Manufacturing Business Ethics

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Discuss how objectives of a manufacturing business might be affected by ethical issues. An ethical issue can be defined as a problem or situation which requires a person, business or organization to choose between alternatives that must be evaluated as right (ethical) and wrong (unethical.) Businesses face these ethical issues everyday and must create objectives that take these issues into consideration. A manufacturing business is an organization in the secondary sector that processes natural resources to form a product. These businesses are affected by ethical issues more than other businesses in different sectors because manufacturing involves labour and natural resources that create many ethical decisions for managers and directors to…show more content…
This involves finding the cheapest suppliers, resources and labour. Many manufacturers move to less developed countries in order to find cheap labour, land and less legal procedures and protocols. This can lead to many manufacturing businesses employing child labour which is where young children are forced to work long hours in sweat shops where they are crammed into small spaces and work all day with little or no breaks and very little pay. These children suffer at the hands of the manufacturing business all because they had the objective to maximize profit by cutting down production costs. Child labour is now a recognized problem in the business world and if a company is seen to be using child labour it is often made known to the world so that people will stop buying those products. This occurred when Nike was found to be producing their sports gear using child labour and sweatshops, the brand name suffered from this negative publicity and people were discouraged from buying Nike products because of the unethical values that the company appeared to have. This would have affected Nike’s objectives as a company because they would have needed to change their manufacturing process which would increase the cost of production and therefore slowed the company’s progress towards their objective to maximize…show more content…
Because manufacturing businesses are involved with the physical production of goods they are known to be culprits for emitting smoke, carbon dioxide, chemicals and other pollution into our atmosphere. If a manufacturing business has the objective to maximize production by 10% per annum they must take into consideration how much more air pollutants the factories will pump into the atmosphere and decide if it is the right thing to do just to make more profit. Not only is air pollution a problem but rubbish and waste products produced by factories can become out of control when there is no longer anywhere to dispose of the waste. An objective of the manufacturing business may have to be to decrease waste to a certain amount each year and to find new more environmentally friendly methods of production. In society today people are becoming more aware of businesses being ‘green’ or environmentally friendly especially the secondary sector. Often consumers will purchase the product that does not harm the environment as they feel as though they have done something good for our planet. This can influence manufacturing businesses’ objectives as they will aim to be the company with the ‘greenest’ image which can increase sales and ultimately

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