Ethical Responsibilities at Woolworths: A Case Study

ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITIES

Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Ethical issues at Woolworths...........................................................................................................3
Recommendation.............................................................................................................................5
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................5
Reference List..................................................................................................................................6
2

Introduction
Corporate sustainability initiates in the presence of an organisational value system as well as a
principle-driven strategy to implement business. This strategy encompasses operation in manners
that can meet the basic responsibilities in contexts of labour, human rights, anti-corruption and
environment. The thesis statement of this essay is to evaluate sustainable principles and values of
ethics in a company in regards to a recent ethical dilemma. The essay evaluates a recent ethical
conflict in Woolworths in relation to breach in customer trust. This evaluation is done in
consideration of United Nations Principles. The researcher has also enumerated a set of
recommendations to establish integrity in the present issue.
Ethical issues at Woolworths
A recent investigation in Woolworths has shed light on the issue of widespread misconduct that
has been taking place in the pubs owned by Woolworths. The alleged incidents of the
aforementioned ethical issue have been further highlighted by the help of a whistleblower. This
whistleblower claims that the company often targets the venue that can prove to be vulnerable to
the gamblers (Toscano and O'Malley, 2018). This in turn can lead to maximisation of losses of
the clients. One of the anonymous employees who worked as a bar staff in one of the hotels
owned by Woolworths have provided details of staff meetings. As stated by Louche and
Lydenberg (2017), an organisation has to be collaborative in their approach to commit
fraudulence against their customers. This can be determined with the help of an incident that has
occurred in one of the pubs owned by Woolworths. It has been alleged that staffs have
encouraged a grieving lady, which lead her to gamble away her entire inheritance on one of the
poker machines in the pub.
The UN Global Compact enunciates a set of principles that must be followed by each business in
order to conduct their transactions in a sustainable and ethical manner. As asserted by Haw
(2017), failure to comply with these principles can give rise to liabilities and penalisation. This,
in turn, can reduce the scope of organisational progress for a company. Incorporation of UN
Principles into strategic procedures can help to establishing organisational integrity and ethics.
This can also motivate organisations to uphold their responsibilities to their stakeholders. The
principles are retrieved from Universal Human Rights Declaration, Rio Declaration on
3