Your company wishes to form a joint venture with a multinational. You had to choose one from the list below :?

Right, I'm going to be deliberately provocative here. The issues are NOTHING LIKE as black and white as they might first appear.

I couldn't possibly answer the question based on so little information, but I wouldn't rule out 2, 3 and MAYBE 4, depending on the individual organisation.

2: Surveillance

Let's be honest, this is what companies like Wipro (the largest outsourcing firm in India) do. Is it a pleasant place to work? Well, they have about 1,000 applicants for each job, because conditions there are far better than the alternatives. If the WORKERS are happy, who am I to judge?

Many parts of the world have a different view of "personal privacy" to the view we have in Western Europe. For example, I'm regularly shocked at how little privacy the US gives its citizens' personal data, in things like the selling of student information by Universities to credit card companies.

3: Nuclear power

Nuclear power ain't great, but not is continuing to burn fossil fuel. The fact of the matter is that we in the West use about 10 times as much energy per head as India or China. If we hope to provide better standards of living for EVERYONE in the world, not just those of us lucky enough to be born in Europe or North America, then we need to come up with a way of generating more power without completely stuffing the ozone layer. In the long term, solar, geothermal, wind and wave have to be the answers. In the medium term, nuclear feels "less bad" than some of the alternatives.

4: Child labour

While we in the West love to wring our hands and moralise about how terrible it is to have children working for multinational countries, that's because we're a bit blind.

We seem to have this idea that if they weren't working, they'd be having happy, playful childhoods, with schooling five days a week.

In fact, at least according to Amnesty International and the United Nations, the FACTS are somewhat different.

They revisited an area in Bangladesh where, after pressure from US consumers, US retailers had pulled out of factories, and discovered that, rather than being in schools, the former employees split into three groups:

- Those working in fields (typically harder work and longer hours than the factories had been)

- Those working for local companies in sweatshops (typically WORSE conditions than the multinationals had provided)

- Those working as prostitutes.

Under those circumstances, child labour PROVIDED it was done in the context of mixed work/learning companies (which do exist) isn't something I'd rule out.

Personally, though, I'd rather work with a company like, say Dezign Inc. in Harare, Zimbabwe, that provides funding for education to the CHILDREN of workers, rather than using the children to work (which I guess means that I'm happy with "1" as well.)