Mar
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The Unethical Practices of Large Companies – Tina Jing Ru Shen
March 26, 2015 | 1 Comment
These reports and accounts of large companies cheating workers of their pay and hours is shocking and disappointing. As learned in Marketing Ethics, companies practicing unethical actions, especially illegal ones, are throwing themselves into the fire pit. When word gets out about their shoddy ways, consumers lose trust in those companies. Existing customers may change to its competitors, and non-customers will be even more justified to not be loyal to the company. What is more harmful to the wellbeing of the business? Having to pay employees normal labor costs, which reduces already profitable profits for the company, or having to deal with the loss of valuable customers through bad public image?
Although Jannette Navarro’s story is a single publicized account of a Starbucks worker struggling to balance personal and work life due to irregular assigned shifts, I know that a lot of workers in several other companies work under the automatic scheduling software as well. Large corporations such as Bloomingdales and Sephora give their employees different shifts every week. However, the hours are not as extreme as Navarro’s case.
On top of working irregular hours, large corporations such as McDonald’s is shaving off employee wages by practicing several shameful tactics such as forcing workers to work off the clock without paying them for the time, call off workers in the middle of their shifts, and forcing employees to pay for their own work clothes. These issues are seriously unethical, and just goes to pile up on top of previous controversial practices of the fast food chain (environmental and health issues regarding its food and animal cruelty). The lawsuits against McDonald’s described in the Cohen Milstein website show how outrageous McDonald’s is in avoiding to pay their workers the wages they deserve. The case about McDonald’s requiring workers to pay for and clean their uniforms is silly, since the uniforms are a kind of advertising for the company, as the case description says.
Then the most ridiculous news among the three readings comes up. I cannot believe the Supreme Court actually ruled that Amazon could refuse to pay employees for staying at the workplace overtime because of tedious security checks. First of all, it is Amazon that does not trust its employees, so it required that employees stay after-hours. If employees had a choice and voluntarily stayed for security checks, then there is slightly a better justification for refusing to pay the workers. But this is not the case. Plus, shouldn’t there be state-of-the-art security cameras in the workplace to adequately monitor Amazon’s workers? Why does it still need security checks? If they really do need this additional, and unnecessary I believe, security measure, then why don’t we have security checks in all stores, warehouses, etcetera? If Amazon cannot trust its workers to such an extent, how are we supposed to trust doing business with Amazon?
Also, I believe that this scenario is an unfair one for the workers because Amazon claims that security checks are not part of their payroll, but the security personnels that perform the measures are technically working. So, if they are greedy, they might take their lovely time to check each employee, so that the longer they take, the higher their salary – all at the expense of the normal employees. This issue and process is complicated and unnecessary in my opinion. If Amazon implemented security measures to monitor workers during their actual work time, perhaps it could save more money that could go into the company’s profits or increase workers’ wages. Either way, the security line could be done away with, and Amazon could still ensure their inventory’s safety with other time-saving, less expensive alternatives.
These readings were better to understand because they were not as verbose as previous articles. Since I am quite simple-minded, I found this class’ readings to be easier to relate to. However, the opinion on Hanauer’s TED talk was confusing for me. Tim Worstall does not agree with Hanauer’s claim that the rich are responsible for giving back to society. The main takeaway is probably that Worstall believes that investments are good for the general economy, and that higher tax breaks for the rich will encourage them to invest their money? However, is investing money the only solution to improving the economy or even improving the lives of the lower and middle class? I agree with Hanauer that rich company owners need to pay their employees higher wages because their employees will contribute to the economy far more than the small population of elites.
