Cutting Jobs at General Motors Case Study Essay

Social responsibility makes a company more competitive and reduces the risk of sudden damage to the company’s reputation and sales.

Social responsibility is generally regarded as a duty of an organization’s management towards the benefit and well-being of the society in which it is engaged. The organization must behave ethically considering the social, cultural, economic and environmental issues.

Of course, the board does not confess to satisfying the greed for higher profits by taking these unpopular steps; they present all the process as catching up on the competitors. “GM has to do what it has to do in order to stay competitive, even if it means laying off thousands of people”, says a member of the board, and thus makes it more than clear that in a capitalist society the managers and the directors are concerned only with the profit maximization and with their own welfare, whereas the employees have to fight for their jobs in more and more unfavorable conditions. More than 30 000 workers have now lost their jobs, whereas the company’s chairman Roger Smith has just made $2 millions himself. The unions are no help at all in this moment. Supposed to increase the workers’ bargaining power, the unions have now become useless, since “too many people in the unions friends with the management”, whose interests, in this case, are completely the opposites to those of the workers.

There are conflicting expectations of the nature of a company’s responsibilities to society. However, those companies that undertake what may be termed ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ must decide; what are the actual social responsibilities of these companies? I will present a possible paradigm. Also, I will look at the benefit to the business that employs proper management as compared the business with poor management. This research paper describes my view of corporate social responsibility and compares the social responsibilities of Delta Air Lines and Spirit

Many believe that business entities should have an ethical duty to be socially responsible, to work towards increasing its positive effects on society while decreasing its negative effects. Many organizations look for opportunities to be socially responsible while also creating shareholder wealth.

General Motors (GM) was one of the premier automakers of the world. Firmly planted as the leader of the big three automakers, GM, Ford, and Chrysler, years of success grounded GM as an economic and cultural icon of American business. As the Japanese auto market grew and became more efficient, turning out improved vehicles that the public wanted, GM was becoming a lumbering behemoth of inefficiency and corporate gluttony. Many circumstances contribute to GM’s road to bankruptcy including high legacy costs in union owned contracts, largely poor design, inferior quality, and low productivity.

In this paper I am going to discuss and explain my opinion on why a company Q is or is not socially responsible in the following areas company Q close a couple of stores in high crime areas, company Q started offering a very limited health conscious an organic products, company Q was approached by the local food bank for donations of day old food and company Q declined the donation request from the food bank and started throwing the food away, and company Q suspected possible fraud among its employees.

Every business has a social responsibility toward society. That means to maximize positive affects and minimize negative affects on the society. Social responsibilities includes economic-to produce goods and services, that society needs at the price, that satisfy both-business and consumers, legal

3.Business to External Environment. Because businesses exist within a community from which they take resources, businesses have ethical responsibilities to the community. This obligation to protect and enhance the society is called Social Responsibility. This also includes responsibilities to the customers from which they earn profits. The main areas of Social Responsibility are:

• Conduct business in a way that is good for society as a whole, both now and for the future.

Auto workers at Fiat Chrysler are in an uproar over changes in job assignments at the auto plants. Many feel Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) is looking to eradicate the skilled trade jobs by reassigning so-called minor tasks to production workers (Jones, 2016). Tasks such as fault resets and electrical cable replacement, now done by skilled tradesmen, would become the responsibility of workers who are not sufficiently prepared for such work and often for only little additional pay. Auto workers feel that the United Auto Workers (UAW) union is working with the FCA to implement concessions contracts over workers’ protests. Though sales figures have been down in the auto industry, with many companies reporting declines, FCA has shown an increase with Jeep up almost 3% and Maserati revenue up 69% (FCA). The FCA has released a statement that passenger cars would no longer be produced in the United States, though it plans to continue to produce larger vehicles like trucks, leaving many workers worried over job prospects in the future. So far, 1300 auto workers at a plant in Michigan have already been laid off in July 2015.

Social responsibility is built on a system of ethics, in which decisions and actions must be ethically validated before proceeding. If the action or decision causes harm to society or the environment then it would be considered to be socially irresponsible. Being socially responsible means that people and organization must behave ethically and sensitivity towards, social, cultural, economic, and environmental issues. Striving for social responsibility helps individuals, organization and government to have a positive impact on development, business and society. Often, the ethical implication of decision/action are overlooked for personal gain and the benefits are usually material. This frequently manifest itself in companies that

Organizations should practice two forms of responsibility: social and corporate. According to investorwords.com, social responsibility is ?the idea that businesses should not function amorally, but instead should contribute to the welfare of their communities?; corporate responsibility is the ?accountability of a corporation to a code of ethics and to established laws?. An effective leader?s goal is to practice steps to support these responsibilities.

Carroll (1991) organized different corporate social responsibilities as a four-layered pyramid model and called it the pyramid of responsibilities. The four different responsibilities - economical, legal, ethical and philanthropic are the layers of the pyramid. Corporate social responsibility involves the conduct of a business so that it is economically profitable, law abiding, ethical and socially supportive. To be socially responsible then means that profitability and obedience to the law are foremost conditions when discussing the firm’s ethics and the extent to which it supports the society in which it exists with contributions of money, time and talent”. And the different layers in the pyramid help managers

One of the world’s largest automakers, GMC has it’s roots traced back to 1908. Also known as GM, this company is a United States-based automaker with its headquarters in Detroit, Michigan. After the General Motors Company was founded, it soon became known as one of the largest car manufacturers in the world. In 1909, the Grabowsky Rapid Motor Vehicle Company (GMC) joined with GM. The trade name GMC Trucks was first exhibited in 1912 at the New York Auto Show and registered with the U.S. Patent Office eight months later. The