The article that chose to review was titled, “Samsung Unethical Behavior More Diversified Than Its Smartened Lineup. ” The article focused on the unethical practices that are currently practiced by South Korea electronic giant Samsung. Samsung has been accused of refusing to release information in regards to worker health. There have been documented cases of leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma and independent researchers have reached UT to determine how prevalent these diseases are in Samsung facilities.
Samsung has repeatedly refused to let anyone come in and analyze this data and has also refused to release this information to the public as well. Think that Samsung is doing their entire country a disservice by acting in a very mysterious, defensive manner in regards to safety. Think that they should be open to discovering if there is a problem that’s causing cancer, and needs to look into finding a solution. In the year 2012, Samsung was investigated for sing illegal labor practices in their China manufacturers.
The allegations of this case were that the employees at this manufacturer were in some cases working 16-hour days with one day off per month, and they were also found hiring employees under the legal working age of 16 years of age. According to Friedman’s theory of individualism, the only obligation that the business has is to maximize profit for the owner and stockholders. Samsung manufacturer in China was trying to cut their costs and maximize their profit by hiring younger employees and overusing overtime.
This would be deemed ethical by individualists, but they used illegal methods to maximize profit. Utilitarianism is the minimization of happiness for all stakeholders. Utilitarian’s would see this case as unethical for many reasons. They didn’t maximize happiness for employees, who were overworked, underpaid, and under appreciated. Shareholders’ happiness also wasn’t maximized in this case because they found out that they were funding a company who not only used child labor at their manufacturer, but also their other illegal labor raciest they were found to have used.
Kantian bases its perspective on people’s ability to act rationally and their motivations for their actions. It is clear in this case that Samsung didn’t act rationally. Their motivations for their actions were to maximize their profits for personal gain, treating their employees as means to increase their profit by not following the formulation of humanity. Another problem that Samsung faces is the fact that they have been accused of bribery throughout the government in South Korea, as a way o keep regulations and costs down, and also eliminate competition.
These bribes are well known throughout the country, but people are afraid to do anything about them because they have fake control of the government through these same bribes. The government is unlikely to do anything that would hurt Samsung, since it would affect them financially and economically. Along with these bribes, Samsung has routinely been accused of stealing technology from Apple in order to make their high-tech products. Also, Samsung manufacturer expected its employees to work 1 6-hour days with sometimes just one day off per month.
These expectations are absurd and definitely not reasonable. Samsung didn’t possess courage nor stand for “right ideas and actions” in this case. Its actions were very poor and unethical, and certainly not courageous. To me, it seems like Samsung is setting itself up for an epic collapse in the future, since it has been shown that unethical businesses are more likely to fail than ethical businesses.
