I’ve had a nagging question for a while, so today I’m finally going to ask out loud.
I currently work for a small company - I was the third person to join, and now two years later there are about a dozen of us.
You see, my company is for-profit. Everything we do, we do to get money and pay dividends to investors.
However, we also have a charitable arm. This charitable arm does nothing at all as far as I’m concerned. My boss tends to use ‘the charity’ as a way of getting discounts. For example, if we need to get a legal licence and the cost of getting it is lower for charities, we get it for the charity (even though the licence itself is used in for-profit work). If there is an expensive piece of software, we always ask if we can get a discount for a charity (even though, again, it is only used in for-profit work).
Time and again ‘the charity’ is being used to get discounts for the business here and there. I really do not feel comfortable with it. I know it is immoral - can anyone tell me if it is illegal, and how illegal it is? I’m working up the courage to tell my boss how uncomfortable I feel about it, so I want to get an understanding of where the situation leaves us as a company.
Ta!