Powerful global corporations have become the predominant actors in employment relations around the world. Neither national laws nor trade union rules have proved able to regulate the behavior of these corporations. In this power vacuum, activists and practitioners have been seeking to identify international moral norms about what corporate behavior regarding their workers should be. However, given the focus of corporations on profit-seeking, can they realistically be expected to do the “right” thing when it might interfere with their core function of maximizing shareholder value? According to the worlds of both theory and practice, the answer is yes.
