Rama Plaza Building Collapse Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Rama Plaza Building Collapse - Essay Example While the signing of agreements is a good indication of goodwill, it is essential to consider other issues which will guarantee that employees are treated in the best way possible. Signing go many agreements is however no guarantee that safety is going to improve. Yet, these agreements only make the relationship between workers and employers to be tortuous. It cannot be stressed enough that such unfortunate events as the Rana Plaza accidents are unacceptable in any way. In this regard, firms and industries must be able to have a good way for protecting their workers (Ehap & Salim, 67). Manufacturers must not depend on rules and laws in order to protect human life. Human life is way too important, and the value of human life should not be valued based on econometrics. This means that these firms need to be able to look at these issues in a better way rather than just creating rules and laws and loo at worker safety in a very serious way. In a modern business world, competition has con tinued to increase in this regard; there are many strategies which are mean to help in making sure that businesses are competent. In this regard, business experts has developed the value chain process is the life cycle a product goes through until the product gets to the end consumer (Ehap & Salim, 66). This process is a definition of the costs which the firms will have to incur in order produce a finished item. In other words, the many businesses are geared towards making sure that the firm can present the best quality of their merchandise to their consumer while offering them the best price possible. This has led to businesses trying as much as possible to reduce their operational costs (Ehap & Salim, 78). In this case, human resource has been affected because firms have tried as much as possible to reduce the cost of human labour, leading to firms in the first world to outsource their labour aboard (especially in China) in order to have cheap labour. This means that events such a s the Rana Plaza industrial accident can be traced back to the consumer. To prevent this in the future, it is necessary to involve the consumer and help them understand the real cost of the product thy use. Some cheap products in the market are paid for in blood because humans have been abused to make these products. This can be seen in the way the Chinese sweat houses are used to make low cost garments. This has been seen in other various cases such as in Apple Inc., Nike etc. Consumers need to be educated about these issues and encouraged to avoid blood-products (in other words, products whose real cost is human blood.) by educating the end consumers on these issues it will be possible to avoid instances such as the Rana Plaza. In doing so, firms must be forced to reveal the actual cost structure of producing their products in order to identify any blood cost in their production of goods or in their value chain. From a single business point of view, there is therefore a need to cr eate a solution which is not really considerate of the economic efficiency. Businesses have responsibilities which are tied to various stakeholders and these responsibilities must be met before economic efficiency can be considered. However, in the long run, focusing on these responsibilities will also help individual businesses to save in the long run. A firm

Katrina Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Katrina - Research Paper Example Then, in the early morning of August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina came ashore at the mouth of the Mississippi near Orleans with 140 mph sustained winds and storm surges two stories tall. To make matters worse, many of the 500,000 residents of New Orleans live below sea level and are surrounded by the Mississippi River, Pontchartrain, and several bays. It was obvious that this was going to be a huge storm; consequently hundreds of thousands of Gulf residents evacuated on Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday night Mayor Holloway of Biloxi said that most of the residents in the lowest-lying sections of his city of 55,000 had evacuated. (Drye, 2005). Wherever possible, evacuees from low-lying areas went to higher ground to stay with relatives and/or friends. Some competed to rent limited accommodations; however, soon these were no longer available. By Sunday night shelters were filling up, even as far away as South KATRINA 3 Texas and all over Lousiana, according to Steve Rinard, meteorologist in charge of the national weather service office in Lake Charles, Louisiana (ibid.). Hurricane Katrina made landfall as a Category Four Storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale which ranks hurricanes from one to five according to wind speeds and destructive potential† (ibid.). ... rina herself was responsible for injecting the initial surprise and resulting confusion by making an unexpected jog southward as it crossed the Florida peninsula and then rapidly strengthening in the Gulf of Mexico. Residents in the Florida Keys were caught off guard by Katrina’s intensification. Katrina kept on getting stronger as it took a ragged S-shaped path across the very warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. By Friday afternoon meteorologists feared the worst They felt that the storm would further intensify as it approached large Gulf Coast cities such as Alabama, Mobile, and New Orleans, which it did (ibid.) One has to wonder why by this point, coordinated preparations were not being made for a huge impending disaster. Emergency management officials had been concerned for sometime about a powerful storm such as Katrina hitting vulnerable areas such as New Orleans and the Florida Keys. They saw the greatest vulnerability being the coastal population growth that had occurre d during the past three decades, as well as the fact that 55,000 citizens were living below sea level. Knowing this, one wonders why coordinated plans were not in place for rapid evacuation and shelter for all these people should a Hurricane such as Katrina come to visit. They must have known that KATRINA 4 evacuation would not be easy, not only because of all of the people involved, but because there were a lot of people in the area without transportation and money to evacuate. Certainly there was a lack of preparedness for such a major storm, but, perhaps, even more to the point was a lack of communication, trust, and cooperation. Although President Bush declared a state of emergency for Louisiana and authorized the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to provide aid, in response to