IKEA’s Global Sourcing Challenge IKEA is a Swedish furniture retailer that sells affordable, good-quality furniture to mass-market consumers. IKEA is a well-established company that has many suppliers in 40 countries. With this enormous amount of business, they are bound to have ethical issues in some of these countries. Marianne Barner is a business area manager for IKEA’s carpets division and discovers many social and environmental issues ranging from IKEA’s operations in India, IKEA’s contract with Rangan Exports, and IKEA’s position on Rugmark. To begin, IKEA received a lot of backlash from international organizations about how they run operations in India with child labor. This goes back to our class discussion on globalization and
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In 1995, a very well-known German documentary maker was going to exploit IKEA by broadcasting children working at looms on public national German TV (Bartlett). Barner and her manager tried to quickly learn of the situation and to Barner she had a couple of concerns with this social issue. Barner develops concerns that the child labor issue is not generally worried within IKEA and this proactive stand can bring cost disadvantages. This goes back to the whole main cause of the child labor issue on that it is an extensive socioeconomic anomaly that has ill enforced laws with a rare uncompromising prosecution. Marianne should deal with this complex situation by accepting the invitation to take part in that live discussion. They had positive momentum when they were dealing with the other child labor issue from the operations in India. IKEA needs to work with their foundations like Rugmark, UNICEF, ILO, and Swedish Save the Children and consider the information that was provided to them from these companies. This would show that IKEA is on the same page as the German broadcaster and that they are generally concerned with the eradication of child labor. It is almost like reverse psychology where IKEA is kind of thanking the director on helping spot this social issue at the company’s manufacturer and that IKEA will strongly deal with this case. IKEA could help itself by recovering their …show more content…
All of the children working at Rangan Exports can then be offered educational opportunities with the addition of keeping count of children working at this location. Next, IKEA needs to hire professionals to find children labor cases within the company and find experts to keep tabs on these issues by investigations at their suppliers. This creates this sort of professionalism from IKEA to do these random inspections on their suppliers even though suppliers may find this as a nuisance. This is also where IKEA’s position with Rugmark can also come into effect. IKEA should allow Rugmark to monitor the use of child labor on its behalf, as long as the child labor issue is completely handled. Think about it! IKEA gets its supplies from other suppliers because they do not produce their own goods with their own manufacturers. This would be very challenging for IKEA to monitor their entire production line. IKEA will have a very difficult time ensuring there is no child labor within the company without the aid of
In 1995, a very well-known German documentary maker was going to exploit IKEA by broadcasting children working at looms on public national German TV (Bartlett). Barner and her manager tried to quickly learn of the situation and to Barner she had a couple of concerns with this social issue. Barner develops concerns that the child labor issue is not generally worried within IKEA and this proactive stand can bring cost disadvantages. This goes back to the whole main cause of the child labor issue on that it is an extensive socioeconomic anomaly that has ill enforced laws with a rare uncompromising prosecution. Marianne should deal with this complex situation by accepting the invitation to take part in that live discussion. They had positive momentum when they were dealing with the other child labor issue from the operations in India. IKEA needs to work with their foundations like Rugmark, UNICEF, ILO, and Swedish Save the Children and consider the information that was provided to them from these companies. This would show that IKEA is on the same page as the German broadcaster and that they are generally concerned with the eradication of child labor. It is almost like reverse psychology where IKEA is kind of thanking the director on helping spot this social issue at the company’s manufacturer and that IKEA will strongly deal with this case. IKEA could help itself by recovering their …show more content…
All of the children working at Rangan Exports can then be offered educational opportunities with the addition of keeping count of children working at this location. Next, IKEA needs to hire professionals to find children labor cases within the company and find experts to keep tabs on these issues by investigations at their suppliers. This creates this sort of professionalism from IKEA to do these random inspections on their suppliers even though suppliers may find this as a nuisance. This is also where IKEA’s position with Rugmark can also come into effect. IKEA should allow Rugmark to monitor the use of child labor on its behalf, as long as the child labor issue is completely handled. Think about it! IKEA gets its supplies from other suppliers because they do not produce their own goods with their own manufacturers. This would be very challenging for IKEA to monitor their entire production line. IKEA will have a very difficult time ensuring there is no child labor within the company without the aid of