Who owns your knowledge?

Who owns your knowledge?

Ken is a process engineer for Stardust Chemical Corp., and he has signed a secrecy agreement with the firm that prohibits his divulging information that the company considers proprietary. 

Stardust has developed an adaptation of a standard piece of equipment that makes it highly efficient for cooling a viscous plastics slurry. (Stardust decides not to patent the idea but to keep it as a trade secret.) 

Eventually, Ken leaves Stardust and goes to work for a candy-processing company that is not in any way in competition. He soon realises that a modification similar to Stardust's trade secret could be applied to a different machine used for cooling fudge and, at once, has the change made.

Has Ken acted unethically?

Definitely yes, no question about it, but in that particular case there were tempting factors which  pushed Ken to do what he did; the most important is it’s not a competitor company. In the real world such a lot of such things like this happen and no one knows even if the proprietary company knew thy will not be as mad as if it’s a competitor company; for example Apple will not be mad if Casio violates one of Apple’s patents but they will be mad as hell if Samsung attempts to.

So Ken may see it from that point of view. But it’s still unethical as he signed that secrecy agreement and then he violated it.

On 24 April 2013, an eight storey factory collapsed in Savar near Dhaka and 1,129 people were killed. The building was called the Rana Plaza and inside many different factories produced clothes for companies such as Primark. The day before the collapse, cracks had appeared on the building. However, the factory remained open and workers were ordered to attend work by managers. Many different people have been blamed for the incident. The government said that the Mayor should not have approved the building and also that the owner of the building was to blame because he built extra floors on top of the building to make room for more factories. Large generators were also put on the upper floors which made the building shake when they came on. There are many ethical issues behind this tragedy - the demand for cheap clothing by the West. The cheap fashion stores rely on 'slave labor' to produce clothes for very little money, which they can then sell in large amounts and make a big profit on. Moreover the environment in the workplace had major safety issues,such as the building wasn't strong enough to carry the heavy machinery used in business it was built without a permit and it's owned by Sohel Rana who is the famous political name who used his power to bypass some of the safety regulations and pressured the inspector to get the renewal   

In conclusion  the collapse happened because businesses want cheap clothing; and the factories that produce them do not provide good conditions for the workers. Since the tragedy, the families of many of the workers that died are still waiting for compensation. Only 7 of the 28 retailers that were connected with the factory, have paid into the compensation fund.  

Bibliography

wikipedia. (2013). 2013 savar building collapse. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Savar_building_collapse

theguardian. (December , 2013 02). Bangladeshi workers still missing eight months after rana plaza collapse. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/25/bangladesh-workers-missing-rana-plaza

bbc. (October , 2013 25). Bangladesh factory disaster: Primark to extend aid. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/business-24646264

Human rights

Human rights

The American Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

"Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains" That was the first sentence of Rousseau's "The Social Contract."

This was the concept of ‘the noble savage’.

Thomas Hobbes:

"In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, not culture of the earth, no navigation, nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."