MT220 Unit 9 Seminar Reflection Example

The Distributor's Cooperative and My Own Line: A Unit 9 Seminar Reflection on Responsibility Through a Partner

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT220: Global Business

Unit 9 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Cascade Drum Works, its distributor and the scenario are composite and illustrative; the description of Colombian labor practices is summarized from public sources; the sources cited are real.

Where I Started

My view going in was simple. Cascade Drum Works answers for what it does. Its distributor is an independent company that buys machines and resells them, and how it hires its technicians is its own business. Asking a small exporter to police a partner's employment practices seemed unrealistic and slightly arrogant, especially for a company with twenty-two people.

The First Challenge

A classmate who used to work in Bogota explained something I did not know. For years, associated work cooperatives were widely used in Colombia to engage workers who did the same jobs as employees but were classified as cooperative members, without the benefits, severance and social security an employment contract requires. She said the practice became a point of dispute in the US-Colombia trade agreement, and that Colombia committed in a 2011 Colombian Action Plan Related to Labor Rights to stop the misuse of cooperatives for work that is part of a company's permanent activities (Office of the United States Trade Representative, 2011).

In the scenario, the distributor's technicians install and repair Cascade's roasters full time, using Cascade's training and carrying Cascade's parts. They are, in practice, the people who represent Cascade's brand on every farm. If they are cooperative members without benefits, the arrangement may not only be unfair to them but may also fall into exactly the kind of practice Colombia agreed to curb.

The Second Challenge

The instructor then brought in the 2011 UN framework for business and human rights, whose principles ask a company to respect human rights beyond its own walls, including harms tied to what it sells through a partner, and to try to prevent or reduce them even when the partner, not the company, caused them (United Nations, 2011). The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises take a similar approach, asking firms to carry out due diligence on risks in their supply chains and business relationships (OECD, 2023).

My first reaction was that these frameworks were written for large multinationals. The instructor's response was that they scale: a small company has fewer relationships to examine and less influence over each, but it is not exempt. Cascade has one distributor in Colombia, and that relationship is entirely within its view.

Another classmate pushed back on the instructor, and her point deserves a place here. She argued that a foreign supplier lecturing a Colombian company about Colombian law could look paternalistic, and that the distributor might simply hire elsewhere for the same work. The instructor agreed that tone mattered and that the aim was to ask questions and set expectations, not to run the distributor's personnel department. That exchange made the obligation feel more manageable to me: Cascade's job is to know and to ask, and to act if the answer is bad.

I had drawn the line at Cascade's door, but the technicians on those farms wear Cascade's name.

What I Now Think

I still think Cascade cannot run its distributor's business. But I no longer think it has no responsibility. The technicians are directly linked to Cascade's product: they install it, repair it and represent it. That gives Cascade both a reason and a way to act. The reason is ethical and practical, since poorly paid, insecure technicians are more likely to leave, and turnover would undermine the service quality the whole entry plan depends on. The way is the distribution agreement, which Cascade has not yet signed and can still shape.

What I Would Change

Three changes follow from this. First, the distribution agreement should require that technicians servicing Cascade machines be employed in compliance with Colombian labor law, including social security and legally required benefits, and should give Cascade the right to ask for confirmation. Second, Cascade's technical manager, the engineer hired in Unit 8, should get to know the technicians personally during training, which is also when problems would surface. Third, if the distributor uses a cooperative for permanent technical work, Cascade should ask it to move those technicians onto employment contracts within a set period, and treat failure to do so as grounds not to renew the agreement.

None of these steps is expensive, and the third is a real lever, since the distributor values exclusive rights to a good product. The question I take into the final unit is how to present these terms to a distributor without damaging a relationship that, as Unit 3 showed, depends on trust more than on contracts.

References

OECD. (2023). OECD guidelines for multinational enterprises on responsible business conduct. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/81f92357-en

Office of the United States Trade Representative. (2011). Colombian action plan related to labor rights.

United Nations. (2011). Guiding principles on business and human rights: Implementing the United Nations "Protect, Respect and Remedy" framework. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.