Here’s an interesting article that proves to companies that implementing a safety plan is not only ethically right, but would not cost much more, especially in the long run.
The company in this scenario is the infamous Wal-Mart Inc. Having a long history of a lack of safety regulation, their opposition to it usually revolves around the “not financially feasible” responses given to the public.
However, according to the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent labor rights monitoring group, the costs of adding fire-safety standards, for example, would only add very minimum costs without being forced to raise their prices by much. An estimate of only about 2.5 percent to their outsourcing costs would be enough to improve some of their fire incidents, for example. This would allow them to implement training and planning to avoid a history of factory deaths, such as a firetrap that took the lives of about 100 workers just last month in Bangladesh.
Here is the article:
Wal-Mart Shouldn’t Discount Worker Safety
By Lisa Beyer Dec 5, 2012
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) is learning just how hard it is to escape the stain of exploiting human beings for profit.
The company was already roiling from news that the Tazreen factory in Bangladesh, a firetrap that burned down killing more than 100 workers last month, was a Wal-Mart supplier. Now, Bloomberg News has reported that the retailer last year said it would not pay Bangladeshi factories prices sufficient to cover safety improvements that might have prevented the Tazreen blaze.
To read the entire article, visit http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-05/wal-mart-shouldn-t-discount-worker-safety.html.