{"id":922,"date":"2017-05-04T13:49:36","date_gmt":"2017-05-04T13:49:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/?p=922"},"modified":"2017-05-04T13:49:36","modified_gmt":"2017-05-04T13:49:36","slug":"mwr-far-businesses-put-needs-workers-importance-profit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/making-work-real\/2017\/05\/mwr-far-businesses-put-needs-workers-importance-profit\/","title":{"rendered":"MWR: How Far Should Businesses Put the Needs of their Workers Before the Importance of Profit?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Ellie<\/a>
Ellie Blackhurst, first year business student at Southampton, discusses the modern duties of the business world.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Is slavery within the 21st-century business world an issue today? At first glance, before carrying out any research I thought about my chosen inquiry question and assumed the simple answer to this question was no, not really. How very wrong I was. Having developed my ILP and carried out research tasks, I discovered that although it has been over 200 years since William Wilberforce was responsible for the abolition of slavery, it is still very much an ongoing issue as \u201c28.9 million people are estimated to be enslaved worldwide\u201d (Foley, 2014). Narrowing this down to looking only at the UK and the role businesses have within slavery, I found that \u201csome companies with significant presence in the UK, rely on people working in slavery to produce the goods they sell or have supply chains that can encourage traffickers\u201d (Foley,2014). Furthermore, a shocking \u201c11% of UK businesses say slavery in their supply chains is likely\u201d (Noble 2014), which highlights how relevant the topic is in the contemporary business world.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I then wanted to delve into more specific cases and examples and found that \u201cforeign workers were employed as slave labour\u201d (Connett 2015) in \u201cinhumane conditions\u201d (Connett 2015) by a UK bed-maker who supplied leading British high street retailers such as Dunelm Mill, John Lewis and Next. This article suggested that the ethical audits for these companies failed to notice that their supplier was treating their employees unfairly, by paying them \u201cless than \u00a32 a day\u201d (Connett 2015). This article raised another question in my head. Is it that companies are genuinely unaware of the unethical treatment within their supply chains, or are they choosing to be ignorant towards the issue?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This leads my research directly into the subject of my second inquiry question; regarding how far businesses should put the needs of their workers before the importance of profit. This is an ethical debate which has existed for centuries and has divided opinions globally. A key contributor to this debate is, of course, Milton Friedman, who famously stated that \u201cthere is one and only one social responsibility of business- to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits\u201d. This controversial point of view suggests that regardless of the working conditions for employees, businesses should consider making profit their number one priority. Doesn\u2019t seem very ethical and up to date with supposed modern standards, does it? This led me to consider other forms of inequality within the business world such as the role of women and the glass ceilings and inequality they continue to face. \u201cResearch confirms that women represent less than 10% of board level and director level positions\u201d (Lawton, 2015), and this alone demonstrates the position of women as beneath men in the hierarchy of the business world. This lead me to question whether this could be considered a form of enslavement; it could be argued that women are somewhat enslaved by their gender which unfairly limits and controls them in terms of pay and positioning in the contemporary business world.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ellie Blackhurst studies Business Marketing at Southampton Business School. The views in this article are those of the author. This article is part of our ‘Making Work Real’ series.<\/strong> <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is slavery within the 21st-century business world an issue today? At first glance, before carrying out any research I thought about my chosen inquiry question and assumed the simple answer to this question was no, not really. How very wrong I was. Having developed my ILP and carried out research tasks, I discovered that although it has been over 200 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99269,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1030568],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-making-work-real","column","threecol"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99269"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=922"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":924,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922\/revisions\/924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}