The sheer amount of energy required for transportation and refrigeration here is mind boggling, and the notion of outsourcing any job rubs me the wrong way. It’s bad for the local economy and generally exploitative of people in other parts of the world.

People in Scotland loose jobs. The environment suffers in the fuel used and CO2 emissions. It is environmentally unsound to say the least and totally unthinking with the impact of a small community in Scotland. It is all about exploiting workers in Thailand and making more money. It is disgusting and wrong.

I totally agree with the two above me. That’s terrible.

I totally agree with the two above me. That’s terrible.

If you dont like it, dont buy it.

Why is it cheaper for them to ship the shrimp twice and have them hand peeled then to just do it on-site? Maybe there lies the problem.

Why is it cheaper for them to ship the shrimp twice and have them hand peeled then to just do it on-site? Maybe there lies the problem.

I pledge not to buy from Youngs any more. Not that I eat shrimp anyway, but I shall tell my mates about this practice. Seems like a very stupid, irresponsible thing to do. Vote with your wallet. Don’t buy.

Are you people kidding me here? The company should overpay for services? And, if you are so concerned about job loss, what about the jobs created in the transport and peeling of said shrimp? Plus, all the extra profits are taxable, meaning more money for the gov’t to hopefully fund further developement, which leads to more employment at home and abroad. Would you feel better if they just machine peeled the shrimp? They still wouldn’t need those 120 employees, and none of the associated shipping and peeling outside the borders.

One of the reasons we lucky idiots can spend time on Web 2.0 sites rather than in the fields of down a coal mine is that our economies are efficient. We do what we do best at home, and outsource everything that can be done cheaper elsewhere. This has two benefits: a) it ups our game – people who previously peeled shrimp have to look for more skilled service-based jobs, and b) it helps a developing country’s economy by boosting employment, thus putting it on the same path to futher development. I find it deeply depressing that the founders of this site have little concept of the machinery of development yet such a clear sense of what is right or wrong. Forget Web 2.0, let’s all go back to economics 0.0.1 Alpha.

I think that it’s only ridiculous that it can be cheaper for Youngs to fly a shrimp across the world and back to have it shelled, than to do it on their doorstep. It’s ridiculous that I can fly to Nice for £6.50 but it costs me three times as much as that to get to the vast shopping mall from where the planes leave (formerly known at Gatwick Airport). But this is the way of commerce – driven by shareholders and consumers to provide things evermore profitably and cheaply. The problem for me in such discussions is that there is no evidence that there can be an ethical quality to any commercial transaction. What is conceivably intrinsically ethical about buying or selling something – it’s just trade. There is no ethical dimension implicit to the transaction to be considered; one party sells one party buys – that’s it. As to externalities, that is another matter altogether – and in this present debate, typically, the external costs (not limited to repairing or replenishing the environment and the costs to social security and cohesion in the area where jobs will be lost) are not considered or accounted for. If we were to calculate the true cost (pace Robert Monks), then the flying shrimp might transpire not to be such a bargain.

Michael Jensen makes the elegant point “It is logically impossible to maximize in more than one dimension at the same time, unless the dimensions are monotone transformations of one another” (Jensen, M. “Value Maximization, Stakeholder Theory, and the Corporate Objective Function” Business Ethics Quarterly, 2002, Vol. 12, No. 2, page 237/8). So we can have business, and we have ethics; but “business ethics” is a monotone transformation – ethics reduced to impotent, meretricious CSR. The same fate befalls “sustainable development”; do you want to develop or do you want to sustain? Or are someone for whom sustainable means continuously profitable? Another montone reduction. Another oxymoron?

On this basis, and being it is impossible logically as well as established now in decades of practice, I suggest it is more constructive not to look for business to be ethical or sustainable, except relatively; and then you cannot be disappointed. The impossibility of corporate ethics is easier to understand perhaps if you think about what “consumer ethics” might mean. What are consumers doing buying re-imported treated frozen shrimp? I can see clear aesthetic objections, but not intrinsically ethical ones. Is there a consumer social responsibility campaign about to peep over the horizon? I don’t see it. And what about “shareholder responsibility”? Ok, just kidding.

We can look realistically, however, for good standards of corporate governance – and those are rare enough; but at least they are possible and indeed emergent in the practice of our more responsible senior managers.

davidbevan makes some good points, if you believe that our way of thinking about these matters should be proscribed by the language of economics. I personally have no belief in economics and certainly don’t believe that we should be applying economics to the question of ethics, in any field.

He says that, ‘the seller sells, the buyer buys, period’ ... but what is left out of that statement is that the seller is a human and the buyer is a human, and as humans we are all bound by shared values of morality and ethics. Much economic theory would have us believe that we stop being moral beings when we step into the sphere of commercial trade; that when we become ‘buyers’ or ‘sellers’ we stop being human.

Economic theory conveniently sets aside concepts like environmental impact and moral obligation as ‘externalities.’ The reasoning for this makes sense only within the field of economics; it’s an arbitrary rule of an arbitrary ‘science’. Economists would have us believe that their theories are a self-evident science but, quite simply, they are not.

Economics themselves are a complete and utter externality to the greater moral, economic, and ethical problems that face us as humans. If the study of Economics has no interest in morality then they should not be brought to bear in this discussion.

I feel that economics – which is simply (by definition) concerned with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods + services, or in other words, how to allocate a scarce resources – is ultimately an efficient and good way to organize.

The way economics work in practice is a different story; there are problems at each of the levels but they are not, in my opinion, a necessary consequence. In this situation, it is cheaper to ship things around the world twice, effectively, than to process them in Scotland. My impression of this is that too much of the ‘cost’ of shipping is externalized – the cost of energy and pollution is unfortunately not reflected in the price because it can, and is, suffered by everyone. The solution is for the ‘true cost’ of our production, distribution, and consumption to be reflected in the price.

At that point, economics can decide what is best. Despite the bitter thought of shipping things like this, perhaps it would be the most economical way (and providing wealth – despite ‘taking advantage’ of cheap labour – to a less-wealthy country). I don’t feel that we are in a good enough position to measure true cost yet, and I hope that comes (in the form of carbon credits, pollution taxes, companies being responsible for the whole lifecycle + waste of their products etc.)

I feel that moral arguments shouldn’t be made in the domain of economics, but rather in education of consumers who can then “vote with their wallets” which is a very powerful force.