Archive for the ‘International’ Category
An Ethics Can of Worms, All Named “Nike”
August 26, 2011
Jack Marshall writes in his EthicsAlarms.com blog that I was “open[ing] an ethics can of worms” with the piece about Nike and its $4-a-day workers. He raises a terrific set of questions that need to be argued over before deciding whether a company doing international business is behaving ethically. They’re not easy to answer. I guess I’ll try them out on my business ethics students next month. Here they are
Q: If workers agree to work for a given price, is the company’s obligation to pay them more?
Q: Should any company pay less than a living wage for full-time work, whether or not desperate workers assent? (more…)
Is it ethical for Nike to pay people who make its shoes $4.00 per day?
August 23, 2011
Athletic shoes used to be made in Massachusetts. Now they’re all made overseas; Nike’s come largely from Indonesia, where its workers* earn $4.00 per day, barely enough to pay rent, transportation, water, and two small bowls of rice and vegetables..
In the courses I teach on business ethics we wrestle with this question: is Nike’s behavior ethical? In Nike’s corner are those who believe what Milton Friedman wrote fifty years ago: that business’s only social responsibility is to increase profits while staying within the rules of the game. Their argument is buttressed by the fact that the workers take the jobs voluntarily, so they must think they’re better off than if they weren’t making Nikes.
On the other side of the argument are those who believe that it’s just not fair for Nike to sell a pair of shoes for $80 that cost roughly $16.25 to produce, including just $2.43 for labor. Were Nike to pay a decent wage to its Indonesian workers, say double the current rate, it would reduce its profit margin by only three per cent, from $63.75 per pair to $61.32.
One man, Jim Keady, has been hard at work for thirteen years selflessly trying to get Nike to treat its Indonesian workers decently. Jim has even lived in Indonesia on $4.00 per day to see if it’s really a “living wage.” It’s not.
Jim came by his passion to change Nike while studying theology at Saint John’s University, where he was fired from his job as assistant soccer coach (more…)
Tripoli falls, Americans and free people everywhere rejoice
August 21, 2011
Government ethics 101:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
These words of Thomas Jefferson are the core principle of government. Perhaps nothing defines being American so much as a belief in these three sentences. So every American must be joyful at the fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
The bloodbath that the evil dictator promised hasn’t occurred. His troops defending his capital seem to have melted away as the rebel army drove, almost anti-climactically, into Tripoli.
What comes next no one can say. The people who united to oppose the dictator soon will have nothing so powerful to unite them. Qaddafi claimed—like Mubarak before him—that he (more…)
Schoolgirls: the face of Syria
August 3, 2011
As I read about the massacres in Syria–many hundreds, perhaps thousands of Syrians murdered by tanks, machine guns, helicopters, and artillery fired by their own Army, this picture keeps coming to mind–in March I was framing a photo of the National Museum in Aleppo when these little girls raced into my picture and posed. To me they’re the face of Syria.
Hooray for the USA women’s soccer team: winning with grace and losing with grace
July 18, 2011
The USA women’s soccer lost to Japan in the World Cup final on penalty kicks, but what a show they put on! It really seemed like watching a game, complete with sportsmanship and good feelings all around. No diving, no faking injuries, lots of smiles, and a helping hand whenever an opposing player was knocked down.
They played with incredible energy, outplayed the Japanese except when it came to the important area of getting the ball into the net, and were as gracious in losing as they had been earlier in winning. Megan Rapinoe’s speed and passing, Hope Solo’s goal-keeping, and Alex Morgan’s shooting, bode well for next year’s Olympics.
We hated to lose on a penalty shootout, but we were glad enough to get by Brazil on PKs, so maybe we shouldn’t complain. And if the USA team had to lose, who better to lose to than Japan. See you next year in London.
Is Obama a militarist, a peacenik, or a political waffler and difference-splitter?
June 25, 2011
Distrust of the President, and of the government in general, divides our society, emboldens our enemies, and diminishes the effectiveness of our Armed Forces. We owe our elected leaders more respect than that.
President Obama’s Afghanistan drawdown announcement has drawn fire from the left and from the right. He was pilloried on Fox News, on MSNBC, and on CNN, and even ridiculed on The Daily Show after he announced that the U.S. would withdraw 10,000 troops by the end of 2011, another 23,000 by “next summer,” with continuing reductions through 2014.
To the right, the President is recklessly ignoring the advice of his military professionals who know what’s needed. To the left, he’s mindlessly sticking to a hopeless and pointless strategy. To both sides he’s sacrificed principle for politics.
But has he? Is there any chance that his decision was based on what he thought best? If we Americans trusted him we’d give him that much. But we don’t, at least not much: the latest Gallup poll says that just 35% of Americans say they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the Presidency; 36% have very little confidence or none at all.
But we do trust the military: 78% of us say they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence. I’d guess the numbers are even higher on the right. But what happens when the military supports the President? Ah, then it’s a different story. (more…)
Yelena Bonner, ethics super hero, dead at 88
June 20, 2011
The greatest ethics challenge that most of us face is speaking truth to power. When our boss, or our spouse, or our good friend, says or does something that we disagree with we’re too often reluctant to object. At work we may fear the boss’s wrath; in our private life we may fear the loss of a friend.
We should take heart from the life of Yelena Bonner, who died Saturday in Boston after a long hospitalization. Many people think Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet Union: you could just as well argue that Yelena Bonner did.
Bonner relentlessly fought a one-woman battle against the Evil Empire, perhaps the strongest and most ruthless dictatorship the world has ever known. She had every reason to be fearful of its might: it executed her father and imprisoned her mother as enemies of the state when she was 14. Her own children were driven out of the country by state pressure and KGB threats. As a Jew in fiercely anti-Semitic Russia she had special reason to fear the state. But somehow she made the state fear her.
She was a founder and the personification of the Soviet human rights movement. In 1972 she married Andrei Sakharov, father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb-turned human rights activist.
When Sakharov was awarded the Nobel peace prize for his advocacy of human rights the regime forbade him to travel to accept his award; Bonner, in Italy for medical treatment, risked the regime’s wrath (more…)
Playing soccer (football) with head scarves can cause choking, so FIFA disqualifies Iran’s women
June 14, 2011
Soccer, aka futbol, aka futebol, aka football, is also known as the beautiful game. It’s the closest thing there is to a universal sport, played in over 200 countries. It’s championship game, the World Cup final, player every four years, draws a television audience of over one billion, according to FIFA, the international governing body.
FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) rules soccer internationally. And corruptly: its board is rife with bribery, which is apparently why it awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, where summer temperatures reach over 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
And it rules arbitrarily, inconsistently, and ugly, as when last week it disqualified the Iran women’s team for wearing head scarves to their match with Jordan. Why? Because head scarves were dangerous. Don’t you know, they’re a choking hazard. As a result Iran won’t have a chance to qualify for the 2012 Olympics in London.
The issue has come up before, and FIFA reversed an earlier ruling against head scarves (more…)
An American Turkophile approves of the election results
June 12, 2011
Turks went to the polls today in numbers that should make Americans blush: 44 million of 50 million registered voters, or 88 per cent.
The results should get two cheers from American friends of Turkey. The victory of the Justice and Development (AK) party was a foregone conclusion. AK got 49.9% of the vote and 325 seats, losing eleven seats from the current level.
But the critical issue for Turkey is what happens to the Turkish constitution, which was written by the Army after the 1982 military coup. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is committed to writing a new constitution. He hoped to capture two-thirds, or 367, of the seats in parliament, which would have allowed his party to write the new constitution by itself. Failing that he hoped for three-fifths, or 330, of the seats, which would have allowed the same unilateral drafting of a new constitution but subject to a popular referendum (which he would have been heavily favored to win). But on Sunday AK fell a little short of even the 330 threshold.
This matters for two reasons. First, AK is an Islamist party, and while many (more…)
Ethics Bob 