There are certain economic imperatives that have to be followed to build and maintain any successful business. However, it can be argued that ethics are irrelevant, to the efficient running of a business. Therefore the inclusion of ethical practices, (whilst important to many of us), is not necessary and possibly outside the scope of the Lead programme. I would also submit that the subject is to a degree superfluous, because by the action of joining the Lead programme, cohort members demonstrate a desire to improve their management style and leadership qualities and this is in itself, to a degree, ethical behaviour. (Yes, even scouse, (Curse the locking wheelnut), Craig and Mark, (‘call me Sue’) the solicitor).
With regard to the wider world and perceptions of ethical trading; consider the ethics of paying a fair working wage to textile workers in say Vietnam or China. All right thinking people would surely agree that foreign companies setting up in these and similar micro-economies should behave ethically and not only pay a fair wage, but put back into the local economy at least what they take out, with due consideration for lasting legacies such as pollution management and infrastructure. Many British companies extol their own virtues in respect of these commitments, for EG: Marks & Spencer’s “Look behind the Label” campaign, emphasizing the importance of fair trade.
Now, consider the ethics of a British textile manufacturer setting up a fair trade type operation in say South America or Asia, to produce goods at lower costs than they can in the UK or even Europe and then closing down their long established factories in Britain. This is what one of Britain’s leading clothing brands, “Burberry”, did in 2007, with the loss of 300 jobs in South Wales. What were/are the ethical choices made by Burberry? Is it ethical to promote your company as treating workers ‘fairly’ in a ‘fair trade’ manufacturing site in a low cost economy, after having devastated another micro-economy back home?
Consider further the ethics of a wave of Victorian philanthropists who built factories, houses, churches, parks & hospitals, etc. For sure the appeal of a tied healthy workforce living close by the mills was a factor in their planning, but for many industrialists, the desire to rid the working classes of the deprivation in which many of them lived was the driving force. In their time, was this not “Fair trade?” And as a final point on this, if we can concur that this was fair trade, then as society and industry grow up side by side in a symbiotic relationship, with developing micro economies springing up around the nucleus and both benefiting from the others inputs; at what point is it ethical for the company to abandon the society it spawned and start again somewhere where costs are lower?
In closing, I would submit that the answers to all the questions raised above are subjective, complex and are influenced more by the economics of free-trade than fair-trade. Ethical trading is here; it has been here for a long, long time. It is in many of the businesses of our cohort. It is not a new fad; it has not just been discovered, it is not (just) about large manufacturers producing low cost goods in low wage/low cost countries and then being more generous than is the norm. Ethical fair trade is what much of British industry has been built on.
Discuss.
Steve W
———PRODUCED AS A WORD DOCUMENT, THEN CUT-N-PASTED INTO LINKEDIN. IT’S THE ONLY WAY TO DO IT!
