Thursday 14 June 2018

Ethical Dilemma #7: Should companies give to charity?

WEEK 7: BANKS AND CHARITIES 


Canadian banks are Canada's largest corporate taxpayers and largest corporate donors. According to the Canadian Bankers Association, in 2007, seven of Canada's Schedule 1 banks donated $197 million to charities in Canada and around the world. These contributions support education, youth, and health care. The banks also support amateur athletes, the arts and community events. For example, the Bank of Montreal is the principal sponsor of Skate Canada and is a founding sponsor of the Kids Help Phone.



Because banks are the largest taxpayers in Canada, their profits help build roads, schools, hospitals and many other governmental activities. In addition, banks are also committed to helping the environment.





Resources
www.cba.ca/banks-rally-to-support-red-cross-new-brunswick-flood-relief





Do you think that companies should give money to charities? Why or Why Not?


Do you think that companies should be obliged to be front-runners in helping the environment? Why or Why Not?


Ethical Dilemma #6 - Corporate Reputation

ETHICAL DILEMMA: REPUTATION 

Read this article:



The 2008 Corporate Reputation Study, completed by Leger Marketing in association with Marketing magazine, surveyed 1500 Canadians and found the following companies have the best corporate reputations:


1. Staples

2. Sony

3. Tim Horton's

4. Canadian Tire

5. Panasonic

6. Shopper's Drug Mart

7. Subway

8. Kraft

9. Honda

10. Toyota


Whereas, two years previously, in 2006 Canadians voted the following as the companies with the 10 best reputations:

1. Canadian Tire

2. Tim Horton's

3. Sony

4. Sears

5. Kraft

6. Nestle

7. Panasonic

8. Subway

9. McCain Foods

10. Home Depot




What do you think gives a company a good reputation? What are the criteria for a good business? What businesses do you think have a good reputation (name three not on this list)? What businesses do you think have a poor reputation (name three)?

Ethical Dilemma #5: Peninsula Farms and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency





Peninsula Farms was a small business in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, that began with one cow.  The Joneses owned the cow and kept her around to maintain their lawn.  The cow produced milk, of course, but the Joneses didn't know how to milk her.  So they learned proper milking techniques.  The cow was producing more milk than they could use, and the surplus was going to waste.  The Joneses researched the local market to find out what kind of milk product they would sell.  They discovered that whole-milk yogurt was in demand.  They then found out how to make yogurt in large batches.  They also studied the health and safety regulations to make sure they were meeting government standards.  The Joneses were so successful that they exceeded the government criteria.  The Joneses then bought more cows -- enough to make Peninsula Farms a profitable business.

Government inspectors had always given Peninsula Farms a high rating on their regular inspections.  It was a surprise to the Joneses, then, when six federal inspectors from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) visited the farm and, with just a cursory examination of the plant and its procedures, impounded more than $50 000 worth of yogurt.  This halted the production and left Peninsular Farms customers without product they wanted to buy.  The Joneses faced a total loss of more than $100 000 as they were now behind $50 000 worth of new production in addition to the yogurt that had been impounded.  (Their cooler was full of the impounded yogurt and there was nowhere to put any new yogurt.)  They were losing sales and customers as well.  The space that Peninsula Farms' product took on grocery shelves was soon filled with competing brands.  Faced with such a loss, Peninsula Farms was forced out of business.  It was discovered after the fact that their plant was above standard and their yogurt tested totally clean, with no trace of offending bacteria.

No one wants to be poisoned by the foods we eat.  The Canadian Inspection Agency does a wonderful job of protecting us from dirty factories, unsafe packaging, and dangerous storage practices.  As a result, we eat foods that do not, as a rule, make us sick.  Canadians are grateful that the CIFA is diligent in their efforts on our behalf.  However, in this case, do you believe the Canadian Food Inspection Agency was too diligent in this case?
Should there be special rules for small ventures that cannot afford such an interruption in their businesses?
If you were the Joneses, would you start over?  Explain your decision.



****Please read the article below before answering this post****



Idealism and yogurt

    New York professor of Spanish literature and management consultant find niche market making yogurt in rural Nova Scotia

Published: The Globe and Mail, August 14, 1989, Report on Business
By Deborah Jones

    Ask Sonia Jones what makes an entrepreneur tick, and she will wax poetic about the main character in Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's seventeenth-century masterpiece Don Quixote de la Mancha. ''I love his willingness to go forth and tackle every problem,'' said the practical-looking Ms Jones, chairman and chief executive of Peninsula Farms Ltd. of Lunenburg, N.S., a maker of all-natural yogurt, frozen yogurt and ice cream.

    Don Quixote, an adventurous country gentleman addled with idealism, ''wanted his life to be useful to others: orphans, widows in need, damsels,'' she enthused.

    What have such altruistic notions to do with running a business such as Peninsula Farms , which employs 42 and sells $2.7-million worth of dairy products in the three Maritime provinces each year?

    ''The love of living and learning and helping and doing is part of the entrepreneurial spirit,'' Ms Jones said.

    She and her husband, Gordon Jones, were well-to-do New Yorkers when they moved to Nova Scotia in 1972 in search of an academic job for her and uncrowded sailing room for him. Ms Jones, a Harvard-trained professor of Spanish literature, found a job at Dalhousie University. The pair eventually settled with their two small daughters on a farm in pastoral Lunenburg on Nova Scotia's south shore.

    Starting a new business was the furthest thing from their minds. Ms Jones was happily teaching students about her first love and specialty, Cervantes. Mr. Jones had left the corporate world far behind when he retired as a management consultant.

    But then Daisy came along, and Peninsula Farms - the tale of which Ms Jones has set out in her book It All Began With Daisy - inadvertently began.

    Daisy was a Jersey cow the family acquired to have a supply of milk. However, she produced far too much milk for them to use. Ms Jones began making yogurt from the excess and then, on the suggestion of a friend, started selling some to health food stores in Halifax.

    One day David Sobey, then president of Sobeys Stores Ltd., which operates a chain of supermarkets in the Atlantic region, came calling. He told Ms Jones that if she cared to produce her yogurt more commercially he would be willing to stock it. The couple considered the offer, and decided to take him up on it - on condition he allow them to expand lowly.

    Today, the Jones's products are sold throughout the region. Peninsula Farms yogurt holds a 25 per cent share of the Maritime yogurt market, Ms Jones said, and this year the company introduced all-natural ice cream.

    She has also written a yogurt cookbook, which went on sale this year, and is working on a proposal by a Nova Scotia film production company to turn her book about Daisy into a movie.

    Peninsula Farms has not been entirely a story of adventurous romance, the likes of which Cervantes would have relished. Although they now draw a healthy salary, the Jones's did not pay themselves for eight years and, at times, their personal possessions were used as collateral for business loans.

    Indeed, the company would not have endured ''if there hadn't been this spirit of adventure and this desire to live life in a vital way, and if we both hadn't enjoyed this whimsical adventure,'' Ms Jones said.

    She relishes the idea of being an entrepreneur and teaches a course in entrepreneurism at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S., although she is not entirely convinced that an entrepreneurial spirit can be taught.

    ''Unless you have a sense of humor and a touch of whimsy and an incredible willingness to work yourself very hard, and you have a certain willingness to take risks, you're not likely, even if you want to be an entrepreneur, to pursue it to the end.'' Ironically, Ms Jones appreciates Nova Scotia precisely because it seems to have fewer born entrepreneurs than her native United States. ''I find myself really loving Nova Scotia because it isn't grubby-grabby. . . . You need a middle ground between California crass materialism or pure drudgery,'' she said.

    And what of Daisy, with whom it all began and whose likeness is part of the Peninsula Farm logo? The cow is probably in yogurt heaven now.

    In 1981, the Jones's sold their herd and began purchasing raw milk from Farmers co-operative dairy. Daisy, who would be about 18 years old now, was auctioned off as just one of many lot numbers.

    ''We lost track of Daisy. We didn't know she was going to be famous when we sold her,'' Ms Jones said ruefully.


Copyright Deborah Jones 1989

Ethical Dilemma #4: To What Extent Should Employees Be Monitored While At Work?




The unblinking eye of the boss sees more than you realize

Last Updated: Thursday, March 12, 2009 | 11:07 AM ET 
By Ian Harvey, CBC News 

Some companies are purchasing software to track the time employees spend on sites such as eBay, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. (iStock) 
Warning: reading this story at work could be hazardous to your career.
Your boss could be watching your keystrokes, logging websites you visit and keeping track of how long you spend there, and looking for keywords in your emails. As if that weren't scary enough, some employers are going even further by demanding prospective employees submit to deep background checks as a condition of employment.
Technology is making it much easier for employers to quickly find out things about the people who work for them —or want to work for them.
And it's all perfectly legal.
'I think one day everyone will be fingerprinted by their employer.'—Paul Guindon, Canadian Corps of Commissionaires
Some employers, for example, are going far beyond a simple check of employment references and are drilling deep into a prospective employee's background. They're checking for a criminal record against the national police database by requiring a fingerprint.
It's a trend that Paul Guindon, chairman of national business management committee at the Canadian Corps of Commissionaires, sees growing exponentially. Besides providing security guards, the Commissionaires' services include doing police clearances and digital fingerprint checks of staff for companies.
"I think one day everyone will be fingerprinted by their employer," he says, "especially those in sensitive positions like teachers."
To capitalize on the trend, his organization purchased 40 digital fingerprint machines with training and software at a cost of $1.5 million. At some 20,000 checks a year and growing, Guindon expects the investment will pay for itself in three years.
"We already do about 25,000 traditional ink-and-roll fingerprints, but there's a 200,000 backlog at the RCMP because it's manual," he says. "Digital is instant."
He says many private and public employers demand criminal record checks, including the Department of National Defence and defence contractors, Public Works Canada and many educational and health institutions.
Because of the privacy issues involved, those being checked must consent to the $75 process. The encrypted fingerprint data is sent directly to the RCMP, and the results returned to the employer noting a summary of any conviction including the offence, location and date if there is a match on the database.
"We have no idea of the result, and the data is wiped off our computers when it is sent," says Guindon, noting the Commissionaires also offer a pardon service for those with criminal records who qualify to have them expunged.
Potential employees, of course, can refuse the check and take a pass on the potential job. They usually get into difficulties if they haven't disclosed a criminal record when asked directly about it during their application process.
Companies have some responsibilities to protect privacy, though. They must store the information securely and restrict access to it if they hire the prospect, or destroy it securely if the applicant is not hired.
Desktop surveillance
Technology is also offering employers ways to quietly keep tabs on what their staffers are doing on company time.
That time is money, says SpectorSoft Corp.'s marketing director Doug Taylor, and the Florida-based company sells software packages to monitor the online activities of a company's employees. Underlining how much time at work some spend on personal pursuits, Taylor points to a report from consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas that suggests during the National Football League regular season some 37 million people spend an average of 50 minutes a week at work managing their fantasy teams.
Add in eBay, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, stupid email jokes and the lists of top web destinations, and number of lost hours grows exponentially.
During the National Football League regular season some 37 million people spend an average of 50 minutes a week at work managing their fantasy teams.
Looking to claw back that company time, IMV Projects, a Calgary project management firm, installed SpectorSoft's 360 software three years ago on the PCs of the 650 people it employed at the time.
IT manager Ross Benov conservatively figures the firm recouped 10 hours per year per employee at $30 to $40 an hour, equaling between $195,000 and $260,000 in salaried work time. Setting a more liberal estimate of time wasting at 40 hours a year per employee, it adds up to more than $1 million, he says.
"We use it in different ways —to run a report on an employee if their supervisor feels they're spending too much time online, to see what websites they're going to," says Benov.
He notes that employees are told about the software and the company's internet guidelines. "We've had no problems since and I haven't heard any complaints. We allow full internet access at lunchtime because we want to keep people happy and maintain a balance."
SpectorSoft started making its surveillance software for the consumer market about a decade ago, allowing parents to control what their kids did online and monitor which sites they went to. It has since expanded to the corporate world and is finding an eager audience. Today it is one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S., with sales to more than 50,000 companies and 400,000 consumers.
"You have to own the computer and the network," says Taylor noting some European jurisdictions do prohibit some types of monitoring. "And you should tell your employees up front that they may be monitored."
He says there are two ways to use the system. The first is to monitor all employees for prohibited online behaviour. The second is to only watch employees who are not meeting performance standards. The software is not intended to crack down on any personal use of the web or email, Taylor says, but to single out the worst abusers.
"The system knows how long you had an eBay window open and how long you were active in that window," he says. "So it's not going to report that you were on eBay for seven hours [if the window was open that long], just that the window was open and that your mouse was active inside that window for 20 minutes."
Legal considerations
But do the measures companies are taking to check and monitor employees equal an invasion of privacy?
A recent Ontario Securities Commission case, for example, uncovered a scheme by an IT worker who had default access to all company emails and who used his inside knowledge of merger talks to profit on the stock market before the talks were made public.
Companies are within their rights to ask prospective employees to submit to a background check, including fingerprinting, says the federal privacy commissioner's office, though there are rules around how that information is stored and who has access to it.
When it comes to on-the-job surveillance, there's no easy answer, says lawyer Michael P. Fitzgibbon, a labour and employment law specialist at Borden Ladner Gervais in Toronto.
"The lines are not clearly drawn, so it's a question of degree," says Fitzgibbon.
He notes that there are legal requirements around compliance and dissemination of information for publicly traded companies that may make surveillance necessary. A recent Ontario Securities Commission case, for example, uncovered a scheme by an IT worker who had default access to all company emails and who used his inside knowledge of merger talks to profit on the stock market before the talks were made public.
Fitzgibbon adds that there are areas where the employer has an interest in ensuring confidential data is not distributed by employees, and that sexual harassment and human rights rules aren't violated by material a worker puts on their screen or uses a company email system to distribute to others.
Still, says Fitzgibbon, monitoring all employees by default can also create a climate of distrust. That can have an unintended, negative impact on the productivity or retention of valued staff.
The federal privacy commissioner's office says surveillance of employee activities is a case-by-case matter. It says that as long as there are legitimate reasons for capturing the data and it's stored securely under privacy legislation rules, there's no hard and fast policy on the practice.
Not every company is comfortable with such stringent measures.
"We do get prospective clients who investigate our software and then decide it's just not for them," says SpectorSoft's Taylor.
The key is consent, Fitzgibbon says. Companies should tell employees if they are being monitored and be clear about what the guidelines are for personal internet use.
Still, to be on the safe side, you might want to stop reading this story and get back to work.



Managers now have the technical means to monitor employees. Managers can listen to their staff's telephone calls, read their email, and search their internet activity. Many managers believe they should monitor employees because they need to measure productivity, gather information for performance reviews, and prevent legal problems for the company. They also feel justified in keeping track of their employees' actions because technology is owned by the company. The majority of employers using electronic-monitoring technology notify the employees that they will be monitored.

1. What do you think of this management practice? 


2. Is it ethical, moral and legal?

Ethical Dilemma #3: The Canadian Tar Sands and Their Impact on Wildlife





Canada's Tar Sands


In 2005, Canada was second only to Saudi Arabia in crude oil reserves, but almost 97% of Canada's reserve is in tar sands. The Athabasca Oil Sands development in northern Alberta currently produces 1.98 million barrels per day and is forecasted to reach 3.7 million barrels per day by 2020". (http://www.energy.alberta.ca/oilsands/791.asp) But removing that oil from the tar sands requires a lot of energy. Currently the tar sands project burns natural gas to heat the steam that removes the oil. The tar sands project is the largest single producer of greenhouse gases in North America.


What are some of the harmful effects of the tar sands, and the greenhouse gases they produce?

What are some positives to Canadian tar sands? (check out the link below for some insightful statistics)


Should businesses and consumers be concerned about the effects?


Useful Links:

https://www.energy.alberta.ca/OS/AOS/Pages/FAS.aspx

http://www.energy.gov.ab.ca/OS/Pages/default.aspx


Ethical Dilemma #2: Chicken Farms: How Ethical Are They?






The Ethical Dilemma Around Chicken Farms


Chicken is a very popular meat, but many feel the chicken production industry can be cruel to the birds. Broiler chickens are the most popular chicken on the market and fast-food menus. These chickens are raised in large, windowless buildings in flocks between 20 000 and 50 000 birds. Feeding, watering, temperature and ventilation are all automatically controlled. Most broiler chicken are slaughtered after just six or seven weeks (a chicken's natural lifespan is around seven years). The farm carefully controls the artificial lighting within the broiler sheds. When the chickens first arrive, the lighting is bright so the chicks can find the food and water. This encourages eating and rapid growth. After a time, the lighting is dimmed in order to prevent fighting between the chickens. The birds have little space in which to move. The space diminishes even further as the chickens grow.

Free-range chickens are raised in open pastures where they forage during the day for natural foods. They return to their nesting sheds at night. As a result of their daily exercise, the chickens develop good muscle tone and are much more meaty than the farmed chickens (it is the muscle tissue of the chicken that we eat). The chickens are treated better, and the meat is tastier, but these birds are more expensive for the consumer. If we impose free-range standards on all chicken production, the price of chicken will skyrocket. 

Another issue to consider is the environmental impact of these chicken farms. 

How important is it to you how chickens are raised?


Do you care more about the availability of inexpensive chicken from the supermarket or your favourite fast-food restaurant?


What is your standard for ethical treatment of chickens?


 


Some resources:

http://www.peta.org/


http://www.upc-online.org/fouling.html


http://sustainablepoultry.ncat.org/


http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/12/epa-plays-chicken-regulations-poultry-farm-emissions--steel-mills-oil-refineries.php

Ethical Dilemma #1: Nicotine in Beverages




Smoking and nicotine are bad for your health -- that's a fact. So why would an American company create a lemon-flavoured drink laced with nicotine? This 8 oz soda contains the same amount of nicotine as two cigarettes. The company is marketing this drink to smokers who find themselves in places where smoking is prohibited. But nicotine is a highly addictive drug. Those who oppose this product claim that it is the equivalent to putting a drug in a soda can. Meanwhile, supporters say that the lack of second-hand smoke from these drinks will make nicotine use safer for others. Moreover, because the drink is legally classified as a dietary substance rather than as a drug or cigarette, it is not currently subject to the rules that regulate the sale of drugs and cigarettes. The introduction of this product appears to be serving consumer want.

Read the following articles to further your knowledge:





So... what do you think?

What are the ethical questions that this product raises? Should it be legal to sell this drink in a corner store? Why, or Why not? Explain your position using information you have learned from the course so far as well as your own person opinions.