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FORD PLANT CASE STUDY
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Ford Local Management
You share the pride in Ford's historic role in the local community and wish to continue its role by being environmentally responsible and sensitive to the needs and attitudes of the neighborhood. You share these aims, in fact, with the City Councilman, an old friend of yours from college. Generally, you have faith that business and environmental aims need not be inconsistent. You thus acknowledged the need to do odor and emission studies and you have cooperated fully with the MPCA on the permit application process. At the same time, you note that the high-rise apartment building, now the apparent locus of so much emission trouble, was built on the very land that was deeded by Ford to the city as part of a good will gesture in the 1950s (and originally intended merely for a public park).
You know, of course, that the plant must work profitably to remain in operation and thereby honor what you see as its implicit commitment to its workers regarding job security. If the market for Ford trucks falls, however, you have to cut production and lay off workers. You also recognize that excessive expenditures on pollution control equipment would offer incentives for Ford's national office to move the whole plant to South Dakota. This would not only violate the commitment you sense in serving the community and workers, but also likely lead to more overall particulate emissions in the atmosphere though also perhaps in a less densely populated area.
Some particular questions that you need to resolve:
- What is the nature of your duties to community residents, employees, consumers and the enrivonment? How will you balance these multiple responsibilities?
- Given actual costs (and their market implications) and other values, what level of pollution control and/or allowances will you advocate as most appropriate ethically?
Be sure to read the Background carefully for information that is relevant to these questions and your position.
Remember that the aim in adopting a stakeholder's perspective is not to "act out" someone else's role or to make decisions according to some stereotyped view of how another person "should" act. Rather, you should focus on the stakeholder's concerns and consider how YOU would act in a similar situtation.