Global and Business Ethics

Running head: GLOBAL BUSINESS AND ETHICS

Global Business and Ethics Papers

Anthony Laskey

University Of Phoenix

MGT/216

November 29, 2009

JuliAnna Sanchez Stone

Global Business and Ethics Paper

Global businesses (multinationals) have found that either outsourcing their business to underdeveloped countries or moving the manufacturing of their products creates a new source of profit and a greater market share for the particular company. In doing so, businesses have come under increased pressure to conduct business with the same ethical and moral practices they use within their respective countries. Multinationals themselves are not entirely to blame for the unethical and immoral practices being conducted in the host country. Many countries and their respective cultures accepted unethical practices before some multinationals moved their organizations to their countries.

Ethical issues that became evident as the result of business globalization were unfair labor practices like child labor, sweathouses, apartheid, and oppression due to apartheid. Businesses like Nike, IBM, Ford, General Motors, Firestone, Exxon, Mobil, Kellogg’s, Eli Lilly, Kodak, Control Data, Wal-Mart, and over 300 other US companies found it profitable to do business in underdeveloped countries. Corporations did not have any part with passing the laws being governed by the host country but were all bound by the laws, just as were the local firms of the host country. Nike for example, even though Nike was exposed in to its unfair labor practices in 1996 by CBS’s 48 Hours, had and continues to have a reputation for producing its products in less developed countries like China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Haiti, and Indonesia with the cheapest labor and the laxest law enforcement.

According to Lormand (1997), “Nike's grand strategy was and still is quite simple - first, enter developing nations whose people are desperate for work because they are kept in poverty by brutal...