Ethics

not something that someone can just decide to follow on a whim; they are part of a person’s character. Honesty is no different; a person cannot simply decide to be an honest person overnight. Yes, a person can decide to start being honest, but the person may not be considered honest until they have acted honestly for a considerable amount of time. A dishonest company may maintain their dishonest reputation until enough time has passed to show that they are now conducting their business honestly. The amount of time it may take is dependent on the situation at hand. For example, if a company had been lying about their profits, and this dishonesty was discovered, it may take years for the trust in the company to be built back up. It is also entirely possible for the trust in the company to be completely eroded, which could mean that the company may never recover. This is why it is very important for a company to be honest. The public is quick to accept an apology when a company is honest and admits to their mistakes; but if the company tries to cover up the facts, the chances for forgiveness are reduced drastically.

Mattel was not being honest prior to 1996 because they turned a blind eye to the working conditions present in their Indonesian factories (Sethi, Veral, Shapiro, & Emelianova, 2010). They were caught off guard by a Dateline report which exposed the fact that child labor was being used to produce their products. Mattel disputed some of the claims from the Dateline report, but they also understood that they had to take some sort of action to improve the conditions in their factories. It was only after the report that Mattel took action by implementing their Global Manufacturing Principles in 1997. While the senior executives may not have been aware of the conditions in the factory, someone in the company knew about the working conditions, and Mattel failed to act to correct them until they were revealed to the general public. If Mattel were acting honestly, they would have disclosed the conditions in the factory on their own, and worked to correct the problems instead of only reacting to the bad press that resulted from the Dateline report. They make children’s toys, and they were using child labor to manufacture the toys, which should have never been allowed to happen in the first place. Mattel did, however enact policies to correct the problems reported by Dateline, and took steps to ensure that working conditions in all of their factories met the same standards. Many of the standards that were implemented by the Global Manufacturing Principles were already laws in the United States, but since the factories were located overseas, they did not have to comply