Discuss the Ethical Dilemmas Faced by Foxconn

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Finally, under the pressure of the public, Foxconn’s CEO Terry Guo was forced to adopt few measures accordingly, involving setting up some safety fences, increasing hotline to help employees lessen pressure, raising their wage and apologizing to the victim families. Nevertheless, the spokesman still insisted that the management of Foxconn was not problematic or guilty at all, because the culprit of the suicide was the victims’ personal psychological problems and social competition (XU and Li, 2012). Evidently, Foxconn employed denial strategy to protect the corporation image. Once admitting the management system is guilty, not only will the image of the company decline, but also its competitive advantages such as low cost and high production are likely to shift. Successively, the other stakeholders’ benefit will be impacted. Worst of all, the corporate will lose business relationship with partners. After all, it is the direct mutual benefits between Foxconn and its business partners that matter the most.

However, if Foxconn only focuses on establishing the positive relationship with business partners and shareholders while ignoring and mistreating its employees, the ethical compliance of the public may shift to its business partners. For example, the public can refuse the electronic devices produced by sweatshop, which will impact the benefit of its business partners and arouse the electronic corporation to change manufacturing partners. Therefore, it is tough for Foxconn to balance the benefit with each stakeholder. In this sense, the ethical dilemma is derived from Foxconn’s imbalance stakeholder approach.

During the suicide issue in Foxconn, US and China press have multifaceted interpretations with their own stance for this issue respectively, which has exerted different effects. Based on the research of Guo et al. (2012:493) from various media in US and China, the major US media report is about Sweatshop in China, such as human right abusers (78.3%) and economic consequence contextualized in China (47.8%). Conversely, in term of Chinese newspaper, the most prevalent coverage is about the non-sweatshop (40.6%) and human right abuser (39.1%). Also, Chinese economic problem report has over one-third newspaper coverage.

As for the suicide issue, some Chinese newspaper reports have limitations and even support that the Foxconn suicides formed a temporal cluster (Cheng et al., 2011:10). The majority Chinese newspaper identifies psychological problems of the young generation rather than a sweatshop issue as the reasons of suicide (Guo et al., 2012:484). Moreover, Chinese media mainly serve for the Chinese government as the ‘mouthpiece’, such as People’s Daily (Cheng et al., 2011:9; Guo et al., 2012:488). According to Xu and Li (2012), Chinese government, as one of the stakeholders, has good relationship with Foxconn, owing to the large amount of employment opportunities provided for the local city by Foxconn. Thus, government also allows some priorities for Foxconn, take cheap rental land for Foxconn for example. Moreover, government even connives with Foxconn’s forcing employee to work over long-time. Therefore, if Foxconn was accused of sweatshop, the government should also take responsibility for it. It is possible for Foxconn to recognize its own problems and stick to its original management system due to the media’s report, which could also trigger the uncontrollable suicide and more copycat occurrence in Foxconn.

Compared with Chinese media, US press reports focus on the sweatshop and Chinese economic problem, which is helpful to push Foxconn to make some response under the public press. For example, after the tenth suicide, in order to quell the angry media and the public, Foxconn invited national and international journalists to visit their factory (Xu and Li, 2012). Although Foxconn always holds its silence toward media while not being influenced by the reports, the business partners such as Apple, Dell and Sony, could be impacted by the report that their products were from sweatshop Foxconn. However, based on the previous study of Zhou (2008), the stance of the US media framing China is about anti-communism ideology. The issue of the sweatshop permeates in the global range rather than being typified by China solely; however, the Times articles overlooked the global neoliberalism rationale embedded in the worldwide phenomenon. Also, the reports failed to attend to the responsibility of multinational corporation (Guo et al., 2012).

Overall, China and US media report the ethical issue of Foxconn differently on their own stance, exerting distinctive influence on this event. Furthermore, Cheng et al. (2011) point out that reports from one region are not applicable or generalizable to other regions, given the involvement of some social learning phenomenon, such as Chinese complex economy and product versus capital. It is helpful for the corporation to make appropriate interactions and responses considering the objectivity in the reports.

This essay discusses Foxconn in ethical dilemma from two aspects. First and foremost, it focusses on profit maximisation and well-being of society to analyse the reasons why Foxconn was trapped in the ethical dilemma. Albeit Foxconn has a good performance on profit maximisation generally, it fails to develop well-being of society, especially for employees. This arouses the cluster suicide and makes itself difficult to make choices between profit maximisation and well-being of employees. The second aspect encompasses the media reports from different cultural background involving China and US, which posed multifaceted effect on Foxconn separately.

Overall, Foxconn ignores the benefit of the employees, failing to balance the benefit of stakeholder between business partners and employees, thus leading to its ethical dilemma. Therefore, it is suggested that multinational corporation should establish the balanced leverage for each stakeholder, in order to develop stably in the long term. Moreover, the reports on the same issue contextualized in diverse culture are not applicable to other regions, given the cross-culture consideration with objective attitude. Additionally, further research is supposed to centre on a diversity of reports from more countries and different regions, because the ethical dilemma Foxconn faced as a multinational corporation reveals the common phenomenon existing in the global range and the decision will definitely affect the business partners.

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References

Cheng, Q., Chen, F. and Yip, P.S.F. 2011. The Foxconn suicides and their media prominence: is the Werther Effect applicable in China. BMC