Considering the working conditions of the garment employees in Bangladesh, the employees were forced to work without proper wages, environments and buildings. Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh collapsed in 2013. There were employees in the building, trying to complete their orders as instructed by their managers. Being a manager, having a factory in Bangladesh, it poses an ethical dilemma in signing the safety accord of the employees. The safety accord may be a contract that will handle the welfare of the employees. According to Waddle, Jones and George (2012), there are three models of decision making approaches that will ascertain whether a decision is ethical or not. The three models are utilitarian, justice and moral rights decision making model. With having respective effective ways to determine if the decision is ethical or not, this essay will argue that the manager needs to sign up for the safety accord based on the moral rights model.
The utilitarian model suggests that the values of any actions are based on its consequences (Conway and Gawronski 2013, 216). This would mean causing harm to others is appropriate only when it is developing the welfare of a greater mass. In the view of the position that the manager is in, this model is supposed to direct the manager to continue liaising with the company. Having said that, the decision that he made is to benefit a large group of people. This will advantage the stakeholders who are the consumers, the shareholders and the suppliers of the company. The consumers will be able to consume the goods at the lowest prices whereas the shareholders will have the opportunity to sell the company stocks. The supplier too, will be able to continue to trade with the company to earn some profits. However, there are limitations to this utilitarian model. To comply with the company reputation, there are a lot of tasks to be done back in the factory, in Bangladesh. The employees are given back to back tasks. The employees were pushed to work beyond their limits or else they will receive intolerable treatments from the supervisors. The ethical decision for this model is the idea of utility (Ferrell and Gresham 1985), and the measurement of the value of the outcome. Thus, it does not safeguard the employee rights for the staff in Bangladesh. It is inappropriate to work towards an outcome with a negative process, just to benefit the larger mass. Hence, it is considered as an unethical decision by the society as it can be seen as harming the minority while bringing in benefits for the greater mass (Koenigs et al 2007).
The justice model is a concept on being fair and equal (Yoon 2011, 2402) which guides the manager towards an outcome whereby the recipients of the decision receive fair distribution of harm and benefits (Sama and Shaof 2002, 95). With that, any incoming harm that will affect the stakeholders of the company will be distributed equally. The main affected stakeholders for this model will be the employees of the Rana Plaza in the Bangladesh factory. They are supposed to have better salaries, working conditions and environment. Even when there are cracks appearing in the factory building, the employees were forced to work and complete their tasks. Other stakeholders such as the consumers are able to purchase the products of the company, despite the bad working conditions for the employees in Bangladesh. The action was carried out because the higher management in the factory will ensure that their employees complete their respective tasks, so that the management can send out the orders to the company. By forcing them to complete their respective task and ignoring the bad building conditions, it can be seen that the managers is self-centred, only wanting to complete the orders in order to benefit the consumers. The manager should be guilty instead of being satisfied when the employees managed to complete the orders. In short, the managers should be guiltier for harming the