Ethical issues of L'Oreal and Unilever

Résumé du document

Nowadays, big corporations usually need a strong code of ethics to let the stakeholders know about the mission of the corporation and its values as well. Sometimes, the code of ethic written by the company is not quite in correlation with the way it acts, as a company, as an employer, as a supplier or as a customer. I chose to compare two big multinational corporations, L'Oreal, which is a French cosmetic group, and Unilever, which is one of its main competitors, a British multinational consumer goods company. We need to analyse both of the companies ‘Code of Ethics, to see whether there are efficient and what is the differences between them.

A good Code of Ethics will be written according to several points. It has to describe the values-based actions of the company, it has to respect the stakeholders perspectives, it also has to answer to many different business specific issues. By reading the Code of Ethics of a company, we are supposed to know about its implementation process, and the individual moral thinking of the corporation. To sum up, a good code of ethics is not simply a set of constraints.

Extraits

[...] The Code of Ethics of L'Oreal also follows the law mentality, which could be considered as being “just part of a Code of Conduct”. Indeed, there is a all paragraph “respect the that could let us think that the company pays more attention to the law than to the ethic. Not just the CEO's point of view This Code of Ethics is not only the CEO's point of view, but it takes into consideration all the stakeholders approach. We can read which makes us understand that each one of the stakeholders, such as ambassadors or any member of the community of L'Oreal, has something to say about this Code of Ethics. [...]

[...] After this announcement L'Oreal admitted it was really disappointed after the result of this 3 year legal battle. Actually, the Code of Ethics of L'Oreal has been made to avoid this kind of business ethic issues. However, we can consider the fact that finding a solution for these problems would not be easy because each problem is different. Therefore, that is the reason why a good code of Ethics needs to be analyzed and well-studied in order to solve any kind of problem met by stakeholders. [...]

[...] Even in these paragraphs, we can see a lack of practical guidance. These points are just descriptive, but they do not clearly help the employee or some other stakeholder. This is not a real value-based action document, indeed, the document does not show that it speaks about the company's values, it just shows the Dos and DO NOTs, it is more a “ready to manual, but not even complete, because it does not let the employees know what to do, like we saw in L'Oreal's Code of Ethics. [...]

[...] Ethical Business Issues L'Oreal had many ethical business issues, usually because of its racism discrimination towards its employees. For instance, in 2007, the corporation, whose catchphrase is “because you worth has had a problem with justice, because it apparently broke the law by hiring only and exclusively a white sales team to promote one of their products: Fructis Style, a hair line made by Garnier, one of L'Oreal's beauty departments. Actually, L'Oreal sometimes works with French temporary recruitment agencies, such as Adecco. [...]

[...] This kind of extract shows us that the Code of Business Ethics of Unilever is not really proactive, but just a proof of a severe lack of practical guidance. Indeed, the employee or any stakeholder will not find any important information in this kind of sentences. The only thing that this code of ethics does is to provides general principles. It also follow the law mentality, as we can see in the second paragraph of the document: There is no further information that would indicates to the stakeholders what decisions they should make regarding a business ethic issue they could be involved in. [...]