A JOB CHRONICLE

To everyone that could matter, this is a story of what I've been experiencing:

I'm a 20 year old woman, worker at a Bangladesh factory in the shoes industry. I have worked here since I was 15 and I have been hidding some things about the treatment we are receiving by this No-Name American Enterprise. I usually have to work from 15 to 18 hours a day and having a salary of just 12 cents an hour, wich can hardly cover my room in a crowded dorm. Besides we have to make our job in a 40 degree environment and it could pass two months before a day off. The space between people' workplace is minimal and abuses are clearly defined. We have not even been provided with the adequate implements to the shoe making, as masks and gloves to protect us from chemicals such as glue and other materials employed, and some workers have been hurt.

I think currently we are not having any job securities at work, bacause when some co-workers of the factory complaint about being mistreated, after a short period of time, they were fired with the excuse that there were quality control reasons and that they have to let them go, even knowing that our company has been used for producing this american products for almost 10 years. Maybe if that would happen before the complaints were made we could think that was reasonable, but after this event, workers at the factory fear for telling something about what is happening internally, because they need their job in order to survive.

By this, I only wanted to create some consciousness about what is happening in many developing countries around the world and make people know that it is required that these transnational companies abandone this negative practices such as ruthlessly exploited workforce, civil liberties denial, poor wages, and start to give the right to work in dignity in healthy safe environments, because big companies know that sooner or later this stories would begin to appear in many cultures, generating an extreme bad image to their brands and eventually reducing their profits.  

Organizational Culture and Cultural Diversity

The Organizational Culture is some sort of group in which different people could relate with each other. For example, in a company there is a "sub-culture" where their employees feel that could be identified as members of that organization, sharing beliefs, customs, rules, goals and ways of behaviour.

In order to be accepted, people would do whatever they need to belong to one particular group, even showing the best or worst qualities of them. They have to be careful in the power management, because it is not easy to have the others by my side and this could turn into bad consequences. People need to feel that they are an important part of the organization, they need to be respected and have always in mind the common thoughts and decisions of the group, because they should be integrated and coordinated in all of its work. 

They should also have in mind that there are differences at the inside, that everybody must respect the others' culture and understand their attitudes in order to strenghten the organization an achieve the common goals. 

¿What can we do to improve the way corporations behave?

As globalization changes the way we see corporations and the market itself, we find harder every day to make contributions in terms of changing some companies' behaviors ethically speaking. I mean, when some global companies do things innapropriately (for the environment, for their employees, for the costumers they're selling...) is very difficult to just demand them and have sufficient power to change that.

So, I think that in this situation, first we can speak with some people of the company involved in order to let them know we are worry for some of the things they're doing and try to make them understand that their costumers (we) are not going to continue aquiring goods or services from them if they keep behaving like that. Second, we can promote and publicize those wrong actions in our personal networks (as facebook, twitter, mails, etc.) and spreading them around the people we know to create a powerful voice to make corporations react and take some action.

By this, I just want to let the people know that if corporations feel threatened by anybody that could create a "bad voice" from the company's name, they would probably take some action on the issues and try to correct their behaviors in order to keep having a good image and satisfying their costumers.