Ethics in Global Business: Gap’s Evolving View of Ethics

Do you think that customers are impressed with the effort that Gap has made to respond to the need to have more worker-friendly suppliers? Explain your answer.

No doubt, Gap extensively made changes in their work environment to improve and correct the relationship with the suppliers. Therefore, I believe that these efforts are very impressive with regard to customer satisfaction.

When the company identified that its suppliers are not adhering to ethical work practices, it took immediate action and publicly reported that it has halted its business activities in 136 factories because they did not meet the labor standards. The bids from more than 100 others were also turned down. This shows the company’s concern for social corporate responsibility and its dedication to maintaining the quality of the workplace in all regards by maintaining and promoting ethical practices in its operations. Therefore, the Gap was able to earn a good reputation and positive image in the market due to its admirable social and ethical initiatives.

The Gap explored wage, health, and safety issues in its plants. What other issues might the company explore if it wants to assure the best working conditions possible?

When wage, health, and safety issues were identified by the company in its all major plants, it took corrective measures such as the implementation of an elaborated monitoring system that can perform more than 8,500 factory inspections and the preparation of a detailed social-responsibility report in response to eliminate any kind of unethical practices.

Although, the report specifically outlined all the issues related to wage, health, and safety, other ethical and social issues could also have been addressed to assure better working conditions (Hasle & Zwetsloot, 2011). These include child labor, freedom from discrimination, equal pay, harassment, education, opportunities for advancement within the company, and training (McDougall, 2019). Therefore, as these issues also play a critical role in the effectiveness of the workplace and employees’ satisfaction and motivation, the company can explore the relative measures of these issues as well, in addition to the wage, health, and safety issues.

In general, are a stockholder in the Gap, more interested in revenues and profits than good wages and working conditions?

In General, Stockholders in a company are focused more on making profits and growing their business in comparison to establishing ethical work practices and improving working conditions. However, the stockholders of the Gap deliberately preferred promoting good wages and working conditions according to the social corporate responsibility of the company. This is evident from the fact of pulling away 136 factories when they were found to have unethical working conditions, knowing that it can potentially affect the productivity and sales of the company.

Thus, the company has a clear stance to do the right thing on time which has earned a good reputation across the globe in 2006. Business Ethics magazine named Gap Inc. as one of the “100 Best Corporate Citizens” among major U.S. companies.

What concerns might a Gap employee working in one of its stores have because of its social stance?

Gap successfully cleared its image by publicly reporting the ethical issues in its working conditions and the corrective measures it took to eradicate them. However, this can be a potential concern for employees who have to deal with the public regarding the facts announced on the media. It is also possible that people are not duly informed about the efforts that the company has made to ensure good wages and work standards and therefore, some can develop negative perceptions of abuse that occurred previously in an overseas factory. In this regard, if the company imitates proper training and information session, it can effectively overcome this issue and manage them more efficiently in the future.

References

Hasle, P., & Zwetsloot, G. (2011). Editorial: Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems: Issues and challenges. Safety Science, 49(7), 961–963. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2011.02.013

McDougall, D. (2019, April 10). Child sweatshop shame threatens Gap’s ethical image. The Guardian; The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/oct/28/ethicalbusiness.india