Class this week did not start off un-familiarly. Ilana came in to expose PLAers to something many of them had not heard before--the Kol Nidre prayer, which sung during Yom Kippur that asks G-d to "make our vows not vows, our obligations not obligations and our oaths not oaths." I am very familiar with this prayer--it is one of my favorites from the liturgy, and I had just heard it sung in synagogue on Friday night at Kol Nidre services. In Judaism, vows are taken seriously. If you promise to do something, whether to another person or to G-d, you are bound to keep that promise. However, the premise of this prayer is to absolve us of the vows we made and are no longer able to keep, if the other person passed away, if a situation changed making it impossible to fulfill the promise. But it does not excuse us from the promises we make and are able to keep, just fail to do so. It is our responsibility to keep our promises--otherwise we cannot be trusted by friends or by G-d. 

What if the university said the Kol Nidre prayer and thought that it absolved it from all of the obligations, promises and vows it made to its students, those students parents, the faculty and staff that work here and the alumni that contribute to the future of this school? What if the university no longer kept up its end of the bargain in all of the agreements made in contracts?  Employees would not be sure of their benefits. Parents could not trust that their children would be safe away from home. Faculty members could not be guaranteed salaries and that would lead to a decrease in the level of education offered here. Following through with obligations and promises is what allows corporations, universities, big businesses to be trusted by the people around these institutions. When the population finds out the the corporation lied, or broke a promise or stopped offering all that it was capable of offering, a lack of trust forms between the people and the institution. 

If Penn State follows through with its vows and oaths, the students here will be guaranteed a good education, parents guaranteed safety, faculty guaranteed salaries and employees guaranteed benefits. But it is also the responsibility of the other party involved to uphold their end of the bargain too--students have to go to class, parents have to send their students, faculty have to teach and employees have to work. If both of these ends are met and both parties take their oaths seriously, great things can happen. It is when one party doesn't respect the other (like when a company doesn't pay its workers for the work that they are doing) that vows start to get bent and broken, leading to problems within corporations. 

Tonight's conversation on corporate responsibility really made me question the ethical nature of certain industries. We were talking about the cost of settlement during a law suit and how it is sometimes cheaper for a company to settle with numerous clients than to replace the defective property in the first place, like with the case of the exploding gas tank in Ford Pintos. And while it may have made financial sense to settle with these people instead of fixing the gas tank, people were still being injured. Had the gas tank been fixed when the problem was first detected, many people would not have been hurt. The safety of the public in this situation was not as important as earning a good return on their product. 
In a topic more relevant to my life (since I am not in the market for a new car), the food a industry values money over the treatment of animals and workers. In a food class I took last semester, we learned about the meat industry and how animals are given the most fattening food possible so that they will have the most meat possible within the least amount of time. The value here is on the cost spent per amount of meat produced in a certain time, not on the life that the animal leads. Additionally, the conditions in which animals are kept--packing so many animals into a single cage or living area that they animals can no longer move is inhumane. 

But do consumers care? Yes, I would argue that some do care about the treatment of animals (hence vegetarians, animal rights activists and the production of the movie FOOD, Inc.) But I would argue that the majority of Americans would choose the cheapest food product available even if that meant that the food they are eating was not procured in the best possible way. I'll admit that even after learning about the meat industry and watching FOOD, Inc., I was more conscious of the companies producing my meat--where the meat was coming from and the "organic" or "hormone-free" labels posted on the packaging. But at the same time, I was very conscious of the cost. I would be willing to pay a few bucks less to have the food come from a little further away even if I knew that it meant more fossil fuels were used in the transportation of my food. 

So what do we have to do? I think there is an expectation on both the part of the company to share more information about how the product is being produced and on the part of the consumer to go out and seek that information. If you say that you support the fair treatment of animals and the workers that slaughter those animals, why would you then go and buy meat from a company that does not treat the animals or workers fairly? We consumers have to learn what the companies are doing (even if they do not want to share that information--we consumers have a right to know how our food is being produced). And companies also have to be more transparent. Hiding the processes makes a company seem untrustworthy, like they are doing something illegal that they do not want anyone to find out about. If there is nothing wrong with the way a company is working, what is the problem with sharing the way that company works with the consumers who buy those products? 

We have to learn about the companies behind labels.