A Cheap Commodity: The Sweatshop Case In Bangladesh

People, A Cheap Commodity

Every day, businesses around the world make decisions that benefit their cause. The decisions that they make hold moral expectations. Ultimately, their consequences either good or bad. However, in making business decisions, an executive might negatively impact the lives of workers who are creating services and products for the company. In other words, by trying to make the business more profitable, they would create the opportunity for base level workers to undergo unjust pay, terrible work environment, or in some scenarios both for the sake of profitability. In this essay, we will visit the sweatshop case in Bangladesh where workers are paid crumbs making products for big retailing companies. This case will be analyzed

Their duty is to flourish the business and make it profitable. Hence, this gives their decisions a moral worth. Second, an action that’s done from duty does not get its’ moral value from the purpose that is to be achieved through it, but from the maxims, that it involves. In other words, those executives do not receive moral value for the purpose of making the business more profitable. However, they would benefit from the moral value due to the maxim that they generated to fulfill their duty towards the owners. That being the case, Kant believes that terrible consequences do not matter if the motive or action is good. This can be controversial and allows the opportunity to develop a negative view about Kant’s philosophical approach. To put it into the perspective of the sweatshop case, the good motive of the managers is to make the business more profitable. As a consequence, workers have to endure unjust pay and miserable work environments. This approach is debatable because, for those companies who are expert in cutting cost, it is easy for them to figure out if their products are produced using cheap labor. This case is similar to the peeled garlic retailing industry in the United States. The story goes as follows, an American garlic peeling business owner that operates in the United States was amazed by how much the Chines peeled garlic is less expensive than the average American counterpart. After months of research and travel to the source, he learned that the Chines garlic suppliers have contracted with the Chines government to force the prisoners to peel garlic for free for the purpose of exporting it to the United States. Those businesses are exploiting the prisoners for their own benefits. It is obvious that their maxim is not morally good. Besides the exploitation of the prisoners, they are undercutting the American producers because