Student Number : 9307680N -
MA research report -
School of Philosophy -
Faculty of Humanities / Many individuals working in South Africa earn extremely low wages. I briefly
discuss these low wages, and examine their implications for the shareholders
(owners and controllers of businesses) in South Africa. I argue that shareholders,
in particular, have a moral duty to increase the absolute level of the wages of
their lowest paid workers. In this essay I choose to develop this position in the
context of Kantian distributive justice. I seek to join distributive justice and
Kantianism together to evaluate the moral status of the lowest paid workers. I
propose a just means of allocating the benefits of wages according to the work
performed that shows respect for workers’ autonomy.
Current South African stakeholder theory includes ‘equity’ claims arising from
compensatory justice issues. However, based on the arguments in this essay, I
believe we can see that there is also a definite independent moral duty in
distributive justice for shareholders to increase the amounts that they spend on
their worst-off employees. This spend is not necessarily only the wage costs for
these employees, but is also on self-empowerment tools such as education and
community services with which employees can build their life plans.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/2140 |
| Date | 26 February 2007 |
| Creators | Laird-Smith, Stuart |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 163364 bytes, 4673 bytes, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf |
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