How The Jacksonville Jaguars Owner Shahid Khan's Ethical Behavior

Nike is one of the top sports clothing industry in the world. However, for years there are fresh allegation for Nike, which dogged by sweatshops and child labour (Daily Mail Reporter, 2011). On the 13 July 2011, Nike has revealed several cases of worker abused at factory.

As such, it applied cultural relativism to justify the use of child labor, unsafe labor practices, and near slave labor in its factories. Since then, Nike has been a driving force to ensure fair labor practices across the apparel industry. In 1999, Nike was a key contributor to the establishment of the Fair Labor Association, an organization that is “…dedicated to protecting workers’ rights around the world” (Fair Labor Association, 2016). Today, Nike continues efforts to ensure that contract factories comply with its Code of Conduct to improve labor standards in overseas factories (Nike, 2016). Because of Nike’s efforts to expand and enforce social responsibility at its factories and given the lessons learned from its sordid past, it is unlikely that Nike would resort to any of the straw men fallacies. However, given the pressure by investors to expect solid returns, one hopes the company continues its altruistic social responsibility efforts while veering away from the Friedman Doctrine and its assertion that “… the only social responsibility of business is to increase profits” (Hill, 2011).

Since the 1990s, Nike has been embroiled in controversy over its use of sweatshops. Including numerous media reports of workers earning very little an hour (14 cents per hour), and even workers abused by sub-contractor (Allarey, 2015). Incidents such as these are ingrained in Nike’s history and not quickly forgotten. However, as CEO I would like to attempt to correct wrongs.

Every business develops a set of ethical principles that they abide by. The business ethical principles intentions: it construct the business certainty in the community , maintain the employees liveried in what the business attempt to have as structural conducts and aid the employees consume principles to make ethical choices that guards the business. In a culture with a diverse assessment structure and augmented judgment visibly by companies with changeable ethics and interests, there appears to be further difficulties on business individuals to make tougher ethical assessments. In our day-to-day performances, we depend on on our ethical principles to monitor us in the correct path and do the correct things. The substance of any efficacious and perpetual business is they segment a mutual ethical matter concentrating on presenting and generating value along with allocating their business values with the citizens they network with on a day-to-day basis.

The highly recognized name brand—Nike— fails to notice the faults that are happening in factories that are violating a few disturbing rules. The company’s reputation has decreased due to demands and claims Nike; implying that they utilize sweatshops to produce more products at a lower pay. The company has been sued numerous times for abusing and exploiting their employees in factories for years. Another problem that Nike has faced throughout the years was making employees work in poor environments that affected the health of many— which contributed to being abused by the manager for not going to work. Nike distributes and sells merchandise of high quality for a high value. The company is giving the satisfaction of quality service to their

As a company, Nike is extremely profitable; it is the biggest shoe company and has become the fourth biggest industry leader. Nike can easily afford to increase wages of people that do labor work for the company without even the slightest loss but unfortunately chooses not to. According to the SEC, “In 2007, Nike’s advertising budget was $678 million. Realistically, Nike could pay all its individual workers enough to feed and clothe themselves and their families if it would just devote 1% of its advertising budget to workers' salaries each year!” (A background on…) In Nike’s Code of conduct, they state that in the area of human rights and in the communities in which they do their business, they want to do everything required of them as well as what is generally expected of a leader and thus by magnifying on the wrongs an industry leader commits, changes in the entire industry is expected.

Corporations can be large or small but they all have some sort of ethical impact on their employees, shareholders, customers, community, and surrounding environments. Richard DeGeorge writes, “We can speak of corporations having moral responsibilities to act in certain ways, and they are morally responsible for the consequences of their actions on people.” (p. 200). Large corporations are comprised of the board of directors, management, and their workers. They also deal with suppliers, customers, and have competitors. This essay will examine the moral responsibilities within a corporation.

Many name brand companies have fallen under certain accusations of taking part in manufacturing their own products in sweatshops. These sweatshops are where workers of the company are employed in horrible and unsafe working conditions as well as working long hours at low wages. Unfortunately, one of the most popular companies in America is now being kept under surveillance for their unfair labor practices. This company that is well known has now damaged its reputation, specifically through their company’s image and their sales. The famous Nike brand has now fallen through the cracks.

Jeffrey Gitomer once said, “Great people have great values and great ethics.” These great people start ethical companies with great values with great ethics of course. The meaning of ethics can sometimes be unclear, but the general idea of ethics is choosing between right and wrong. There are many ethical companies that treat their company and consumers well such as Levi & Strauss Co., The Hershey Company, and 3M. Despite these companies that are successful and don’t attempt to cheat the world of business, there are others that aren’t so ethical. These include: Wells Fargo, Nestle, and Chevron.

In comparing and contrasting two articles which analyze and evaluate ethics in business, the impact of corporate social responsibility and ethical behavior by corporation and their managers can be understood by the public perception documented in a survey of Hawaiian residents, as well as the argument of negative value to consumers when self-interest and lack of ethics are part of an organization’s business model. The survey results in Choy’s article demonstrate the impression of a decline in corporate ethical behavior over the past twenty years. Both articles use the environment of competition to discuss the characteristics of ethical and moral behavior in the corporate realm. The recommendation based on the evaluation of information in the two articles is for business organizations to employ ethical and moral practices that include the values of society, and use traditional morality in all business dealings. The value of corporate social responsibility will be acknowledged and appreciated by consumers, and both economic and social gains can be achieved.

Business ethics is a major component of organizational success. Companies must strive to act in an ethical way, not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it is required of them by their stakeholders. Stakeholders have a vested interest in the performance of the organization (Jones, 2012, p. 28), above and beyond the organization’s financial performance. While shareholders expect to receive returns for their financial backing (p. 29) and expect an organization to behave in a way that ensures those returns, other stakeholder such as consumers (p. 30), the government (p. 32) and special interest groups (Weiss, 2014, p. 13), may be more concerned with how an organization operates and whether they follow legislated and/or accepted norms of ethical behavior (p. 50). Should an organization and its leadership cultivate a culture/structure in which unethical behavior flourishes, especially in this age of heavy government oversight, that organization will not last long. This paper sets out to

The athletic apparel industry in which Nike is involved is a major money maker in the United States, but the fact that none of the factories are located in North America has brought some heat to the company. Nike controls more than 40 percent of the U.S. Market for sports related goods, but doesn’t have a single sneaker factory in this country (Miller 1). Nike continues to make millions of dollars yet exploits workers overseas by paying them very little, while requiring long hours without overtime pay in factories that are not up to “American” standard. Nike subcontractors employ nearly 500,000 workers in plants in Indonesia, China and Vietnam (Saporito 1). The exploitation of workers in Third World counties, where the majority of Nike’s

Nike is a widely known and respected athletic company, but they treat their employees with the least amount of respect such as, “verbal and physical abuse, shockingly high rates of sexual harassment, forced overtime, denied sick leave, inadequate access to medical care”(O’Rourke). Many people are unaware of how poorly these sweatshop workers are treated every day. It seems like Nike is very unwilling to change, because of how inconsistent and unfair the labor conditions are in countries with their sweatshops. Many people worldwide who buy Nike products are unaware of the labor conditions in the sweatshops, but American consumers need to promote efforts to improve the labor conditions for Nike employees.

The Pou Chen factory is located in a place where the minimum wage is far below the national average. It has 10,000 workers who make Converse sneakers. Most of the workers are women, and they earn only 50 cents an hour. The amount that they earn is not even enough to cover their food and very poor housing. In this factory, the women are both physically and verbally abused. Nike’s own investigations have proved these complaints to be true. The company made a statement saying that immediate actions would be taken to deal with the situation. It is interesting to note that, “an internal Nike report, released to the Associated Press after it inquired about the abuse, showed that nearly two-thirds of 168 factories making Converse products worldwide failed to meet Nike’s own standards for contract manufacturers. Twelve are in the most serious category, ranging from illegally long work hours to

Nike took advantage of that and disregarded that the people making their products at an extremely low price were actually humans. It was ethically wrong for Nike to not see those employees as actual people but saw them as a machine that produced products. They did not care to see how being underpaid affected a person’s family. They also did not see that children were working to support families and continued to work in terrible health conditions because they needed the money no matter the environment. The biggest issue was that the company had a total disregard for human life.