Elizabeth Hall
05/30/22
This picture is from a beach club we visited for lunch in Mykonos.
Last weekend most of our class went on a short trip to Mykonos. Lila and I booked an air bnb to stay in together; we also had to book our transportation. We decided to buy ferry tickets because they were cheaper than airline tickets and they offered a student discount. When booking the tickets, I accidentally booked them for the weekend of June 17th; and we only realized this mistake at 1am the night before we were leaving. Although we fixed the mistake, it was very stressful. Making my own transportation arrangements here is stressful because I am unfamiliar with public transportation and I am in a foreign country where I do not understand the language.
The company I researched in class was Nike. Nike has been known to produce their sneakers and activewear in unethical sweatshops since the 1970s, but it was only in 1991 that activist Jeff Ballinger published a report describing the low wages and poor working conditions in Nike’s sweatshops. There most common in developing countries like India, Indonesia, and Thailand where labor laws are rarely enforced. These factories are often hosted in decomposing building which are overcrowded with underpaid employees and pose fire dangers. Under pressure to make changes to improve the wages and conditions of their workers, Nike worked to become a member of the sustainable apparel coalition. Nike has claimed to use reduce greenhouse gas emissions generated from their operations and supply chains; but there is no evidence to support this.
Between chapter one and two my favorite reading was chapter one. It was interesting to discover all the different resources that business ethics includes. Such as psychology, business management, organizational behavior, leadership studies, and sociology. The chapter gives you the tools to investigate ethical questions that arise at individual, organizational, and social/political levels. The chapter also lays out the clear goals of our business ethics class: creating ethical organizations, thinking through social, economic, and political policies that we should support as citizens; developing our knowledge base and skills that we need to identify ethical issues, understanding how and why people behave unethically, and deciding then how we should act, what we should do, and the kind of person we should be individually.