Product Dumping
Consumer safety has been a business ethics issue for as long as there have been regulatory agencies testing products and deeming them safe or unsafe. The function of such organizations if to verify the safety of products based on testing and reports of unsafe effects and especially those involved in human fatalities. A concern that has to be addressed by business is the relative risk of a product and the relative resources that are invested in it, both in the sense of research and development and product inventories. One rather modern global occurrence has been that when a product is deemed unsafe by the Consumer Products Safety Commission and either recalled or illegalized for sale in the United States, product inventories are then shifted to places where the product is not illegal to sell. This trend is known as "product dumping." (Not to be confused with the kind of "dumping" used by businesses to artificially drive down product prices in regions so that local industry is effected and often forced to lower prices until the products are cost prohibitive to manufacture at which point the offender business then begins selling their own form of the product in the newly "opened" market. (Beckington 199)) The problems associated wi
To make an ethical decision the agent must weigh all the information, such as in the case of Halcion, a sleeping medication that was not outlawed in the US but was banned from sale in the UK market. In addition, a demonstration of the consequences of a human error, under safe training conditions, is often helpful. In the case of the three wheeled all terrain vehicles, where the CPSC deemed them illegal to sell in the US as a result of several fatalities associated with their use the company stand was user inexperience, rather than inherent product safety issues and began dumping the inventories on other international markets. There is a limited amount of open knowledge associated with actual cases of product dumping but some evidence implies that the assumptions of the consumer that business is inherently unethical (De George 5-6) is demonstrative of what evidence does appear in the record. The agent must then weigh the options and decide if the ethical thing to do is introduce the product in another market or scrap the project and write off the remaining inventory, potentially creating a large market loss through the devaluation of stock. Whatever the magnitude of the problem, developed nations can help developing countries to protect themselves by informing them of the safety regulations in place elsewhere and by counseling them with respect to their own regulatory apparatus. There could be market losses associated with the public acknowledgement of actions, especially in cases where the decision seems to be based entirely on the bottom line, rather than on viable research and discovery associated with products and alternatives. In this situation product dumping was probably the most logical solution, as the product was deemed safe by the FDA in the US as a viable therapeutic product. After already taking a substantial hit from product recalls the companies chose to seek other markets to rid themselves of the now US banned inventories. The commitment to provide technical assistance in existing GATT accords is thus helpful here as well. To make an ethical determination the agent must also stress the need to explore alternatives that will protect the consumer in the international market as well as whether the potential market could and would be able to absorb the product at current or reduced cost and if the consumer would need additional information to be able to safely use the product. Developed nations might also undertake on their own to ban exports that did not meet domestic health and safety standards, but as noted, it is by no means clear that developing nations would benefit on balance. The market affects are potential damage that the introduction of this surplus of products on any existing market in the international market for the same or similar products being produced locally.
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Acceptance Essays
