CSR5003 Module 1 position paper example

What a Chocolate Maker Owes the Children Who Harvest Its Cocoa: A Position on Duties Beyond Shareholders

Student Name

American College of Education

CSR5003: Principles and Practices of Corporate Social Responsibility

Module 1 Assignment

Instructor Name

July 3, 2028

The Case

Marrow Creek Confections, a composite family-controlled chocolate maker with annual sales of about $420 million, buys roughly 18,000 tonnes of cocoa beans and cocoa products a year through two large international trading houses. Most of the cocoa originates in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, where child labor in cocoa farming, much of it hazardous work such as carrying heavy loads and using machetes, has been documented for two decades. Marrow Creek has never asked its traders where its cocoa comes from below the level of the exporting country. Its largest retail customer has now announced that, from next year, suppliers must show that they identify and address child labor risks in their supply chains.

Two board members have taken opposite positions. One argues that the company's responsibility is to its owners and customers, that it neither employs the children nor controls the farms and that the retailer's requirement is a cost to be met at the lowest price. The other argues that the company profits from the cocoa and therefore shares responsibility for how it is grown. This paper takes a position between the two and explains why.

The Strongest Case for Shareholders Alone

The shareholder view deserves its strongest statement. Friedman (1970) held that a company has a single social duty, which is to make as much money for its owners as it can while playing by the rules of the game, which for him meant honest competition that stays clear of fraud. Executives who spend the owners' money on social goals, he argued, are in effect imposing taxes and deciding how to spend them without any democratic mandate. On this view, if society wants to end child labor in cocoa, governments should do it, and a chocolate maker's managers have no special competence or authority to act.

The argument has force. Marrow Creek's managers are not experts in West African agriculture, and poorly designed interventions could harm the families they are meant to help, for example by pushing children out of cocoa into worse work. But Friedman's own qualification matters: business must stay within the rules of the game, and those rules have changed. The retailer's requirement, and growing legal requirements in major markets to conduct human rights due diligence in supply chains, are now part of the rules within which Marrow Creek competes.

Stakeholders and Layers of Responsibility

Freeman (1984) proposed that managers should consider any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the firm's objectives, because a firm that ignores those groups will manage poorly as well as unfairly. The children and families who grow Marrow Creek's cocoa are affected by the company's purchases, even if they have no contract with it. Carroll (1991) arranged corporate responsibilities in a pyramid: economic responsibilities at the base, then legal, then ethical responsibilities to do what is right and fair even where the law does not require it, and at the top philanthropic responsibilities that are desired but not expected. Its value lies in keeping obligations apart from generosity.

Applied to Marrow Creek, ending the use of child labor in its cocoa supply is not philanthropy. Profiting from hazardous work by children, once the company knows the risk exists, falls within ethical responsibility, and increasingly within legal responsibility. Funding a school in a cocoa region, by contrast, would be philanthropic: admirable, but not something the company owes. The question is not whether a chocolate maker should be generous, but whether it may keep profiting from harm it now knows about.

Responsibility Without Control

The strongest remaining objection is control: Marrow Creek does not own the farms. International guidance addresses this directly. The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights state that businesses should respect human rights, which means avoiding causing or contributing to adverse impacts and seeking to prevent or mitigate impacts directly linked to their operations, products or services through their business relationships, even if they have not contributed to them (United Nations, 2011). The expected response is human rights due diligence: identifying risks, acting on findings, tracking effectiveness and communicating how impacts are addressed. The principles scale what is expected to the company's influence over the parties involved.

Marrow Creek is linked to child labor through its purchases even though it does not cause it. Under this framework, its responsibility is not to guarantee that no child ever works on a farm that sold cocoa to its traders, which it cannot do, but to know where its cocoa comes from, to use its influence with its traders to support monitoring and remediation and to be honest about what it finds.

The Objection From the Other Side

The position also has to answer critics who would say it asks too little. Some advocates argue that a company linked to child labor should stop buying West African cocoa until its absence can be guaranteed, or should promise that its chocolate is free of child labor. Both responses fail the families involved. Cocoa is the main cash crop for hundreds of thousands of smallholder households in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, and child labor there is closely tied to household poverty and to the lack of nearby schools. A buyer that walks away removes income from the households whose poverty drives the problem, and the cocoa is sold to buyers who ask no questions. A promise of guaranteed absence cannot be kept by any company buying from smallholders through traders, and a company that makes it will either mislead its customers or discover a case and face a choice between hiding it and breaking its promise.

The position taken here is therefore demanding in a different way. It asks Marrow Creek to stay, to learn where its cocoa is grown, to pay for monitoring and remediation in proportion to its purchases and to publish what it finds, including cases it cannot yet resolve. That is harder to market than a promise, but it is the version of responsibility that can be carried out and checked.

The Position

Marrow Creek owes its shareholders a profitable business. It also owes the families in its supply chain three things, grounded in its ethical and emerging legal responsibilities rather than in generosity: to find out where its cocoa is grown and what risks exist there; to use its purchasing relationships to support credible systems that identify and remediate child labor, paying a fair share of their cost; and to report honestly on progress and failure. Its duty stops short of guaranteeing outcomes it cannot control or of substituting for governments in West Africa. The retailer's requirement should be met, but not at the lowest price, because a program designed only to produce paperwork would fail the children and eventually the customer. The following modules map the company's stakeholders, trace its supply chain and price the choices this position implies.

References

Carroll, A. B. (1991). The pyramid of corporate social responsibility: Toward the moral management of organizational stakeholders. Business Horizons, 34(4), 39-48. https://doi.org/10.1016/0007-6813(91)90005-G

Freeman, R. E. (1984). Strategic management: A stakeholder approach. Pitman.

Friedman, M. (1970, September 13). A Friedman doctrine: The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. The New York Times Magazine.

United Nations. (2011). Guiding principles on business and human rights. United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner.