Hello everyone, I’ve been lurking here for a while now and just wanted to put in my two cents on ethical management of businesses. Here are my thoughts and reasoning behind them. Feel free to tell me if you agree or disagree.
A business should:
1. Use increased profits for the sake of the business by reinvesting that money into company expansion, solving company problems, improving the craft of the business, and investing into their employees.
2. At the very least, increase wages and prices to match inflation. Anything less is saying that the employee is worth less than they were last year. If done right, this would mean any real profit would come from increase in customer base and the value created by providing their service minus the operating costs. This is the honest way that profits should work. The fact that the vast majority of companies try to increase profits by taking it from their workers is disgusting. An even better way is to increase wages above inflation to pay for the experience the employee has gained throughout the year. Of course, if the company isn’t getting higher profits than last year, then this may not be possible, but in most cases it would be considering most products are sold at many multiple times the value of their cost of production. If a company increases prices more than inflation, the product should have gotten better. If it hasn’t, this is just forcing the cost of living up for profit. Someone who cares for the well-being of others would not do this because there are always people that are struggling.
3. Prices should be determined by operating costs and cost of production plus a buffer to ensure the financial safety of the company. If companies did this, they would have a highly competitive price. I understand that most small companies get bought out by larger ones to prevent this, but why? If you are making a comfortable living AND running a business ethically, then accepting an offer to be bought by a larger company just shows that you care more about money than you do the people it will screw over.
4. The company and its higher ups should be law-abiding citizens. Primarily, I’m pointing at paying taxes. Using loopholes and other methods to avoid paying taxes is unethical. That tax money would be used for the country and it should only be withheld from the country if it won’t be used for the betterment of it due to bad policy surrounding taxes. But if that is the case, the money should be put towards things like charity and paying for positive change within society and tax policies, not pocketed. We all know that our taxes aren’t used in the best way possible, but how quickly would that change if the people making billions wanted it to? Probably pretty quickly.
Reasoning/ranting:
First and foremost, I for the life of me can not understand why anybody would require more than say $100,000 per year (ignoring extreme cases of cost of living). Even that is pretty generous. I think requiring anything past that means you are spending money unwisely and most likely buying things out of desire for status and being straight up wasteful. Because of this, the higher ups of a company shouldn’t make more than this. That money is better spent securing the place of that company in the market in coming years by expansion, treating workers fairly, and improving the business. Every million dollars a CEO takes from the company could have been used to make the company better.
Second, the higher ups should feel more achievement from providing a living wage to a great number of people than the extra money should ever make them feel. I can not understand why this isn’t the case. I understand that money is nice to have and gets you cool stuff, but the effect is diminishing with the more you spend. Personally, I want to have a good effect on people. I like to try to leave people better off than when I met them. If things don’t work out, at least I can feel good about the choices I made. Personally, I think that the value of a company should be measured by things like how many people are employed there and what their average salary is, not things like increasing profits. Or at the very least, make those things factors in the value. As it is now, the way we value a company promotes the exploitation of its workers and customers. This should never be the case. Companies should be more focused on making their communities a better place, not making a quick buck. It is possible and sustainable to do this if business owners stick to their moral values and keep that as one of their major goals. It seems to me that most of what companies do nowadays is for the sake of money, but what value does that money really have if it’s made by making the lives of everybody involved except a few much worse? All I’m saying that the goals and desires of many people nowadays are not what they should be.