Nike’s Ethical Dilemmas Going International Essay

Companies are faced with several ethical dilemmas when they decide to go international. They are faced with issues including child labor, hazardous working environments, below the livable wage earnings, long working hours, exploitation of natural resources, and bribery. For example, Nike was faced with many of these issues when they made the decision to go global. The company itself did not manufacture its own goods but rather outsourced their designs to manufacturing companies around the world. Nike’s main reason for doing this was to take advantage of the cheap labor overseas. However, this led them to be criticized because many people believed Nike was becoming rich by exploiting the hard work of underpaid workers. Most of these cases against Nike could have avoided if the company would have taken precautions about the ethically debatable working conditions that were going on in the subcontracted manufacturing companies. Nike could have researched the countries they were subcontracting their manufacturing to determine a livable wage. The company could then require their subcontractors to pay all of their workers at least a wage that could supply the needs of the individual worker. In doing this Nike could have avoided the criticisms about underpaying poor world workers for their input into the manufacturing companies. Also if Nike raised the wage enough to support the individual and their family it would prevent child labor from occurring. However, Nike should have also set a minimum age requirement with their subcontractors to ensure that no child labor laws were broken. A cap could have also been placed on the number of hours an individual could work per week to ensure that no one was being over worked in the manufacturing plants. With these requirements Nike would have keep itself safe from being convicted of having child labor, long working hours, and under payment to the workers in their subcont racted manufacturing plants. The subcontractors should have also been required to meet certain set of Health and Safety regulations to ensure that their workers were not exposed to any hazardous working environments. The factories should not allow any individual to be exposed to any level of chemicals that are above the Occupational Safety and Health Administration set limits for hazardous chemicals. To ensure that the companies were following these requirements Nike should have set up an auditing system that periodically checked on the factories to determine if they met all the requirements necessary to do business with Nike. The auditors in the system should be well informed of all of the safety and health requirements as well as the minimum age, wage, and amount of hours an individual is allowed to work per week. If any factory failed to meet the requirements within a set deadline the business agreement between Nike and the subcontractor would be terminated. If Nike would have set certain standards for their foreign factory subcontractors before they made manufacturing deals they could have avoided most if not all of the criticism concerning exploiting poor world workers for cheap labor. Making the right ethical decisions can be difficult to make especially when other companies are gaining an advantage by exploiting work of poor world workers. However, these benefits are only short term and they can lead to severe consequences down the road such as boycotts, lawsuits, and negative media. Doing the right thing can be costly but can have great benefits in the long run for a company. For example, if Nike portrays that it requires its subcontractors to have working environments that pass the Health and Safety regulations and well as it pays the workers a livable wage, it could boost sales in the United States because U.S. citizens like to know that poor world workers are protected from global companies trying to exploit their hard work for u nsustainable wages.