It is the world’s largest automobile maker by sales. The company was founded by Choir Toyota in 1937 as a spiff from his father’s company Toyota Industries to create automobiles. Three years earlier, in 1934, while still a department of Toyota Industries, it created its first product, the Type A engine, and, in 1 936, its first passenger car, the Toyota AAA. Toyota also owns and operates Lexus and Scion brands and has a majority shareholding stake in Dadaists and Hint Motors, and minority shareholdings in Fuji Heavy Industries, ISSUE Motors, Yamaha Motors, and Mitosis Aircraft Corporation.
The company includes 522 subsidiaries. Toyota is headquartered in Toyota City, Chichi and in Tokyo. In addition to manufacturing automobiles, Toyota provides financial services through its Toyota Financial Services division and also builds robots. Toyota Motor Corporation (including Toyota Financial Services) and Toyota Industries form the bulk of the Toyota Group, one of the largest conglomerates in the world. Product and services Toyota products are abundance. From selling vehicles like cars, mini vans, sports utility cars, and many more to marine products such as speed boats.
They also sell spare parts which include maintenance parts, oils and exterior and functional parts. Not to mention, a various numbers of accessories they have been come up with. For example, car navigation system, and security products. They also provide facilities to maintain the cars, providing after-sale maintenance for the customers. These are products and services within its industry. Toyota corp.. Also diversifies its business by venturing into new business enterprise, marine business and biotechnology and forestation business. They also involve in financial service by Toyota Financial Service roof.
Besides that, they are involved in housing business as well, known as Toyota Housing Corporation. Last but not least, they have been into the IT and ITS business as well with the introduction of e-Toyota and KAZOO Evaluation of business practices on ethical aspects Positive ethical aspect Due to its scandalous safety regulation on its vehicle, Toyota has developed and tested a precision-cut steel reinforcement bar. This bar will be installed into the accelerator pedal assembly thus eliminate the excess friction which caused pedal to stick in rare (Pedal Solution, 2010).
This is a positive ethical aspect by Toyota. They also have done a recall on all the vehicles and changed the parts in 2008. After the recall, Toyota tend to be more responsive by dealing with customers closely and take immediate actions to ensure the safeness of the vehicles. They also placed rapid response SMART teams to make on-site inspections on the cars and get the customers’ feedbacks. This is also a positive ethical approach by Toyota. Besides that, Toyota had come out with fuel efficiency technologies through hybrid vehicles.
This is an initiative to diversify energy and reduce the carbon oxide emitted by vehicles. They mentioned that they have enough resources and advance technologies to produce a more environmental friendly car (Andrew & Dirk, 2007) for a cleaner environment as this hybrid car emits 25% to 30% less carbon dioxide than a normal vehicle. It is also profitable new market for car industry. This shows that Toyota is socially responsible as they are gaining profit and creating a better environment for others. Toyota has also been involves in community services.
They donated more than $1 00,000 for hurricane Sandy’s victims in 1st March 2013. Not only hat, they are involved in the program called “Paint Your School” which leads to an even bigger project later on. This shows that they are involved in the community. Negative ethical aspect The Toast’s workers have been forced to work between 15 to ours per day for seven days a week. They are forced to work for such long hours and received wages below minimum wages of the countries. Due to this, Toyota has thousands of “over worked to death” claims each year.
This shows that Toyota is lacking in protecting the safety of its workers in the organization which is against the law. Another negative aspect of Toyota is the news about Human Trafficking related to Toyota. Tens of thousands of foreign workers are trafficked to Japan, stripped of their passports and are cheated of their wages. The workers are mostly trafficked from China and Vietnam and are working under abusive sweatshop conditions producing auto parts for Toyota. Besides, the delaying of safety investigation is a serious lack of ethical offense by Toyota.
They have neglected the problem since 2001 and delay the process in order to save some money. The delay in recall too is a major concern. This delay Of recall of 9. Million cars in 2009 with repeated defects such as malfunction of airbags and sticky gas paddle has caused many accidents and death. Not to mention the bad ethic practice they did when they are trying to cover up the stories about the sticky gas paddle. They were not only neglected customers’ complains but also brushed off the complaints saying that the consumers only want money to accuse them for such incidents.
They were lying about doing the investigation too. These are the negative ethical practices by Toyota. HTH kcal Theories In contrast to the four ethical theories, Toyota has violated 3 out 4 of them. Ethical Theory 1 -? Utilitarianism Utilitarianism holds that the rightness of an action is based on how much benefits or happiness it gives compared to its costs for the greatest number of people. Under utilitarianism theory, Toyota has violated this ethic by causing unhappiness in a lot of people with its company. In this case, people have been complaining on the malfunction of the vehicle’s airbags during accidents.
Toyota should have taken action as soon as possible instead of just ignoring the complaints. Not only that, Toyota is notorious of its safety history such as the problems With its accelerator pedals issue. After the Sailor family’s car accidents which caused the whole family died, then only Toyota recalls 4 million gas pedals for repairs. It is by far the largest recall Toyota had ever made in United State (Brown, 2009). All this while, since 2001, more than 1 ,OHO Toyota and Lexus owners have reported the same issues (Abbreviated, 2009) yet Toyota did not do anything.
This unethical behavior of Toyota has been revealed and Toyota finally admitted that they did drag the safety investigation of its vehicles. This delay has saved them $1 million and 50,000 man hours. Toyota should have just run the tests to see if there was really a problem in the beginning. This will increased happiness among its consumers because it shows that Toyota cares about its consumer and not see them for the money. Besides that, Toyota failed to be ethical due to the after-act benefits and cost (Fullerton, 2004).
After the unethical act of delaying the safety issues of its vehicles, Toyota lost millions of dollars for the recall, rebuilding its reputation and paying its penalty (Hirsch, 2014) which lead to a higher cost than its benefits. Ethical Theory 2-? Human rights Human beings of every nationality possess to an equal extent simply by virtue of being human beings. In this case, Toyota has denied their employees’ human rights. Back in Japan, Toast’s manufacturing plants are one of the worst places to work in the world. The company’s operations are being called as human trafficking and slavery.
A human right group called The National Labor Committee had written a 65-pages report entitled “The Toyota You Don’t Know’ alleged that Toyota is linked to human trafficking. It states that this foreign workers’ trafficking is mainly from China and Vietnam. These workers’ passport are taken and forced to work overtime every day and their wages are below legal minimum wages (Rosen, 2002). There are also thousands of “over worked to death” claims each year. There was a case of Kinetic Chino who died due to overworked.
He was just 30 years old, forced to work 13 to 14 hours a day, while having 106 and 155 hours of overtime in 30 days which caused on his death. Chino’s wife wanted to get pension for their children but Toyota claimed that he had only worked 45 hours of overtime; the rest was a voluntary and unpaid work by him. She then fought back in court and succeeded. The court held that Mr. Chino was worked to death. Not only that, if there is an injury occurred to employees, they will fired and will not receive any compensation from Toyota.
There are already 1,800 cases in United State where Kentucky plants employees have been injured, lay off and were not given any compensation. Toyota has been denying their basic human and employees’ rights. This shows how unethical Toyota Company is. Toast’s union busting has dominated and destroyed a lot Of small countries and states around the world. They reduce the standards of living among the citizens. Toyota builds their manufacturing plants in the poorest states in order to get that advantage of the lowest wages in the country. There are a lot of temporary workers are kept as one for over 4 years.
Their strategy is to control and lower the average wages. They will hire the poorest workers in the state to manufacture the cheapest materials whilst maximize its profits. Ethical Theory 3 – Virtue Ethics An ethics of virtue is based on the person’s characteristics. It looks at the moral character Of the person when carrying Out an action. This theory includes courage and honesty which Toyota has failed. Toyota did not have the courage to try to fix the problem or investigate it. They even brushed off the complaints saying that customers just want money from them.
Besides, they weren’t being honest about the whole situation of the safety investigation of the vehicles. According to Bill Kong, Toast’s media representative said that their engineers had look into the problem but they did not find anything wrong with it, while in reality they never investigate the problem at all (Thomas, 2007). Toyota had violated the virtue ethics for wowing neither courage nor honesty in doing business. Ethical Theory 4-? Ethics of care Ethics of care emphasizes on caring for those around us. Toyota has been practicing this ethic in its business.
For example, ‘Piñata Tu Clues” which means Paint Your School program. This program was first launched in 2005 by Toyota De Venezuela in order to improve the study atmosphere. Later on, they realized that the actual need of the schools hence they have to go beyond on what they were doing. They promised to build a new school in Laguna Chick. However, the local community doubted the promise as it was dad by a third party. Nevertheless, Toyota De Venezuela was serious about it and kept their promise. On 9th December 2008, the opening ceremony of the school was made.
In this case, it shows that Toyota has been practicing ethics of care which lead to build its reputation in the view of the public. Conclusion As conclusion for this report, although Toyota Company is a well-known automaker brand in the world but they also facing their hard time with the ethical dilemmas aspects such as above. Toyota aware the dilemmas importance where they have overcome their dilemmas facing in order to improve their business and gives consumer a trustworthy towards their company brand by using the ethical theories such as, Utilitarianism theory and Virtue theory.
