’s latest marketing operations have stressed female consent and inclusion, females who labor for this firm, whether in its factory or at its headquarters, appear left out of the picture. In 2018, two past female Nike workers charged the company, condemning it for fostering an ethos of gender harassment and discrimination (Hoffmann et al., 2020). Nike had a few instances of female employees being sexually harassed. After speaking with 50 former and current Nike employees, it was determined that its policy was too poor, with sexual misconduct endemic (Middlemiss, 2017).
As a result, some women fled their employment, creating a hazardous work atmosphere. As a result, such wrongdoing had a severe impact on the company’s image. This unethical behavior discussed are relevant as they help to understand how to ethically conduct a company and avoid certain issues such as the ones associated with the Nike Company. From these relevance, companies become aware of how to treat their employees fairly and ethically towards the achievement of their goals and objectives.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the reputation of a company is supported by business ethics. Many individuals will desire to do business with a company that has a record for regularly being ethical in how you yield products and how you necessitate workers, buyers, and overall society. One may quit their occupation and harm the company’s status, administrations could mislay their reliability, general confidence and output could agonize, and the actions may well end in penalties or financial damages. Both people and administrations suffer main penalties when they participate in unethical conduct. The unethical issues about the Nike Company led to the destruction of the company’s image. Lack of respect for its workers and giving them less pay also does not contribute to building its reputation.
Rather, these unethical issues affect the productivity and sales of the company, thereby undermining its achievement of goals. In this regard, all companies must employ ethical behaviors to ensure that all employees are fairly treated regarding a good pay that motivates them to increase their productivity.
References
Alhoff, F., Sager, A. & Vaidya, A. J. (2016). Business in ethical focus: An anthology (2nd Ed.). Web.
Hoffmann, J., Nyborg, K., Averhoff, C., & Olesen, S. (2020). The contingency of corporate political advocacy: Nike’s ‘dream crazy’ campaign with Colin Kaepernick. Public Relations Inquiry, 9(2), 155-175.
Lehrer, K. (2017). Ethical Issues for Multinationals in the Age of Globalisation. In Economics of Globalisation (pp. 149-162). Routledge.
Middlemiss, S. (2017). Whistle-blowing and the equality dimension of victimisation in the workplace. International Journal of Discrimination and The Law, 17(2), 137-156. Web.
Peretti, J., & Micheletti, M. (2017). The Nike sweatshop email: Political consumerism, internet, and culture jamming. In Politics, Products, and Markets (pp. 127-142). Routledge.