CORPORATE SOCIAL IRRESPONSIBILITY

NOKUTHULA MASANGO this factory are characterize for exploiting their workers and
there is where we can see the irresponsibility social what could do the factory to
improve by the best this assignment of irresponsibility social? That sweatshop jobs make
workers better off, but that sweatshops should do more to improve the lives of workers
that they should make them even better off by paying higher wages, or providing better
working conditions.
Exploitation, as we’ve discussed here before, is usually understood as to involve taking
unfair advantage of a vulnerable person. Sweatshops, for instance, are said to involve
exchanges in which multinational enterprises profit off of persons in desperate poverty
by offering labor contracts in which workers are subjected to low wages, long hours, and
unsafe or demeaning working conditions.
We think there’s a strong case to be made that these labor agreements are not as unfair
as they appear at first glance, and that the same is true for many of the other allegedly
exploitative exchanges listed above. But we want to put these concerns aside for the
moment and assume for the sake of argument that these exchanges are unfair, in some
morally significant sense.
In other words, both parties come away from the exchange better off than they would
have been without it. This claim is supported, I think, by the rather impressive empirical
data on sweatshop wages. But even apart from the empirical evidence, there’s a fairly
strong a priori argument to be made in favor of the assumption of mutual benefit. After
all, if workers didn’t expect to be made better off by working in a sweatshop, if they
didn’t think it was all things considered their best available alternative then why would
they take the job? And the poorer workers are, the more dramatic the impact on their
overall welfare will be of even slight improvements to their material conditions.
So sweatshops are doing something to make poor workers better off. On the other
hand, I assume that most of us do nothing to make any serious improvement in the lives
of people in desperate poverty. We might give a few dollars to the Red Cross when a
tsunami hits and makes the evening news, but most of don’t do anything on a regular
basis that is going to have any real long-term impact on the lives of poor workers in the
developing world.
There are two main reasons at work:
1. Workers in the developing world are in great need of additional help.
2. Sweatshops are well-positioned to provide that help.
So (1) and (2) by themselves can’t justify a special obligation on the part of sweatshops
to do more. If sweatshops should do more to help the working poor, it is because the
poor need help and sweatshops are able to provide it. But since all of us are able to
provide help, the obligation to provide it is one that falls on all of us not just sweatshops.
Indeed, to the extent that sweatshops are already providing help and we are not, we are
further away from meeting our obligations than they are. Sure, sweatshops aren’t
helping workers out of a sense of altruism. But is that really what matters? If you put
yourself in the perspective of one of the world’s poor, who are you more grateful for: a
sweatshop that provides you with a (relatively) well paying job in order to maximize its
own profit, or an American company that acts with the purest of intentions, and so
refrains from outsourcing overseas at all?