You are responsible for submitting two current, business-ethics related objective news items (not analysis, commentary, or opinion pieces*) on completely different topics. The articles should:
have appeared in mainstream, reputable journalistic news outlets (see details below) within four weeks of the submission date
include ethically questionable behavior by for-profit businesses, not by non-profits or government agencies
those facing specific professions that have their own specialized ethics fields (e.g., journalism, law, and medicine)
those whose issues are idiosyncratic(e.g., professional sports or utilities).
NOTE: Your article must not be identical to a previous student’s submission, and the same topic can only appear on the submission topic list twice. Be sure to check the submission document before investing time in finding your article, so that you know which topics are already taken. Students who submit early will have the greatest variety of topics available.
*Commentaries will include the writer’s opinions, made clear by such clues as using first-person (“I”) terminology or stating evaluations of whether the behaviors reported are good or bad. Your job is to find “straight” news stories that just report the facts.
Examples of mainstream, reputable journalistic news outlets include:
The Wall Street Journal
https://www.wsj.com/
The Financial Times
https://www.ft.com/
The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/
The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/
The San Diego Union-Tribune
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/
Business Week magazine
https://www.bloomberg.com/businessweek
http://www.tmz.com/
http://www.nationalenquirer.com/
Submit Two Business Ethics News Items
You are responsible for submitting two current, business-ethics related objective news
items (not analysis, commentary, or opinion pieces*) on completely different topics. The
articles should:
● have appeared in mainstream, reputable journalistic news outlets (see details
below) within four weeks of the submission date
● include ethically questionable behavior by for-profit businesses, not by nonprofits or government agencies
● discuss moral issues facing business people;
Do not use:
● legal or government issues (e.g., lawsuits, regulatory, or university activities)
● those facing specific professions that have their own specialized ethics fields
(e.g., journalism, law, and medicine)
● those whose issues are idiosyncratic(e.g., professional sports or utilities).
The articles must each be between 350 and 1000 words (you can paste the text into
Word to check the count). The final cutoff time for submitting your articles to the
instructor via this discussion board link is listed in the course schedule.
You are welcome to submit your stories early, or to submit them one at a time.
Include each story’s Title, Reporter, Publication, and URL in your submission.
NOTE: Your article must not be identical to a previous student’s submission, and the
same topic can only appear on the submission topic list twice. Be sure to check the
submission document before investing time in finding your article, so that you know
which topics are already taken. Students who submit early will have the greatest variety
of topics available.
Your grade will be determined based on how closely your selected articles match the
above requirements, along with the depth and interest level of the business ethics
issues they raise. Take your time researching and selecting your submissions: each
article accounts for 6% of your course grade.
*Commentaries will include the writer’s opinions, made clear by such clues as using
first-person (“I”) terminology or stating evaluations of whether the behaviors reported
are good or bad. Your job is to find “straight” news stories that just report the facts.
Examples of mainstream, reputable journalistic news outlets include:
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
The Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/
The Financial Times https://www.ft.com/
The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/
The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/
- The Boston Globe https://www.bostonglobe.com/
The San Diego Union-Tribune http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/
- Fortune magazine http://fortune.com/
Business Week magazine https://www.bloomberg.com/businessweek
Examples that do not fit the “mainstream, reputable journalistic news outlet”
requirement:
●
●
●
●
●
https://onlabor.org/
- https://www.cato.org/blog
http://www.tmz.com/
- http://www.dsausa.org/
http://www.nationalenquirer.com/
Here are so examples:
Example #1
Article #1: Amazon Says It Reached a Climate Goal Seven Years Early
Publisher: NY Times
Published: July 10, 2024
Authors: Ivan Penn and Eli Tann
Link
Links to an external site.
Links to an external site.
The company said it effectively got all of the electricity it used last year from
sources that did not produce greenhouse gas emissions. Some experts have
faulted the company’s calculation.
Amazon announced on Wednesday that effectively all of the electricity its
operations used last year came from sources that did not produce greenhouse
gas emissions. But some experts have criticized the method the company uses to
make that determination as being too lenient. In its announcement, Amazon said
it had reached its goal of 100 percent clean energy seven years ahead of
schedule. The company said it invested billions of dollars in more than 500 solar
and wind projects to achieve its target.
The energy generated by those projects is equivalent to the electricity consumed
by the company’s data centers, corporate buildings, grocery stores and
fulfillment centers in 27 countries. But because the solar and wind farms do not
all directly power Amazon’s operations — most of that energy is sent to
electricity grids that serve many businesses and homes — some critics say that
the company’s calculations can create a misleading impression of its effect on
the climate. The clean energy projects Amazon has invested in can produce
enough electricity to power the equivalent of 7.6 million U.S. homes, the company
said.
Amazon aims to reach net-zero carbon emissions from all of its operations,
including its delivery vans, planes and other means of transportation, by
2040.“We’re really excited about, obviously, the goal that we set five years ago
and reaching it seven years early,” said Kara Hurst, vice president of worldwide
sustainability at Amazon. “That’s quite an achievement for us.” Amazon and
other tech companies have said for years that they aim to eliminate the planetwarming effect of their operations.
But those promises have been called into question recently by the industry’s
decisions to invest heavily in artificial intelligence, which consumes vast
amounts of electricity through its use of data centers. Environmentalists worry
that a surge in electricity demand from data centers, electric cars and heat pumps
could lead electric utilities to rely more heavily on natural gas power plants
because they won’t be able to build clean energy sources, transmission lines and
other infrastructure fast enough. A large data center can use as much energy as
the amount produced by a small power plant serving roughly 100,000 homes.
Tech companies say they are working to increase their use of renewable energy
to account for the energy demands of artificial intelligence. Google said last
month that it had entered into an agreement with Berkshire Hathaway’s utility in
Nevada to power its data centers there with geothermal power. The tech giant
said in its latest environmental report that its greenhouse gas emissions grew 13
percent in 2023 over the previous year with the increased demands of
A.I.Google’s agreement with Berkshire Hathaway and investments by Microsoft,
Amazon and other companies in new renewable energy projects will be needed to
reduce the world’s reliance on natural gas and other fossil fuels, experts said.
“That is real steel in the ground,” said Leah Stokes, an associate professor of
environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“If you actually want to be a part of the clean energy transition, put your money
where your mouth is.” Other energy experts say that despite making big
investments in renewables, some companies like Amazon have not been
transparent enough about how they are calculating and reporting their use of
clean energy.Amazon received a “B” grade from the CDP, a nonprofit group that
operates a global disclosure system for investors, companies, cities, states and
regions to manage their environmental impact. Google and Microsoft received
“A” grades and were commended for their commitment to clean energy and for
being transparent about how they were working to achieve their climate goals.“A
company needs to actually outline, what are the sources that you are accounting
for in that calculation?” said Simon Fischweicher, director of supply chain and
reporter services at CDP. Responding to the CDP rating, Ms. Hurst said Amazon
has been focused on being accurate in its reporting and has increasingly worked
to make more information public.
“I think every single year we are growing and learning and providing more data
and being more transparent,” Ms. Hurst said. “At a company our size and scale,
collecting more data is challenging at times.” The company said it achieved its
100 percent clean electricity goal by building new solar and wind farms, installing
solar panels on the roofs of some of its buildings, operating facilities on electric
grids that already use a lot of renewable energy and utilizing credits produced
from the use of carbon-free energy. A group calling itself Amazon Employees for
Climate Justice criticized the company for what its members see as the use of
accounting and marketing to make itself look good. The group, made up of
thousands of Amazon employees, has previously raised concerns to the
company about its climate policies, including on social media, in a 2019 letter to
Jeff Bezos, the company’s executive chairman, and during a protest last year
outside Amazon’s headquarters.“As Amazon employees, we are frustrated that
Amazon leadership is misleading the public by distorting the truth about its
renewable energy claims,” the group said in a statement about the company’s
announcement on Wednesday.
“Amazon wants us to think of its data centers as surrounded by wind and solar
farms, but the reality is the company is heavily investing in data center
expansions fueled by West Virginian coal, Saudi Arabian oil and Canadian
fracked gas.” No company connected to an electric grid can know for sure that it
uses only clean energy if any of the power plants on the grid burn fossil fuels.
Companies can try to target their use when resources like solar or wind power
provide much or most of the electricity on the grid at certain times of day, like at
midday or at night.
Example#2
Title: Starbucks sued for allegedly using coffee from farms with rights abuses
while touting its ‘ethical’ sourcing
By: Kenzi Abou-Sabe and Adiel Kaplan
Publication: NBC News
Link: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/starbucks-sued-allegedly-usingcoffee-farms-rights-abuses-touting-ethi-rcna130393
Links to an external site.
A consumer advocacy group is suing Starbucks, the world’s largest coffee brand,
for false advertising, alleging that it sources coffee and tea from farms with
human rights and labor abuses, while touting its commitment to ethical sourcing.
The case, filed in a Washington, D.C., court on Wednesday on behalf of American
consumers, alleges that the coffee giant is misleading the public by widely
marketing its “100% ethical” sourcing commitment on its coffee and tea
products, when it knowingly sources from suppliers with “documented, severe
human rights and labor abuses.”
“On every bag of coffee and box of K-cups that Starbucks sells, Starbucks is
heralding its commitment to 100% ethical sourcing,” said Sally Greenberg, CEO
of the National Consumers League, the legal advocacy group bringing the case.
“But it’s pretty clear that there are significant human rights and labor abuses
across Starbucks’ supply chain.”
The lawsuit cites reporting about human rights and labor abuses on specific
coffee and tea farms in Guatemala
Links to an external site.
, Kenya
Links to an external site.
and Brazil
Links to an external site.
, and alleges that Starbucks has continued to purchase from these suppliers in
spite of the documented violations.
“We are aware of the lawsuit, and plan to aggressively defend against the
asserted claims that Starbucks has misrepresented its ethical sourcing
commitments to customers,” said a spokesperson for Starbucks.
In an earlier statement they said, “We take allegations like these extremely
seriously and are actively engaged with farms to ensure they adhere to our
standards. Each supply chain is required to undergo reverification regularly and
we remain committed to working with our business partners to meet the
expectations detailed in our Global Human Rights Statement
Links to an external site.
.”
In Brazil, labor officials have cracked down on several reported
Links to an external site.
Starbucks suppliers over abusive and unsafe labor practices in recent years,
including garnishing the cost of harvesting equipment from farm workers wages,
not providing clean drinking water, personal protective equipment and
bathrooms, and employing underaged workers. In 2022, 17 workers, including
three minors, were rescued by Brazilian inspectors from “modern slavery,”
according to Reporter Brasil
Links to an external site.
, at a coffee farm managed by a man whose coffee roaster company received
Starbucks’ seal of certification a month earlier.
In response to the Reporter Brasil stories and reported labor abuses in Kenya
and Guatemala cited in the lawsuit, Starbucks issued statements
Links to an external site.
at the time that the company was “deeply concerned,” and that it would
“thoroughly investigate” claims of labor violations, “take immediate action” to
suspend purchases or “ensure corrective action” occurred.
Starbucks told NBC News it has since taken corrective action in both Guatemala
and Kenya.
In a promotional video on its coffee academy
Links to an external site.
website, a Starbucks coffee buyer says the company’s ethical sourcing stamp
“means that we are buying coffee, making sure that it’s good for the planet and
good for the people who produce it.”
Greenberg said the suit aims to prevent Starbucks from making claims like those
— particularly its “Committed to 100% Ethical Coffee Sourcing” advertising —
unless the company improves labor practices within its supply chain.
Starbucks, like many companies, uses third-party certification programs to
ensure the integrity of its supply chains for tea and cocoa. The company
launched its own sourcing standards, called C.A.F.E. Practices, in 2004 to
oversee its coffee sourcing in more than 30 countries. The verification program is
administered by a company called SCS Global Services in collaboration with
Conservation International.
The verification program holds Starbucks coffee suppliers to more than 200
environmental, labor and quality standards. Farms that fail to meet those can be
barred from supplying the company until corrective action is confirmed.
But there have long been issues with how effective such programs are, according
to experts.
In 2021, Rainforest Alliance, the third-party that certifies Starbucks’ supply chains
for tea and cocoa, was sued in D.C. court by another consumer advocacy group
over “false and deceptive marketing” of Hershey’s cocoa as “100 percent
certified and sustainable.” A judge ruled last year that the case could move
forward only against Hershey, as the manufacturer of the products.
Rainforest Alliance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“There is this huge pile of evidence that shows that the mechanisms that
[certifiers are] relying on to address problems like forced labor, child labor,
gender based violence, are extremely flawed and not working very well,” said
Genevieve LeBaron, director of the School of Public Policy at Canada’s Simon
Fraser University.
“We have incident after incident that’s uncovered in these supply chains. And
still, companies go around and make these kinds of claims that they have 100%
sustainable or ethical sourcing” said LeBaron, whose research
Links to an external site.
into cocoa and tea has shown that the prevalence and severity of labor violations
on certified and uncertified farms was “basically identical.”
LeBaron, who has consulted for the United Nations on global supply chain ethics,
said the issue is not unique to Starbucks, but ethical commitments from large
purchasing players like Starbucks can have an outsize impact on the integrity of
supply chains if they are backed up.
Starbucks has 10 “farmer support centers
Links to an external site.
” in coffee-producing regions around the globe, including Brazil and Guatemala,
but does not release public lists of certified suppliers, making it difficult to track
how often its suppliers are found to be engaging in labor abuses.
“I think it is really hard to have an ethical supply chain. And I would say, you
know, a lot of the reason for that is that, especially in agriculture, there’s a sort of
status quo of sourcing goods way below the cost of actually producing them.
And as long as you have that, you’re gonna have problems,” LeBaron said.
Article 2:
Title: Fast fashion still comes with deadly risks, 10 years after the Rana Plaza
disaster – the industry’s many moving pieces make it easy to cut corners
By: Ravi Anupindi
Publication: The Conversation
Link: https://theconversation.com/us/topics/business-ethics-9192
Links to an external site.
On April 24, 2013, a multistory garment factory complex in Bangladesh called
Rana Plaza collapsed, killing more than 1,000 workers
Links to an external site.
and injuring another 2,500. It remains the worst accident in the history of the
apparel industry and one of the deadliest industrial accidents in the world.
Several factories inside the complex produced apparel for Western brands
Links to an external site.
, including Benetton, Primark and Walmart, shining a spotlight on the unsafe
conditions in which a sizable portion of Americans’ cheap clothing is produced.
The humanitarian tragedy hit home as wealthy nations’ shoppers wrestled with
their own complicity and called for reforms – but a decade later, progress is still
patchy.
As a professor of operations and supply chain management
Links to an external site.
, I believe it is important to understand how the complex and fragmented supply
chains that are the norm in the clothing industry create conditions where unsafe
conditions and abuse can flourish – and make it difficult to assign responsibility
for reforms.
Shamed into action?
Rana Plaza was not the first garment industry accident in Bangladesh
Links to an external site.
. While the government had stringent building codes “on the books,” they were
rarely enforced
Links to an external site.
. Most workers lacked the information and power to demand safe working
conditions.
Yet the fact that the Rana Plaza collapse was not only a humanitarian crisis, but a
public relations crisis, prompted swift action by international organizations and
Western brands and clothing retailers. A campaign for full and fair compensation
Links to an external site.
for families of victims was launched immediately, facilitated by the International
Labor Organization
Links to an external site.
, a U.N. agency. Within a few months, two initiatives were designed to bring
garment factories in Bangladesh up to international standards: the European-led
Accord for Fire and Building Safety
Links to an external site.
, and the American-led Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety
Links to an external site.
.
Links to an external site.
While the two initiatives differed in some important ways, both shared the
common goal: to improve building and fire safety by leveraging the purchasing
power of the member companies. In other words, Western brands would insist
that production partners get up to standard or take their business elsewhere.
Altogether, the two agreements covered about 2,300 supplier factories. The
coalitions conducted factory inspections to identify structural and electrical
deficiencies and developed plans for factories to make improvements. The
initiatives also laid the groundwork to form worker safety committees and to train
workers
Links to an external site.
to recognize, solve and prevent health and safety issues. Member companies set
aside funds for inspections and worker training, negotiated commercial terms
Links to an external site.
and facilitated low-cost loans
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for factory improvements.
Both were five-year agreements: the Alliance was sunsetted in 2018
Links to an external site.
, whereas the Accord operated for a few more years before handing operations
over to the locally created Readymade Sustainability Council
Links to an external site.
in June 2020.
The record since
The onus and expense of making these improvements, however, were largely to
be borne by the suppliers – a substantial financial burden for many factories,
especially considering the low cost and slim profit margins of the clothes they
were producing.
Under the Alliance and the Accord, thousands of factories were inspected for
building and fire safety, identifying problems such as lack of fire extinguishers
and sprinkler systems, improper fire exits, faulty wiring and structural issues. At
the end of five years, both initiatives reported that 85%-88% of safety issues were
remediated
Links to an external site.
. Around half of the factories completed more than 90% of initial remediation,
while over 260 of the original 2,300 factories under the initiatives were suspended
from contracting with member companies.
In addition, more than 5,000 beneficiaries, including injured workers and
dependents of victims, were compensated through the Rana Plaza Arrangement
Links to an external site.
, receiving an average of about US$6,500.
Overall, I believe that these initiatives have been successful in bringing safety
issues to the forefront. In terms of infrastructure improvements, however, while
there has been decent progress, much still needs to be done; for example, the
initiatives covered just about one-third of all the garment factories in Bangladesh
Links to an external site.
. Importantly, neither addressed company sourcing practices.
Links to an external site.
Clothes yesterday and today
To understand why so much apparel manufacturing takes place in substandard
conditions, we need to understand the underlying economic forces: extensive
outsourcing to countries with low wages in the quest to meet demand for more –
and cheaper – clothing to sell to customers in the West.
In the 1960s, the average American family spent 10% of its income on clothing
Links to an external site.
, buying 25 pieces of apparel – almost all of it made in the United States. Fifty
years later, around the time of the Rana Plaza disaster, the average household
was spending only about 3.5% of its income on clothing – but buying three times
as many items, 98% of which were imported.
Over these decades, low-income countries in Asia and Latin America started
producing more garments and textiles. Apparel production is labor-intensive,
meaning these countries’ lower wages were a huge attraction to brands and
retailers, who gradually started shifting their sourcing.
On a $30 shirt, for example, a typical retailer markup is close to 60%. The factory
makes a profit of $1.15, and the worker makes barely 18 cents
Links to an external site.
. Were a similar shirt produced in the U.S., labor costs would be closer to $10
Links to an external site.
.
As labor costs rose in China, Bangladesh became a very appealing alternative
Links to an external site.
. Garment exports now account for 82% of the country’s export total
Links to an external site.
, and the industry employs 4 million people
Links to an external site.
, about 58% of whom are women.
The growth of this sector has reduced poverty
Links to an external site.
significantly and also empowered women
Links to an external site.
. To meet the rapid growth of the apparel industry, however, many buildings were
converted to factories as quickly as possible, often without requisite permits.
Everyone and no one
A common way that foreign companies source products from low-cost countries
like Bangladesh is through intermediaries or agents. For example, when a brand
places a large order with an authorized factory, the factory in turn may
subcontract part of the production to smaller factories
Links to an external site.
, often without informing the brand.
This highly competitive environment, with people at each step of the process
looking for the lowest price and no guarantee of longer-term relationships, gives
suppliers incentives to cut corners – particularly when under extreme pressure to
deliver on time. This can translate into exploitative labor practices
Links to an external site.
or unsafe conditions that violate local laws, but enforcement capacity is weak.
Links to an external site.
In their constant quest for lower prices, buyers may turn a blind eye to these
practices. The supply chain’s opaqueness, especially when brands do not source
directly, makes it difficult to investigate and remediate these practices. Since the
1990s, international scrutiny of labor conditions
Links to an external site.
has grown, but reform efforts largely ignored building and fire safety, the prime
reason for the Rana Plaza collapse. Because multiple buyers would often use the
same factory, no single buyer felt obligated to invest in the supplier to ensure
better conditions.
Garments traverse a complex global supply network by the time they reach stores
thousands of miles away. Workers are caught in this web, exploited by factory
management that is seldom held responsible by governments either unwilling or
unable to enforce laws
Links to an external site.
. Western brands escape the scrutiny of their governments by outsourcing
production to low-cost countries and absolve themselves of direct responsibility.
And consumers, eager for a bargain, shop for the lowest price.
This complex system makes it hard to assign ethical responsibility, because
everyone, and therefore no one, is guilty.
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