Chiquita Global Case Study
Historically, Chiquita had poor labor relations and made decisions solely based on profit. After Chiquita’s bankruptcy, they were able to do a few impressive things to begin turning around its bad reputation and poor performance. Chiquita strengthened its commitment to the Better Banana Project, in which external auditors audited all of Chiquita’s farms annually. This commitment helped improve environmental and worker conditions. They adopted the SA8000 standard because they felt it would give them the most credibility with external stakeholders.
Chiquita’s farms were located in impoverished countries in Latin America and they would target poor people to work for them because they knew they didn’t have to pay them a lot of money. The book stated that since bananas are produced all year around, local communities have a close tie to the success of Chiquita. For example many of their employees lived in company owned houses; Chiquita provided electricity, water, medicine and other types of services. Despite that there labor relations were dismal. The human resource department faces challenges to maintaining good labor relations with their employees to stay away from bad press. They can do this by increasing wages, benefits and working conditions.
Yes, Chiquita’s global corporate responsibility program creates a conflict between shareholders and other stakeholders. I think that the main stakeholders for Chiquita are their suppliers, employees, customers, competitors, government and other NGOs. Chiquita’s corporate responsibility program has increased costs which affects it suppliers, which has increased prices for their customers. Employees were affected positively and received higher wages and better working conditions. Competitors had higher standards to compete with after their corporate responsibility program.
Chiquita’s past leadership was quite poor. It lacked innovation, good decision