AMAZON AND ETHICS
Executive Summary
The importance of business ethics goes far beyond staff morale and profitability, or the quality of a partnership with a management team. As for other corporate policies, the lawful activity of a firm is closely related to efficiency in both the short and the long term. When trying to decide whether a business is a worthwhile investment, the validity of a company in the local sector, other firms, and prospective buyers is essential. When a corporation is viewed as not behaving responsibly, buyers are less likely to buy a product or otherwise support its operations. The paper analyses the ethical behavior adopted by the Amazon Company and the perspectives of different players on whether ethics should be the main priority of an organization or not.
Keywords: Business Ethics Governance Structure Construction Industry Virtue Ethic Profit Maximization, Amazon Company
Table of Contents
The Ethical Issues with Amazon. 5
Ethical Issues at an Organizational Level 7
The CEO of Amazon’s Perspective on the Ethics of an Organization. 7
Worker’s Perspective on the Ethics of an Organization. 8
Politicians’ Perspective on the Ethics of an Organization. 8
The Consumer’s Perspective on Ethics of an Organization. 9
Offering Ethics Training Programs. 10
Institutions as Moral Agents. 10
Introduction
The ethics and morals guiding a business person, managerial staff, and performance are essential elements of Business and Organizational Ethics. Virtues are necessary for an institution to start and maintain Business Ethics. They are particular values that are related to agents but not to institutions’ moral existence. Institutions are a set of institutional restrictions on their prescriptive-ness. Business Ethics entails virtue ethics and organization ethics and is described by standards and practices written and unwritten, which regulate decisions and behavior within businesses. Business ethics, also recognized as corporate ethics, is a category of practical ethics or professional standards that addresses the legal and moral principles and concerns arising in a business context. It also includes the written and unwritten codes of ethics and values defined by an organization’s society, which regulate actions and decisions within that institution, for instance, Amazon Company (Hardy, 2017, pg. 276). Business ethics relates to all kinds of conduct on behalf of both people and the whole corporation. Ethics, lifestyle, and society tend to become so intertwined that it becomes difficult to distinguish them. Together, they reflect how people in the family, at the workplace, and in every sector of society respond to each other. Business ethics standards allow company managers to recognize right from wrong, and to want to do what is right. People are held morally culpable mainly for actions that they take or can have an effect on someone else. In this effect, ethics should be the main priority in organizations that tend to excel in their endeavors.
Ethics as a Priority
Ethics is an institutional obligation rather than a purely ethical or moral duty. Institutional executives in today’s highly dynamic environment have plenty of consideration. They have to keep informed of fast technical developments, goods and services from rivals, the impact of globalization, and opportunities and challenges within their sector, among other concerns. Leaders also need to keep a close eye on their own institution’s mission, vision, principles, community, policy, and priorities. In the midst of all of this uncertainty, it is not easy to locate space on the managerial plate for the next major priority (Maguire, 2019, pg. 154). However, institutions will have to figure out how to make ethics a priority if they are to prosper in the 21st Century. Ethical values must be identified as the most critical success drivers in modern organizations within the elite. Ethics does not only impact decision-making as a corporate goal but also, and inevitably, systemic culture.
There has to be a cycle of convergence that combines business principles with mission, vision, beliefs, strategy, and objectives to accomplish this dream. Ethical values are fundamentally social. Thus, this adjustment process will be preoccupied with interactions and establishing interpersonal aspirations. The primary aim of an ethical culture is the common cause of everyone. Internal partnerships between members and supporters, as well as external ties with clients, customers, suppliers, and society, are all highly valued. As a result, people are treated continuously well, and the ethical culture emerges (Maguire, 2019, pg. 154). The urgent need for an ethical culture by society is the potential for any company to shape popular culture by institutionalizing moral values. As it occurs, communities will gain from the excellent experience workers take back to their family, colleagues, and coworkers from their workplace.
The Ethical Issues with Amazon
Taxes Avoidance
Amazon thrives on simplicity and affordable costs, ensuring that it will potentially serve as a useful commodity for many members of society due to a loss of employment or out-of-work hours, all of which represent broader structural problems that need to be tackled on their own. Besides debating the motives of a company that works well in a hyper-consumer and inefficient world, when one starts digging at it properly, it appears like practically everybody employed at Amazon has a terrible experience. Amazon has acted unethically by avoiding taxes in various regions they operate from (Micelotta, 2017, pg. 1902). Taxes are significant as they reallocate funds so that all people can get the resources they need (such as education and healthcare). Such taxes often tackle problems such as hunger and income inequality by ensuring that the neediest are in a position to fulfill their needs for free.
If high earners, or corporate business, don’t pay their taxes, that ensures that everybody there’s nothing to go around, so it’s the poor that wind up getting hurt. Regrettably, not paying taxes is also what companies love to do. Amazon is a serial tax avoider, and it was developed to utilize the gap of not having to collect sales taxes when selling products online, which was only a physical retail prerequisite at the time. While sales tax is currently collected in every state that has one in the United States, estimates indicate that if Amazon had paid taxes from the outset, it would have paid a minimum of $20.4 billion in sales taxes from its creation to 2015 (Dahlmann, 2017, pg. 290). Even rarely pays any federal taxes in the U.S. Amazon, mostly by ignoring booking any sales for years, then pouring it back into the company, and ambitious tax preparation.
Warehouse Abuses
Despite being a big company, with a CEO who is essentially the world’s richest man, Amazon also currently ranked high on the list of workers, with large numbers of warehouse workers registered in food stamps. A November 2016 study by the Institute for Community Self Reliance, and lobbying organization for economic sustainability, evaluated more than 1,300 Glassdoor job reports and discovered that jobs at Amazon’s distribution centers pay around 9 percent less than the market average. The Company pays 15 percent less than neighboring companies. An analysis conducted by The Economist in January 2018 using different approaches showed close findings. While in 2018, Amazon revealed it would eventually increase salaries for warehouse staff, there are still a lot of problems for people who take these positions (de Bakker, 2019, pg. 23). Many reports can be found of workers forced to achieve exceedingly high expectations, exposed to stringent breaks and a stressful workplace atmosphere, remotely tracked, and concerned that inability to reach targets would result in imminent job losses.
People talk about peeing in containers out of worry of being penalized or suspended for ‘wasting time ‘going to the washroom, to the point where workers intentionally make the decision not to drink water, so they do not have to attend to short call while working. One worker became ill while pregnant and got a warning, one was admitted to hospital after an asthma attack at work and received a strike for not turning up the next day, and another turned up for work with a gastrointestinal bug, had to go home after two hours and earned a strike despite receiving a sick note from their doctor (Micelotta, 2017, pg. 1907). One woman suffered a traumatic miscarriage while working, which she claimed to have been ‘partly due to increased pressure to meet targets. There are also reports of rising stress, anxiety, and suicidal feelings of workers of British factories, including abuse and intimidation.
Ethical Issues at an Organizational Level
The CEO of Amazon’s Perspective on the Ethics of an Organization
The CEO of Amazon does not believe that ethics should be the main priority of an organization. H believes that organizations are based on profit maximization, and they are entitled to formulating different strategies to achieve their objectives and goals. The CEO of Amazon also believes that the governing board is supposed to set the tone for all the enterprise’s day-to-day activities. Different organizations and entities have different approaches that make them outsmart others; hence they are not obliged to follow what others deem ethical. For example, where leadership’s prevailing ideology is focused on ethical principles and behavior, members of an organization will direct and instruct workers in making bold choices that are not only beneficial to them as individual beings but also to the institution as a whole (Abbott, 2016, pg. 273). Building on an ethical behavioral foundation helps an institution to create long-lasting positive results, including the prospects to recruit and maintain highly skilled persons and develop and maintain a good reputation in society. Running a business from the top down in an ethical framework creates a closer relationship with people on the executive team, further fostering harmony within the organization.
Worker’s Perspective on the Ethics of an Organization
Workers from various organizations, including the Amazon Company, feel that ethics should be the main priority of an organization’s culture. Ethical values convey an institution’s beliefs to its workers and impact all functional areas within a business. Institutional ethics includes mechanisms about how a company reacts to an explicit or implicit stimulus ethically. Institutional principles express an institution’s ideals through its staff and other organizations, regardless of legislative and legislative laws. There are at least four aspects of an institution, which make ethical behavior beneficial (Visser, 2019, pg. 46). These include a formal code of ethics and practices, executive, management and staff ethics training, the accessibility of counsel on ethical circumstances (i.e., feedback lines or offices), and confidential compliance systems. Amazon management has failed to incorporate its workers’ views; hence workers feel that the company is unethical.
Politicians’ Perspective on the Ethics of an Organization
Politicians from different political spheres worldwide also feel that ethics should be the main priority of an organization’s culture. Politicians think that different types of institutions have responsibilities associated with their central tasks. Also, these politicians propose that government agencies need to have responsibilities that are unique to other jobs and other organizations’ responsibilities. Businesses today cannot evade moral obligation by concealing behind the motive of money seeking any less than people can (Abbott, 2016, pg. 273). The political establishment is responsible for both negative and positive responsibilities to its scorecard. In other words, corporate ethics cannot be built from an action concept, but from an analytical framework. Moral courage – moral fortitude is described by various researchers as the reliability of mind and spirit that allows anybody to face ethical problems and moral transgressions with firmness and confidence, without looking away or running away.
The Consumer’s Perspective on Ethics of an Organization
Consumers utilizing goods and services from various organizations, including the Amazon Company, also feel that ethics should be the main priority of an organization’s culture. Amazon also has manufacturing plants that have similar challenges as those of its stores. These factories have subjected workers and consumers to torture and suffering that is against humanity. Chinese factories often take on contract staff recruited from outside companies, known as dispatch employees. It is the rule in China that each workforce cannot allow more than 10 percent of its employees to be dispatch employees. Still, an audit by China Labor Watch found manufacturers producing Amazon products, such as kindles and smart homes, had staff illegally comprising more than 40 percent dispatch workers (Visser, 2019, pg. 47). Employ practices were found to be distinctly different between dispatch and regular staff, given the similar jobs. These actions have been against the principles of ethics, which has angered consumers.
Recommendations
Values-Based Culture
Ethics is neither a lifestyle choice nor an alternative in the 21st Century. Other than professionalism, expertise, intellect, and motivation, people need ethical values at all stages of an institution. This Century’s key challenge is to build and cultivate a value-based culture because of the significant time people spend at the workplace; much of the fostering needs to occur in the corporate world. Researchers identified four main factors in the creation of a culture based on values (Nielsen, 2018, pg. 53). These factors include shared fundamental beliefs, shared language, top-level devotion, and moral courage. Shared ethical principles – in every society globally, there are five fundamental beliefs contained in some way. They are integrity, loyalty, accountability, justice, and fairness. A culture of values should make those fundamental values the guiding power behind decision-making.
Offering Ethics Training Programs
People choose between right and wrong, depending on their code of conduct. They also get influenced by their managers’ ethical climate. In this way, entities should be held morally accountable for their effect, because corporations, like people, have the requisite potentially relevant agent property in the institution’s administrative positions. Institutional moral responsibility is not based on the presence of a set of social values that are agreed worldwide. The organization is obligated to assert a favorable profile and expose it to the community. Patterns create a continuing social debate around executive law (Dahlmann, 2017, pg. 281). In addition to having a framework for addressing ethical dilemmas, organizations also have structured instruction to build knowledge of problematic business practices and make acceptable responses to action, having acknowledged a general devotion to ethics. Many companies have some sort of educational system in ethics.
Institutions as Moral Agents
In western style discussion, moral requirements have usually been aimed at people and some of their cultural practices. Institutions that wish to change for the better have a moral responsibility to foster virtues and values that encourage their workers to do their best in their places of work. This perspective, pioneered by Greek thinkers like Aristotle, suggests that virtue is an essential criterion for all ethical behavior. In this case, what is implied by virtues is a willingness to commit any act as a result of a profound reflection of the importance of that act (Abbott, 2016, pg. 250). Any action is deliberately, rationally, and virtuously assessed to ensure it is legitimate, advantageous, and desirable. People or groups may make decisions made within an institution, but the company’s culture will impact anyone who makes them. The decision to act ethically is a philosophical one; the staff must choose what they consider to be the correct course of action.
Conclusion
Conclusively, many organizations, in their cultural fabric, are conscious of the vital need for ethics. There is still ample room to improve, though. Institutions ought to consider ethics as the moral obligation to which they are tied. No matter how cleverly done, it is not permissible to harm someone for personal benefit. Ethics will also find its right place only in institutions that make it a priority by establishing social standards that work for the benefit of all. Commitment at the top – ethics training is pointless without top-level executives who lead by example. When leaders regularly honor those who want to do what is right, it is more than everything else that tends to build an ethical society. Finally, the successful institutions, through the institutionalization of moral principles, will take the opportunity to influence the future by shaping society. By developing a community based on ideals within the corporation, beneficial attitudes that exist beyond the institution will strengthen culture.
References
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