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Austin Jack Decoster: Ethical Dilemmas

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The purpose of this assignment is to review and analyse a business case which features an obvious ethical dilemma. The chosen business case for this assignment involves: Egg farms in Iowa America, bad practices highlighting the ‘ethical dilemma’, and a crooked entrepreneur named Austin Jack DeCoster, a man responsible for making unethical decisions. Austin Jack DeCoster first started operating his egg business in the late 1940’s at the age of 15 and built up his empire to become one of America’s top ten egg producers in the country (Endo, 2010), housing a “flock of more than 15 million chickens” (Friedman, 2010). Although there is a time line of crooked behaviour from Mr DeCoster reaching back as far as the 1950’s (Fassler, 2010), the specific dilemma mentioned in this assignment came to light in August 2010. The ethical dilemma recorded was that salmonella-tainted eggs had sickened an estimated 1900 people, which then led to the recall of 550 million eggs according to (Foley, 2011). These eggs were produced by Wright County Farms, owned and operated by Mr Austin Jack DeCoster. In May 2010 prior to the outbreak several states noticed an increase in the number of cases related to the bacterial illness, which resulted in a nationwide investigation into all major egg processing companies. During the inspections of the Wright County Egg farm, (Layton, 2010) reported that “FDA investigators had documented multiple unsanitary conditions that may have caused eggs to be

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