Ethics, ethics, ethics!

Ethics! All throughout uni, this word has been drilled into our heads! So much time spent writing reports, essays and exams focusing on the topic! You would think that we all get it by now! Because of this reason, I've always known the importance of ethics in the workplace but only now am I fully realising the extent of it's importance and why we spend so much time on it. Since I started doing my work experience, I wish that I could just stick to the hypothetical ethical issues that we are given in class because now I am actually working with real-life ethical issues and problems. However, I am lucky in that I am doing my work experience at a not-for-profit organisation who value ethical procedures highly and are willing to take the consequences for doing their practices ethically.

I realise now that ethics isn't simply black or white, that there is a lot of grey area that can't be answered with a yes or no. I'm currently doing work experience at The Grey Man who work to eradicate child trafficking in South-East Asia where the problem is quite prominent. I am helping them to develop a new merchandise range to sell to stakeholders in order to get some funding for what they do. But because they are a not-for-profit organisation, they do not have a lot of money to spend on the merchandise. Furthermore, they have to keep the costs of the merchandise down so that they can sell it for a reasonable price that stakeholders are willing to pay but high enough to make some profit on it. The problem with this is that the merchandise that they can get for a good price, are mostly manufactured in Asia, where child exploitation may be a problem. This means that they have to choose between cheap merchandise with the risk of it being manufactured in countries where children may be exploited for work or more expensive merchandise produced onshore with the risk of not being able to sell the items because the price is too high. What do you think you would do when faced with this dilemma?

There is still a lot of discussion about the issue but The Grey Man are working to intensively research the company before choosing to buy merchandise off them. I think that The Grey Man are a very ethical organisation, who I can learn a lot from and whichever they choose to do, it will be in the best interest to the organisation and everyone else.

Amy (13948287)

Bentley Campus