The Glade 4.0

This may be one of the most absurd things I've ever heard.

He doesn't understand, nor does he want to. Work is hard, and he doesn't want to do it, so he must dmonise anyone who is successful with it.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

+++1

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"Said I never had much use for one, never said I didn't know how to use one!"~ Matthew Quigley

"nothing like a little meow in bed at night" ~ Bruskey

"I gotta float my stick same as you" Hondo Lane

"Fill your hand you son of a *****!"

Ethics play a huge role in business, it's much better to do business with people that are likely to respect property rights, honor contracts, and be a good partner.

You're living in a 80's movie with stereotypical white business guys, Xec.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

While business ethics are great for smaller/medium companies... they are different for multi-national ones.

Being ethical means you lose market share which could mean the difference between your division been sold, or given priority over other division when it comes to budget.

So while it would be nice to be ethical, it doesn't always work out that way.

When companies are exposed for being unethical, they get bad PR and lose money.

Can you please give a specific example? Is it like the Starbucks "ethical growing" of coffee beans? I don't know how one violates ethics growing coffe, but you never know I guess.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

This This This!

Do corps try to hedge their bets and try and get away with things. Sure, but so do all of us. A corporation is just an amalgamation of sinful human beings like you and I. Supposing they are somehow supposed to be more noble than anyone/thing else is to deny the basic truths of human nature (whether you agree with me why that is, is irrelevant to seeing that it's true).

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I should rephrase, there’s a difference between being promotional ethical and being true ethical. For multinational they are only in-tuned to the idea of promotional ethical and that is really the job of the PR department.

If those ethical coffee beans could be grown cheaper else where, I highly doubt they would bat an eyelid before changing locations. Would the company care that the place they are leaving would be out of jobs or the people they may affect? Everything in business comes down to numbers. Would having ethical coffee beans mean more feel good customers buying, thus a greater market share which in turn means greater dividends for the investors?

Is it ethical to test drugs on animals? Is it ethical to move your production to a country where there are less regulations so you could reduce cost? Is it ethical to use fear as a method of advertising? Is it ethical to produce a product which you know will do harm to your customers?

Most of the time being truly ethical takes away from the bottom line, and most of the ethical things big companies do are the result of the great PR wheel.

edit. took out some stuff cause research data changed in the last couple of years.

I don't think moving a factory to somewhere where costs are lower is unethical. So what is ethical to me might not be to someone else.

Without animal testing most of us wouldn't even be alive right now and progress on drugs would almost stop. I'd kill a few rabbits to cure AIDS or cancer.

I still don't see how being "unethical" is a requirement to be sucessful.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

This is ethical behavior. Why should they grow beans in a worse climate, poor soil, or under antagonistic governments?



Yes they do care, at least for logistical reasons and also because it looks bad to be constantly laying off people. Moving jobs around means people are training instead of working.


Yes, if they advertise this fact.



It's ethical in my book. I want as many diseases cured as possible before I get old.



Yes. Companies shouldn't be held hostage to poorly run governments. Regulations are good in some cases, for example stopping people from dumping waste into a harbor or cutting down all the forests, but they can be overdone and force away desired business.



Yes. Fear is not necessarily a bad thing, marketing to fear will have more people installing alarm systems or Microsoft Security Essentials, which are good things.


Obviously no. This would have a chance of generating very bad PR for the company, and so most companies would never do this. It is very easy nowadays for internal documents to be leaked and put online.

Most of the time it does? I'd say almost none of the time.

Being unethical doesn't mean acting like a bad mustache-twirling silent cartoon villain and trying to rip every customer off for an extra five bucks just because you can. When I think of an ethical business I think of one that doesn't do something that would generate a profit because it views this action as "wrong." That's what kills you as a business. Honesty doesn't necessarily mean ethical if honesty is the best way to make money. Ethical would be remaining honest even if there's more money to be made by lying. Successful corporations act like sociopaths, where every decision is made in order to maximize their own interests, without regards to right or wrong or how said decisions hurt others. That's what I mean when I say ethics are a bad thing in business.

I'm really not sure how you guys interpreted that to mean, "hard work in a business is bad." How hard you work has nothing to do with ethics/morality.

Take the Jiffy Lube example. They do nothing but lie to and cheat their customers, have been doing this for years, and continue doing it even after being caught. They're still the biggest car service chain in the country. Bank of America is the biggest bank despite having the worst customer service and actively structuring their policies to try and screw you out of money through exorbitant fees. AOL was another perfect example, they made it huge by basically lying to everyone about everything.

My wife worked for a construction company that would not operate in Russia, because "greasing the wheels" is completely commonplace there and against their policy. They absolutely lost business because of it. That said, they also likely gained business in other areas because of their reputation for being upstanding.

To understand the role ethics play in big companies, all you really have to do is look at your own life. What company manufactured the clothes you're wearing right now? What are the working conditions in that factory like? How about the computer you're using at the moment? Where were all of its parts made? Are you sure the coltan and other materials in it weren't produced from mines run by warlords using slave labor? And what about that bacon and egg sandwich you had this morning for breakfast? Were the pigs and chickens raised (and slaughtered, in the case of the pig) humanely, or in a factory-farm setting? What were the environmental impacts of those farms? Are the farmers using best-practices or are they cutting corners? Was your desk made from wood harvested using clear-cutting techniques? Which dictatorship pocketed the cash from the gas used in your car this morning? And so on, and so on.

There's just too much to keep track of in the life of even one consumer these days, so we rely on the framework of government rules, social mores, and the risk of bad publicity to establish a baseline level of "ethical" production. We then assume anything available for purchase in the normal economy meets that baseline and generally make our purchasing decisions based on price and preference. (Yes, I'm oversimplifying, but even the most diligent and cautious consumer inevitably makes many of their purchases in ignorance.) Scale that approach up, and voila, you've got your average big company. They don't go out of their way to do awful things, but they don't really expend much time, money or effort looking closely at all the details either.

Looking at working conditions, you should consider the locale, if you expect to see western conditions in India, you're fooling yourself.

So, you want that business pulled? Then those folks in India won't have jobs and at the cost of your jeans goes up. How's that a win-win?

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In time, this too shall pass.

Well isn't the flipside of that the idea that if goverment didn't tax American busniess's so much and require so many stupid regulations and the unions didn't demand everything under the sun, they wouldn't have to go overseas and do all of these oh so horrible things just to make a buck? The leason as always, less goverment is always better.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

Ethics are not morals. Do not confuse the two. Medical ethics are different from agricultural ethics. The ethics employed in Google's industry are radically different from anything Starbucks has to be concerned with.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

So, you think it would be a good thing if we had Americans that made the same salary as a Chinese factory worker?

Who's to say what is good and what isn't when it comes to what a person makes though? If you need a job and all you are qualified for is is crotch stitcher at 3.45 and hour and somebody is willing to offer you that, what's the problem? Should the crotch stitcher make 10 bucks an hour just so you can feel better about yourself? If the crotch sticher wants to make more money, they have options. Make yourself worth more or find a crotch stitcher job that pays more(just to name a few).

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

He should make enough so that he can feed himself and put a roof over his head, otherwise the whole employment exercise is kind of pointless to begin with. $3.45 is probably double or triple what Chinese factory workers make, by the way.

The US has a consumption problem, not a production or work ethic problem. We don't need to work harder or for less money to solve our problems, we need to stop buying so much **** we don't need on credit.

Yes, he should but it isn't the company's responsibility to do that. It's that persons. I think a lot of folks think that a job belongs to them(not counting self employed and things of that nature). It doesn't. It belongs to the owner of the company. The company/owner says I need such and such skilled person to do such and such job. I'm willing to pay X amount in compensation. You can either say sure, I'll agree to that...or you go someowhere else.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

That's fine until it labels millions of people as literally not worth living, because the market rate for any service they can offer does not allow them to feed and shelter themselves. That's when it's the government's job to deal with the problem. It's never the company's responsibility.

So how does the government deal with that problem, Xeq?

Do they mandate a wage that prices the job out of the country entirely, leaving that crotch stitcher to collect unemployment, instead?

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Currently that is fundamentally impossible given the opportunity cost of time in that decision for anyone in Amerca.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Let's go with this. 27.60 a day. Lets assume that it is the "perfect world" and there are no taxes. For this the person is going to have to work 7 days a week so we hit 193.20 a week take home. 772.8 a month. Dude pulls in with 2 or 3 roommates in the condition and 2318.4 is fine enough to have a decent place, food, heat, electricity, a home phone, and transportation plus a bit of savings.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville