Corporate Ethics in The Corporation

While I enjoyed watching The Corporation, I agree with some of the other posts that it presented a fairly one-sided picture of the corporate world. Personally, what I have witnessed in the past few years in social media, the news and in chatting with friends has been a general indictment of large corporations. The Corporation is an older movie so maybe these issues have come more to the fore in recent years, or maybe left-leaning ideologies are just rampant in the little bubble that is Vancouver, but I didn’t feel that the movie shocked me or introduced any particularly exciting ideas.

The most interesting part of the movie to me was the ethical qualms it explored, e.g. the sweatshop dilemma. Most would say that a CEO of a corporation, who has the option of exporting jobs to say Bangladesh and paying the workers abysmal wages, is ethically obliged not to do so. But does this change when the CEO knows that h/she will offer $2/hour in wages while his competitor, next in line to offer work to the locals, will pay $1/hour? Are the ethics of a given decision, binary such that it either is or is not ethical? Or is it a matter of alternatives?

One response to “Corporate Ethics in The Corporation”

  1. nicola

    Hi Cindy,

    In my opinion, I don’t think that the ethics of a given decision are binary! I think that there are so many factors you have to consider when judging a companies decision, and there may be some decisions that don’t quite “fit” into strictly an ethical or non-ethical characterization.

    In reference to the example you had provided, in deciding whether that CEO is being ethical by paying $2/hour while his competitor is paying $1/hour, I think you would need to look to the cost of living in Bangladesh and decide whether this price is a “livable wage” before considering if this is ethical. Even if this was considered to be a “livable wage”, if the CEO’s company had the ability to pay workers a higher wage to provide workers with a better lifestyle, would him paying this minimal $2/hour wage still be considered ethical? I think this exemplifies that it is difficult to decide whether decisions are ethical on strictly binary terms.

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