Explain why Aaron Feuerstein felt his decisions were necessary for his company and for his employees.

Discuss the pros and cons of Aaron Feuerstein's decision making, and explain if or how you would have handled his situation differently if you were in his shoes.

 

Apply virtue ethics and corporate social responsibility to his situation.

Feeling of correctness of Aaron Feuerstein for his decisions

Aaron Feuerstein is the third generation to handle the family textile business. The concerned person intends to run the family business by using same business process in any circumstance. The business conviction that Aaron Feuerstein possessed, is to treat employees more like a family member and care about them. This is the reason when Malden Mills was destroyed by a terrible fire and all the employees are waiting for getting a huge amount of their medical insurance with unemployment, the leader came with a pleasing decision. Aaron Feuerstein decided to pay every employee with full salary for 90 days (YouTube, 2017). Aaron Feuerstein wanted to retain their loyal customers even after the new factory was built in the same place. In an interview, Aaron Feuerstein was asked that he could have been told all their employees to leave and he himself can take a luxury retirement. Aaron Feuerstein then replied that that it would be against the business ethics and the decision that was taken is correct and all employees should be provided jobs and security.

Pros and cons of Aaron Feuerstein's decision making

Pros- The decision took by Aaron Feuerstein results in happy employees. The Malden Mills was also presented by Corporate Kindness Award in the year 2008 (Wordpress.com, 2017). The decision of paying full salaries to their employee in the adverse situation resulted in more loyalty in the employees. The employee and customer retention reached to 95% and the employees intended to work more and the business grew 40% from pre-fire levels (Wordpress.com, 2017). The total production also leads to 130,000 to 200,000 yds. per week (Wordpress.com, 2017).

Cons- Through the employees of Malden Mills and the CEO Aaron Feuerstein were happy, the company went to bankruptcy for the same reason. The decision of giving full payment to their employee for 60 days without any productivity cost the same company to $25 million extra (Wordpress.com, 2017). In the adverse situation of fire and rebuilding cost of the factory along with those $25 million result in bankruptcy. Another situation that turned out to be an adverse state is when textile factories in the country are growing and due to international labor markets there was radical reduction of textile prices. This made Malden Mills incapable to pay the debt.

Alternative way to handle this situation differently 

There is an alternative way for the same situation. In spite of re-building the factory as a more pleasant and healthy workplace, in the initial phases financial resources can be saved for overcoming other debts. The decision of investing more in the interiors of the new factory could have been avoided.

Application of virtue ethics and corporate social responsibility to this situation 

The trait of ‘being honest’ is applicable in this case where Aaron Feuerstein was loyal towards the employees. Moreover, ‘courage’ of re-building the factory to the similar business level can also be considered as virtue ethics of Aaron Feuerstein.

The new factory that was re-built was well-equipped and had a pleasant environment with necessary equipments. The additional things that could have been done were to reduce the carbon printing of the raw material of the Polartec so that the environment can be less impacted.

References

Ethix. (2017). Was Aaron Feuerstein Wrong?. Retrieved 23 July 2017, from http://ethix.org/2011/06/25/was-aaron-feuerstein-wrong

Trevino, L. K., & Nelson, K. A. (2016). Managing business ethics: Straight talk about how to do it right. John Wiley & Sons.

Wordpress.com (2017). Putting people before profits: Classic PR case study, but without the fairytale ending. ToughSledding. Retrieved 23 July 2017, from https://toughsledding.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/putting-people-before-profits-classic-pr-case-study-but-without-the-fairytale-ending/

YouTube. (2017). Aaron Feuerstein's Malden Mills. Retrieved 23 July 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry7_FcSiQL8