Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [125]
The stakeholder view would conclude differently about McBean’s status as a moral agent. A good company provides a good or service that benefits its consumers. If a company undermines the value of its product in order to sell something else, or if it manipulates or produces desires to sell a product that would otherwise be less desirable, then we can see the company dealing in merely “apparent” goods. Just as one would despise an eye that creates illusions, we should reject companies offering services that exploit our needs and desires, rather than meeting them.
Whenever we consider the relationship between business and the consuming public, we should ask whether business activity is meant to serve the public good or whether individual consumers are merely the instruments for the higher business agenda of profit. McBean preyed upon the Sneetches, just as Bernie Madoff preyed upon his investors. The laws didn’t need to be in place to make Madoff’s activity immoral, and the apparent lack of Sneetch laws doesn’t make McBean’s activity less exploitative. But a company’s responsibilities don’t stop with its consumers. Companies are also capable of mistreating the employees that make it successful.
Take This Job and Love It
Another relationship to examine is between the company and its employees. There has always been tension between the owner’s desire to increase profits by fetching labor at lower costs and the laborers desire to earn good wages and benefits. Some recognize all the worker protections now enjoyed in countries like the United States are the result of organized labor’s historic struggles. Some view unions as protecting lazy and less competent workers and illegitimately demanding compensations that business simply can’t afford. However one feels about the balance of interests in mainstream cases, it’s difficult to maintain that human beings aren’t being exploited when the working conditions reach the extreme. In such cases, we use the word sweatshop to connote our moral condemnation.
A sweatshop has been defined by the U.S. General Accounting Office as a “business that regularly violates both safety or health and wage or child labor laws.”14 Typically, people debate about whether some workplace is a sweatshop when conditions of health, safety, employment, or compensation are far enough beneath some minimal standard that one side views the situation as severely exploitative. In the postindustrial United States, there exists now the stereotype that sweatshops are mainly located in China and Southern and Southeast Asia. But the United States has its own share, too. Just in July of 2008, a factory in Queens was found to have cheated workers of $5.3 million, while coercing employees to lie about their pay and working conditions to state officials.15 Wherever they occur, sweatshops serve as the extreme case of undervaluing the contribution of the worker.
Most students of philosophy will encounter Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism and his arguments why labor is exploited. Briefly, Karl Marx (1818–1883) saw capitalism as an economic form that emerged for various historical reasons and would pass for others. It would pass because it’s a system that sets one class against another. In this case, it allows capitalists, who own the means of production, to appropriate the surplus value that a laborer generates above the value needed for the worker to subsist. Workers, who cannot afford to hold out without work for long, find themselves competing for less meaningful jobs and for lower wages. And the better the workers become at their task, the less valuable that work becomes, since the employer will come to expect greater productivity while keeping wages low. Ultimately, workers find that both the nature and the product of their work are owned by another who profits