Corporate Social Responsibility

Human Rights Reader 190 [No.1 of 3 in a short series on non-actors in the human rights arena].

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY DOES NOT REVOLVE AROUND HUMAN RIGHTS CONCERNS OR CHARITABLE INTENTIONS; IT REVOLVES AROUND BUSINESS INTERESTS.

"There is one and only one social responsibility of business --to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engage in open and free competition without deception or fraud". (Milton Friedman)

1. Beware: corporate social responsibility (CSR) is not just another buzz-word and it does have relevance in human rights (HR) work. CSR is to be understood as a branding strategy. More often than not, it represents a series of initiatives by some of the global giants to deviously position themselves as labor-friendly and as environmental stewards. Accordingly, corporation leaders are prone to say nice things about social and environmental matters, only to, then, carry-on business as usual. In al truth, the ultimate relevance of CSR still really is to please the shareholders who are the ones who (in principle) call the shots.
[In Coca Cola's I. Neville's words: "Governments can enforce accountability, but they cannot engender responsibility. Responsibility is a choice, and CSR standards allows us businesspeople to make that choice". ...Indeed, it would seem that it is high time for Coca Cola to make that choice].

2. There is thus often reason to doubt honest commitment to CSR. More often than not, the social responsibility standards set by Western-based transnational corporations remain unconvincing --and if those are unconvincing, so are the HR principles they purport to espouse. Voluntary, vague and unenforceable, in last instance, social responsibility standards are not a step towards a more fundamental reform of corporate structures in the direction of the respect of HR; instead, they are distraction from it. Only exposing and rejecting these standards for what they really are is a step towards addressing the abuse of corporate power.

3. The question that this leaves us with is: Are more sinister corporate interests camouflaged through 'CSR-talk' making host-communities-where-corporations-operate believe that their interests coincide with those of the respective corporation?

4. It is simply not enough for corporations to engage in 'make-believe', sometimes making deceiving (or 'half-baked') commitments to its workers and the communities they are drawn from. Fancy brochures in which companies congratulate themselves on such achievements cannot be trusted to the word. The CSR-card should thus not be allowed to play itself out as a, in our case, HR public relations card, particularly in the case of corporations with spotty records on labor rights and on the rights of nature.

5. In any case, CSR standards make a series of pledges, most of which, one may believe, are self-evident to any responsible person. Moreover, they often promise action will be taken 'where appropriate' and 'over time'... Therefore, for practical purposes, these standards are meaningless.

6. For even a pinch of credibility, the certification of CSR actions must, at the very least, be carried out by external auditors (...but when auditors announce they will be coming-by to inspect, you can imagine what happens at the industrial plant beforehand...). (M. Busse) Therefore, only bottom-up initiatives from local communities are a guarantee of autonomously monitored adherence to CSR principles.

7. Furthermore, having stated CSR documents from many companies must not result in local authorities relinquishing their responsibilities in the area of monitoring social responsibility, the compliance with labor rights and other human rights, i.e., situations in which CSR initiatives purport to compensate for local governance failures in this area.

8. For us in HR work, if CSR is to make sense, it must genuinely and sustainably contribute to the fight for HR, for dignity, and against poverty, hunger, abuses in the workplace, despair and destitution.
Otherwise, at best, CSR programs will achieve little islands of improvement in oceans of HR abuses.

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
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Adapted from D+C, 34:4, April, 2007 and D+C, 34:12, December 2007.