Free «Ethical Issues in Globalization» Essay Sample

Question 1

Children should not be hired for positions where they have to devote as much as twelve hours a day to their chores because work deprives children of their potential, childhood and dignity. Such occupations are also harmful to the children’s mental and physical development, such as losing their eyesight. Working for twelve hours a day can affect the schooling of children as young as eight years old because they are deprived of the opportunities to go to school. These kinds of practices are deemed exploitive child labor and are unacceptable.  Child labor not only violates the children’s rights, but also provides no benefits to children (Manikutty, 2001). In fact, weaving hand-made rugs and carpets is a rather dangerous job for children, and one can foresee the oppressive conditions imposed on children as they work for long hours. Children should be allowed to work only within an acceptable range of hours in order to make their employment beneficial rather than abusive.

It is unethical to buy rugs woven by children because it is very likely that the rugs were produced under oppressive conditions, which is typical for slave labor. Even though such goods could be cheap, buying them supports their production and, in return, encourages child labor. In order to strictly discourage all kinds of child labor, customers should stop buying those rugs. Child labor creates an unethical image for organizations. Thus, customers might succeed in discouraging organizations from involving children into the production processes by decreasing organizations’ income, achieved by refraining from buying such goods (Manikutty, 2001). The organization’s management operates in an unethical manner by using child labor as a form of cutting down the cost of production. Legal conflicts, combined with the loss of loss of customers, could be the best way to alleviate the widespread problem of child labor. It is thus unethical for customers to purchase child-produced rugs while remaining strictly against any form of child labor.

Question 2

It is unethical for multinationals to operate merely on principles where they can find cheap resources because of the violation of human rights and employment practices. The working conditions in the overseas country are clearly substandard to those in the multinational’s home country, making it morally wrong for the corporations to operate based only on the low costs of resources. Rather than offering many working hours every day and extremely low wages in some of the multinationals’ subsidiaries, the working conditions and salaries should be similar across all countries. Such a behavior of multinationals moving their operations to inexpensive countries overseas is not appropriate and should be considered as unethical and abusive (Aswathappa, 2001). Establishing the minimum acceptable standards that protect the basic employees’ rights and dignity as well as auditing foreign subsidiaries should help protect the workers from the unethical and abusive behaviors, demonstrated by multinationals that operate on principles of decreasing the costs of production.

In order to protect the outsourcing employees’ rights and dignity, international labor protection laws should be adopted by both overseas and the multinationals’ home countries. Such laws should encourage global companies to control their outsourcing subsidiaries as they advocate for equal working conditions and fair remuneration across nations. Moving the company’s operations to tap into the lower-cost unique skills and resources pools abroad is inappropriate and morally abusive. The laws should not prevent the corporations from relocating overseas in order to protect the comparatively higher-paying jobs for American workers, but rather to embrace global workforce and stress on equal employment practices (Aswathappa, 2001). Trying to block global trade in services will bring serious economical consequences to those companies. If laws are passed to shut down outsourcing, the United States can avoid economic distraction in the short-run, however, at the expense of blocking the overall gains. America should not ban outsourcing just as it should ban large corporate mergers or some monopolies. However, unregulated outsourcing can do lots of damage to the United States and thus the world economy. Laws should be passed to regulate outsourcing rather than to ban outsourcing.