Ethical Issues and Child Labour

Running head: ETHICAL ISSUES AND CHILD LABOUR
Ethical Issues and Child Labour
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1
ETHICAL ISSUES AND CHILD LABOUR
Introduction:
Managers are often faced with ethical dilemmas while making significant decisions
regarding sourcing packaged products from overseas in order to lower the acquisition costs. The
paper opens presents an ethical dilemma before a production manager who went to visit a newly
acquired cheap Thailand based manufacturing process. The production manager was caught
between the ethical dilemma of choosing profit motive and decision of not source chocolate
cubes from the Thai manufacturer due to use of child labour I can point out that the manager can
consider using two normative theories of ethics and four descriptive theories of ethics to deal
with the ethical dilemma.
Analysis:
Description:
The production manager in the case study had visited a manufacturing facility in
Thailand to source pre-packed chocolate stuffed in plastic toys. The Thai manufacturing process
had no factory and in fact produced chocolate cubes coated in plastic using child labour.
However, it produced plastic toys with embedded chocolate at lower rates than the then present
Portuguese supplier which meant the chocolate retailing company would be able to lower its cost
of production by sourcing finished products from the former. The manager had to choose
between the options of sourcing the products from the Thai manufacturer at lower price using
child labour or continue sourcing these products from the existing Portuguese supplier, which
apparently produced chocolate cubes embedded in plastic toys without child labour but charged
higher rates.