Name-Ashfia Jahan Akifa
Student Id-44339178
Excerpt-1
7-Eleven has become notorious to public in the past couple of years as the company has constantly been accused of overworking their workers and underpaying them. A joint investigation done by Four Corners and Fairfax Media, resulted in former employees of the company finally speaking up (The Sydney Morning Herald 2015). According to an article by (The Sydney Morning Herald 2015) most of the staff that reported against the company were international students. Therefore, they had to abide by the laws of the student visa, amongst which one of them is that a student is only allowed to work 20 hours per week. The victims reported that they would sometimes have to work up to 40 hours per week while receiving the wages for 20 hours and when they tried to file a complaint, the company would threaten to report them to the high commission (The Sydney Morning Herald 2015). The franchisees are trained by experts when it comes to the managing the payroll as some of the stores would be in debt if the company did not do this (The Sydney Morning Herald 2015). Another common complaint was that despite the employees working full time and extra hours as well, they only received the average wage or even lower.
The investigation resulted in the company making big loses ever since the news went public. However, apart from the company the employees and even the customers were some of the other stakeholders who were affected by this event. According to (The Sydney Morning Herald 2015), the owner of the company, Russ Withers makes a profit of $1.44 million each year from 7-Eleven. On the other hand, he also controls the Starbucks and hundreds of Mobil stores across Australia resulting in a fortune of billions of dollars (The Sydney Morning Herald 2015). The owner therefore took such a step to protect his business from facing a loss, however this step broke not only ethical code but it was completely illegal. Thus on the contrary, this event mainly affected the employees. They were overworked, underpaid and not paid the correct amount that they deserved either. As a result, one of the whistleblowers mentioned that they company was treating them like slaves and making money on them instead of the business. However, despite being affected by the problems, the victims couldn’t help but still work at the stores because of the threats from the company and also as they needed money for their living costs, meals and tuition fees.
The main ethical principle that was broken here was integrity. While managing the payroll, the company did not only break the law but they breached the ethical code of integrity with their employees. They made the employees overwork, did not pay them well and in some cases they even made the employees pay for any wrongdoings done by the customers (The Sydney Morning Herald 2015). Therefore, the company took these actions into place thinking of their own self-interest and without thinking how it could affect the other stakeholders. Whereas they are not even supposed to make the employees work such long shifts in the first place let alone letting them pay for mistakes done by customers. On the other hand, the employees followed the principles of ethics even though they were the ones who were most affected by the event. The employees kept the news confidential until they were approached by the investigation team but they did fail to undue the influence of the company which is where the ethical dilemma occurred. Another ethical conduct broken by the company was professional due care and competence as they made their customers overwork. They did not only make them overwork, but did not pay them enough, and made them work long shifts without thinking of how it could affect their health. As a result, with the points mentioned above, if this situation were assessed to see the ethical principles that were broken, both the parties are equally involved in it. Despite both the parties being equally involved in the matter, the employees were the ones who were affected the most.
Excerpt-2
ANALYSIS
One of the major economic problems as mentioned by (McKenzie 2013), was how the increase in p2p file sharing led to a decline in the sales of recorded music industry. As a consequence, the revenue of the recorded music industry went down due to the low sales (McKenzie 2013). Similarly, the data mentioned by (Waldfogel 2012) indicates how the low sales of recorded music led to low revenues for the industry where he states that revenue for the physical recorded music industry around the world fell from a $37 billion to a $25 billion within the years 1999 to 2007. The demand and supply curve can be used as a tool to identify the reasons behind the decline in the revenue of the recorded music industry. Demand refers to the quantity of a product consumers are willing to purchase and based on the demand, if we assess the scenario the demand would go down due to the low sales of recorded music in the industry. The diagram below shows the quantity supplied and demanded of recorded music. As shown in the diagram, the quantity demanded for recorded music decreases, because of the increase in p2p file sharing. Thus, leading the demand curve to move to the left while the supply curve remains in the same place. The supply curve remains the same despite the change in the demand curve. Therefore, the decrease in demand as shown by the diagram is a representation of the reason for low sales.
Similarly, if the situation were to be analyzed based on the consumer surplus, the consumer surplus would be more compared to the producer surplus because the marginal cost for consumers is less than that of producers for recorded music. Therefore, the welfare for consumers would increase. On the other hand, the ethical issue with p2p file sharing is copyright as the files that are downloaded off the internet and later on shared are obtained illegally from websites. As mentioned by Haber (2012), the copyright is the main problem as the files that are being downloaded are from websites that infringe the copyright information. Then these illegal files are being shared among different people which is another way the copyright info of the file is violated. The theory of deontology explains why this is an ethical issue. As mentioned by Parkin and Bade (2016), deontology is the study of one’s duty and obligations, which is exactly the issue being breached here.
POSITION
I believe that p2p file sharing is a problem for the recoded music industry. However. It is not a major problem both ethically and economically. If it were to be a problem for the music industry, the music industry by themselves or even with the help of the government could have easily taken action towards the websites regarding copyright. Additionally, I believe that the sharing of p2p files solely is not a reason for the sales of recorded music to go down. There are other reasons that could cause the sales of recorded music to go down and p2p file sharing does not really affect the sales of recorded music that much. In conclusion, despite the negative aspects of p2p file sharing, it has a very few effects on the recorded music industry.
CRITIQUE
If people like an artist in general, they would purchase a recording without thinking of whether the recording would be good or not. However, if when looking at new artists, they might go for things such as p2p file sharing as they wouldn’t want to spend such a big amount on a new artist whose album becoming a hit is questionable. As mentioned by Bhattacharjee et al. (2005), a decline in sales could possibly occur due to the lack of shelf space at stores which would lead to some artists recordings to be put down. Similarly, as mentioned by McKenzie (2013), the sales of recorded music do not only go down due to the p2p file sharing but also because of the cost of these recordings. I also think that the music industry makes money mostly through their live performances. As a result, I believe that it is pretty clear that the sales for recorded music does not go down mainly because of p2p file sharing. However, at the same time, I would still agree that p2p file sharing is a problem as it is illegal and more actions should be taken by the government to take these websites down.
Excerpt-3
What is Work-Life Balance and Why Is It Important?
Work-Life Balance is trying to keep an even distribution in time and effort given at work and in our daily lives. It is important thing that we often tend to overlook and not give much attention to because of societal norms. As mentioned by Moltz (2018), government jobs have a negative view towards the idea of work-life balance compared to private companies. As a result, I believe that if isn’t taken seriously let alone being regulated by the government, that gives private companies more reasons to ignore it. During my research, I also found similar findings in an article where it was mentioned by Chung and Tanja (2018), that normalizing flexible working hours could help in finding a balance in our everyday life and workplace. We are more inclined to give most of our time and effort at our workplace, logically because we require finances for a living. However, we do not realize the consequences when doing so. In order to be happy with our lives, we also need to focus on other aspects such as friends, family and also activities for ourselves which we do not give much attention to due to societal pressure on having to full time. That being said, it is also to be understood that there can never be a complete balance that we can achieve with our work-life. However, we can always try to improve and maintain it. During my research on this topic, I found out that not only does work-life balance have a positive effect on our health but it also improves our relationships with people. As mentioned by Johnson (2019), people can easily achieve a balance at work and their daily lives by giving the same amount of time and effort they give at work, to their families. I also believe this case is the same when it comes to friends and other relationships.
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