The Business Ethics, Code of Conduct, Environment Initiatives in Companies

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The Business Ethics, Code of Conduct, Compliance, etc. initiatives at Philips and Intel Corporation

I would like to buy from companies that adopt appropriate business ethics and code of conduct when dealing with customers. This company should view business ethics as a part of its sustainability program. Without appropriate business ethics adopted as a code of conduct for the entire company and specifically that of sales and marketing people, the company may not be able to sustain its growth and produce consistent results. The company I have noticed to have adopted such an approach is Philips. I would like to do business with Philips and would appreciate the opportunity to buy from such a company.

Though it is an international company with wide operations across the entire spectrum of electrical and electronic engineering, Philips continues to maintain its growth trajectory. Committed research and development that ensures that the customer always gets value for their money and also never to let the competition too far ahead in any of the spheres of work has made Philips a trusted name among customers. Whether it is the lighting or the audio–video products or any of the numerous electrical products that the company is producing, in all of them they are either the market leaders or they are a close second in most of the locations across the world. This is made possible because of clearly ethical business practices that the company has followed. At no point have they come up with products that brought ignominy to the company or made any advertisement or promotional campaign that was not in the right spirits. In their long history, one would hardly find instances where they have attacked a competitor unethically or made a public presentation that was not in line with the ethical standards of public viewing. All this makes the company a nice vendor and I would prefer buying from such companies. Philips – Sense and Simplicity.

Similarly, a company that I would love to work with should have good ethical standards when they are handling people in their company. There should be an equal footing that has to be encouraged in the company. Ideas and opinions of individuals at all levels should be entertained and if their opinions were found to be in line with the needs and goals of the company, they should be honored as much as the opinion of the top executives. I have generally found such behavior and business ethics in Intel Corporation. Intel was always basing its growth on new innovations and ideas that have emanated from its engineers. As a matter of fact, fresh engineers out of college have produced more innovations everywhere than people who have been in a company for long. That is possibly the reason why one might find Intel Corporation producing newer products at the turn of every year. They are also able to keep up with the competition and the race of the ICs.

I like the way the company handles human relations. During the crisis of Pentium as well, the company could look at creative solutions from its employees and it could successfully come out of the impasse. Though a huge loss was incurred amounting over USD 150 million, the company could regain its status as the number one chip maker only because of its employees. The management of the company has always recognized the importance of the people and the criticality of the human resources. By ensuring that they are appropriately positioned and they are given the lee-way to produce has produced results for the company consistently. There is value for the people and the company also has values. I would like to work for such a company one day. Intel – leap ahead.

All settled economic life requires trust and confidence. The adoption of realistic and workable codes of ethics in the business world can actually enhance business efficiency. Do you agree or disagree with this statement?

Yes, true! I accept the statement. As the statement says, there is no business where every one of the dealings done is through a written understanding. It is not possible to have every transaction, smaller ones too, under a written commitment. It is not possible for a manager to assign or indicate every job that a person has to do when he is working for the company in his appointment order. There is a certain amount of trust between the manager and the employee. The vice versa is also true. So is the case with every one of the contracts commercially made. Though there are one hundred points on the document, there are still more which are only understandings. There is a higher degree of trust and confidence which is essential for doing business with any one. Therefore, the first part of the statement is held true.

Unless a business body works within specific set of rules it becomes highly difficult for customers and vendors to predict the ways of working of the company. When the parent or the teacher is not predictable and they do not follow the laid down rules, the child only gets confused more. In case of adults too, when people do not follow specific rules then it is very difficult to work with them. This is also true of corporate bodies. Only if the companies are adopting specific ethical and codes of practice, it becomes all the more difficult to handle the company. If the company has such laid down rules then it is easy for every one to work with the company and therefore, the overall efficiency of operation of the company increases over a period of time. Everyone knows how to work with the company. Therefore, the second part of the statement is also held true.

The company, Dow Corning had prior information about the nature of side effects a silicon implant will have on the women. The incidence of cancer and other forms of illnesses were highlighted in an article in the June 1991 issue of Business Week. The company which was considered one of the most ethical ones, did not release or make use of all the research results they had obtained. This resulted in an unethical practice of hiding the necessary information from the consumer. The company has also launched a product which had degenerative reaction to the users. This was also an unethical act. Having known that this could cause serious ailments to the users, the company should have refrained from marketing the breast implants even before they launched it. But they did not do so.

After the launch, with in a period of one year, there was huge increase in the number of people who were using breast implements. After the use of these implants some of the patients started giving negative feedbacks on the usage and the effect of these implants. At least, at this stage, the company should have with held further sale of its products and wherever possible could have retracted the product. The company did not do either. This was a clear ethical breach and it has also become a criminal offense. This has spoiled and caused immense loss to a number of people who used it. Since it was mostly women centered and more than one hundred thousand women used this, it had a major impact on the incidence of breast cancer in women. It was right that the company was held liable for the damages that they caused and huge mental and physical suffering the patients had to go through. It had to be viewed along with the fact that this is not a terminal illness that is being treated but only a cosmetic surgery that needs to be performed.

Issues that are faced at the work place

There are a number of issues that are faced at the work place. This might vary from issues concerning smoking and alcoholic habits at the office to issues regarding health and illness and other behavioral problems. A number of such issues affect the working environment which could bring down the productivity of the place. In most of the locations, it is the personnel interaction that creates issues related with ethics. And the same is true in the case of a number of illnesses like AIDS where the patient is found discriminated. Where as there are also cases, where specific groups of people are preferred which in turn causes discrimination against the people who were not preferred. All this cause a down turn in productivity since it affects the morale of the people. It is therefore, essential for the manager to ensure that there is no specific discrimination either positive or negative under any other pretext except performance.

This would be the major cause for break of ethics. In the case sited by the author, he looks at the Porn at work problem. It has been established by a number of surveys and statistics that there is Porn at work and more than one third of all people in every organization has passed through porn at work. Most of the people also indicate that there is a higher port viewing particularly when the strength of the company exceeds 500 people. In companies less than 20 the incidence of porn is rather rare. However, there is an explicit content viewing and passing around which most people claim is hundred percent. Every one of the people has received some kind of sexually explicit material or other. It is not only the usage of porn sites for viewing but also for passing around to your colleagues. There are also cases that every employee receives information from the internet or intranet but at the same time has not asked or requested for it. Unsolicited mails in this connection seem to be quite high. There are also court judgments which indicted the person viewing porn at work but also indicated that the company or the public has no right to get into the private life of an individual. This has dampened the chance of prosecuting some one legally for using porn at the workplace.

It is also true that the productivity of the individual goes down when he sits and downloads porn images and galleries. This only means that if the productivity were to be affected by such happenings, then it would affect the profitability of the company as a whole. It becomes therefore important that porn at work place is strictly controlled and the companies have strongly implemented methods to control such activities. Still these kinds of activities tend to happen and are consistently on the rise. It has been observed that 25% of the companies in the United States has terminated employees who had misbehaved in their emails. All this point to an uncontrolled behavior pattern concerning porn at work place!

Apart from this, there are also cases where the misbehavior has led to court cases and people have resorted to legal remedies because of the growing resentment and offending statements. There was the case of Chevron employees mostly women going to court offended by emails circulated by people. There are also cases where dismissed people from the service of the companies have resorted to ratification by the court. But in some cases, the court they held dismissal unfair and intrusion into privacy, has also said that such behavior should be controlled as the entire operation cannot be conducive to productive work environment. Ethics in work environment is built more for working together.

Privacy of the individual needs to be protected and the case of people who snoop to conquer their colleagues’ behavior certainly affect the way the people work in the office. But to what extent is privacy valid is the question. There cannot be privacy in a computer that is owned by the employer and used for business purposes. The person is expected to use such equipment only for his or her official purposes. Whereas when misusing these facilities provided, the question of privacy should and cannot arise! Though the courts have held valid the privacy part of the argument, it is still debatable to what extent this should be allowed. This can happen not only in the drug related cases which would mean that the person can be subjected to drug testing at the work environment. His computer could be subjected to search for porn content.

Discrimination at the work place

Discrimination at work is another major ethical issue that clouds the work place. Discrimination according to Richard Wasserstorm can be sexual, racial and other basis of discrimination. Facial discrimination as also been indicated. But racial discrimination has been one of the major issues that every work place with multiple cultures and races working in it need to face. There is no way that this could be avoided by these people. In line with these, the author has proposed a much wider perspective to what is happening due to racial discrimination at the office. Be it promotions or increments or even allocation of jobs to people, there are always changes and modifications in the approach which are subtle but yet distinct. In order to set right the wrongs committed to a particular group of people or race, certain affirmative actions have been recommended by the political establishment. These have been argued as some thing that is not in line with the basic political ethics of treating people equally.

Affirmative action has been taken by many of the educational institutions in line with the legal commitments made. However, in the work environment such an affirmative action to set right the wrongs are yet to materialize fully. Discrimination on the grounds of sex, religion or race has been debarred for quite some time now, legally. Though on the job, this tends to rear its ugly head time and again. There are also people who are against affirmative action and who feel that providing such facilities to academically poor people would result in the American institutions getting weaker day by day. There are also people who indicate that this amounts reverse discrimination. While some of the authors indicate that reverse discrimination will eventually happen before the level playing field is set. Until then, people need to sustain and grow with it.

The incident on April 16, 1963 at Birmingham, Alabama is the case of discrimination and Martin Luther King was arrested when he conducted a gathering of people to fight against unjust laws of segregation. This has led from a clear discriminatory law that was passed and was in force in Alabama. The black agitation though was trying to set right the wrongs done; this was more a fight for justice and basic human rights. It was as Martin Luther King written in his letter on that day, ‘For more than two centuries our forbears labored in this country without wages’. The fight that was taken to the streets on that day was restricted by the police action. However, the point reached home. He could take to the millions of people that there is discrimination at all levels and the first rounds of changes were beginning to happen. This today has become the affirmative action as President Johnson said, ‘This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights’. Until the deprived people of the country and all the races here, all have equal opportunities to live and are equal to compete with one another, the need for affirmative action is maintained.

Environment and doing business

The fight to save the redwoods in California between Santa Cruz and Silicon Valley was one of the issues that have been brought up. The issue according to the San Jose Water Co., is one of saving additional work for cleaning up water due to forest fires and the large scale incidence of forest fires because of the thick foliage. Now the company wanted to log this land of 1002 acres which was not logged for the last one hundred years. But the residents objected to it noting that only if the foliage is removed, will there be an increased incidence of forest fires. This could also cause the forest fire to spread faster and to the residential area in the Los Gatos. It was very alarming to the residents in the area. In addition to this, they also said that there is a possibility that land slides will also be caused when the trees are removed. The idea was to log the trees for lumber. But then the residents had a strong case against it and the fight to save the redwoods was conducted primarily to save the trees on one side and to save them on the other.

GE was using Polychlorinated biphenyls since 1940 and the effluents were continuously being let into the Hudson River. More than 1.3 million pounds of PCB was let into upper Hudson by GE plants in Albany in a period of about 30 years from 1947. A large number of evidence indicated that this chemical caused premature births and was also a major cancer causing agent. A number of laboratory experiments also confirmed this nature of the chemical and the company had the liability to clean up the mess that they created. Without the knowledge of the extent of damage that the company caused or could cause, the company has been sending out effluents. This was a case of ethical misuse even if it were to be inadvertent. The Supreme Court ruled that the company should clean up the mess that it created before there is a larger extent of humans affected through eating contaminated fish.

1989, Exxon Valdez Oil spill in Alaska was one of the worst incidents of oil spill in Alaskan wells. One of the Exxon oil tankers ran aground at Bligh Reef south of the Port of Valdez. This caused a massive oil spell that was never seen in North America. More than 1200 miles of beach was covered with the oil spell. The oil spill did not move into the port or on to the beaches or into the ocean luckily. However, the oil spill was vast enough to cause large environmental damages in the Prince William Sound that was adjacent to the spill. The company mobilized a large work force and slogged it out to clean the mess that was created by the oil spill. Thousands of birds, sea otters and other wild animals died due to the oil spill. The workers continued to work for more than a year to clean up the spill that was caused in a single day.

Honeywell let out chromium in a hexa-valent form into the Hackensack River as an effluent. This was actually dumped in the wet lands adjoining and along the shores of the river. Over a period of time, these slowly entered into the under ground water in the land as well as into the river system contaminating the entire water body. Hexavalent chromium is a carcinogenic and has been repeatedly proved to affect human beings and animals. By 1988, Honeywell did observe that a yellow fluid is getting dumped into the river system and did nothing to stop the situation. This was later taken to the court by a social group and the court again passed strictures to the company to ratify the same immediately with close observation of the government agencies. During the case, the court ordered the plaintiffs in the case to prove that the site was a dangerous place and that the toxin present in the place was higher than what was specified by the state of New Jersey as a safe limit.

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The Business Ethics, Code of Conduct, Environment Initiatives in Companies

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