Corporate Social
Responsibility Unmasked
"The world biggest company [Wal-Mart]...is seeking to hang on to its
image as America's friendly hometown merchant. It is stepping up its
slate of feel-good television ads, with more spots featuring happy
employees as well as examples of Wal-Mart's community involvement." -- Washington Post article, Jan. 24,
under the headline Wal-Mart Moves To
Enhance Its Public Image.
"The
image of multinational companies working hard to make the world a
better place is often just that --- an image....What's needed are new
laws to make businesses responsible for protecting human rights and the
environment wherever they work." -- Behind the Mask: the Real Face of
Corporate Social Responsibility, a comprehensive report
issued Jan. 21 by Christian Aid, the relief and aid agency of 40
Protestant denominations in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Good News: David Beats Goliath Again
I shouted "Hooray!" over and over again when I read the press release
on my computer screen. If my wife had been at home at the time,
she
probably would have rushed into my room to see whether I had won the
lottery.
The cause of my happy outburst was the news out of Sylacauga, Alabama,
a town of
15,000 people. There the workers in a foreign-owned plant soundly
defeated a management move to oust their union. Why get excited by
that? Well, I've been tracking the ups and downs of that
union since late 1999, and so, during the week of the assassination in
Cambodia, the good news sent my spirits soaring..
Three years ago I wrote a long article that I titled "Playing
Global Catch-Up," which was published in the July-August 2001 issue of
the Foreign Service Journal under
the
title "Can Labor Catch Up with Globalization?"
It described the initiatives
that the world's
labor movements
were taking to cope with that new reality, the global economy -- an
important subject, but not a
topic that fascinates many. To
add a more human dimension to the story, I focused the first fourth of
the
article on a drama centered on workers in Sylacauga, who were demanding
that
their multinational company, Imerys, a producer of construction
materials, recognize their union.
Small Union in Alabama as David Vs.
Corporate Giant in Paris
"It had the earmarks of a David and Goliath confrontation," I wrote.
"Here was a little local union in the little Alabama town of Sylacauga
taking on a giant multinational based in Paris."
The workers won. Voting in a June 2000 secret election supervised by
the National
Labor Relations Board (NLRB), they cast ballots 205 to 181
in favor of their union, Local 3516 of the Paper,
Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy International Union (PACE) of
the AFL-CIO. But this story did not end there. It had a sequel. At its
first opportunity,
Imerys took advantage of a
klinker in U.S. law that allows
management to launch a "decertification" campaign -- a formal way to
kick
the union out of the plant. So on Jan. 21 this year, Imerys
workers had to vote in an NLRB
election again. And they voted for their union again, this
time by a larger margin, 233 to 108.
The victories did not come easy. In its prolonged struggles,
Local 3516 needed, and got, massive
solidarity support from a global union, the International Federation of
Chemical, Energy, Mine, and General
Workers' Unions (ICEM), with which PACE is affiliated. (Sorry about all
the acronyms; they certainly don't speed up a story. Anyway.)
In
August last
year, Keith Fulbright, president of Local 3516, flew to Norway to speak
at the
ICEM world congress to thank the federation and its allies for their
generous solidarity support and to explain why it was so greatly
needed. Fulbright
described some of pre-election (2000) pressures that Imerys wouldn't
dare apply in its
French and British plants:
- A group of men with green shirts labeled "Goon Squad" created a
climate of fear by roaming through the plant to scare likely union
supporters.
- Workers were required to watch propaganda films showing workers
being beaten and terrorized in mafia-controlled unions.
- The plant superintendent told Fulbright that "if I didn't shut
my mouth, I would lose my job, and did I understand what I was
doing...Not only was I going to destroy the company that I worked for,
but the town I lived in."
- "My wife, my children, had threats. I got shot at once, going
down the highway. It wasn't even safe to come out of the union hall."
Prior to this month's election, Imerys
still held workers as captive audiences in anti-union sessions and
sent anti-union mailings to their homes. But this time the company's
pressures
were less intense than before the 2000 election.
"Unfortunately," President Fulbright of Local 3516 said in a
union press
release, "local management is still intent on destroying any
relationship with their employees. However, the union still intends to
work hard to build a partnership with Imerys. Imerys' ethics must
change, and we will not bend to harassment and intimidation."
Collective bargaining negotiations between the two sides are beginning
soon. Local 3516's brothers and sisters in ICEM and beyond will be
watching.
* * *
What
Does This Corporation's
Commitment to Ethics Mean?
As part of its policies on "sustainable
development," Imerys'
headquarters in Paris has a position
on ethical standards that reads as
follows:
"The obligation to comply
with regulations and legislation in force is asserted and strengthened
through the commitment of both Imerys and its subcontractors to abide
with the basic principles defined by the International Labor
Organization (ILO) in its declaration on Fundamental Principles and
Rights at Work and [the] 1999 Convention on Child Labor."
A new
report by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
throws light on some of the U.S "regulations and legislation in force"
that let anti-unionism flourish here.
Assailing Trade Pact He Had Advocated
Joseph E. Stiglitz, who ten years ago, as
a member of
the President's Council of
Economic Advisors, strongly promoted the adoption of the North American
Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), now says it hasn't worked out as
promised. As a result, he is opposed
to the Bush administration's plan to extend it to the rest of North and
South America through the proposed Free
Trade Area of the Americas
(FTAA). He insists that the FTAA would be "an unfair trade
treaty."
The 1993 trade agreement covering Canada, Mexico, and the United
States was passed without "a full and open debate of [its]
consequences," Stiglitz writes in "The
Broken Promise of NAFTA," published in the Jan. 6 issue of the New York Times. His article is
obviously designed to provoke discussion at this time, when "the United
States [government] is bullying the weaker countries of Central and
South America into accepting its terms."
Business Gets Rights It Failed To
Gain Through Normal Processes
As Stiglitz now sees it, NAFTA is
one-sided in the generous benefits it bestows on business and capital,
particularly a "new set of rights" achieved by the treaty route instead
of
the normal legislative process, and enforced with sanctions by
secret tribunals instead of open door procedures:
"Under NAFTA, if foreign
investors believe they are being harmed by regulations (no matter how
well justified), they may sue for damages in special tribunals without
the transparency afforded by normal judicial proceedings. If
successful, they receive direct compensation from the federal
government. Environmental, health and safety regulations have been
attacked and put into jeopardy....
"Conservatives have long sought to
receive compensation for regulations that hurt them, and American
courts and Congress have usually rejected these attempts. Now
businesses may have accomplished indirectly, through treaty, what they
could not get more openly through the democratic political
process. Meanwhile, those harmed by the actions of foreign firms,
for instance by what they do to the environment, do not have comparable
protections of appealing to an international tribunal and receiving
compensation."
Countries Being Pressured To Adopt
Discredited Policies
Turning to other issues in the current negotiations for FTAA, and for a
range of other trade agreements as well, Stiglitz faults the U.S.
government for refusing to discuss agriculture and non-tariff
barriers,
while at the same time pressing "Latin American countries to compromise
their national sovereignties and to agree to investor
'protections.'"
He attacks the U.S. demand that "countries fully
liberalize their capital markets even as the International Monetary
Fund has finally found that such liberalization promotes neither growth
nor stabilization in developing countries."
Stiglitz' analysis of
NAFTA and FTAA clashes with the conventional
"free trade" beliefs espoused by most U.S. economists, embraced by
Democratic and Republican administrations, and
now being promulgated globally by U.S. government trade officials.
Stiglitz is not completely alone. Dan
Rodrik of Harvard and a few lesser known economists have taken a
hard
look at the modern reality of globalization, and are questioning
whether
the theory of free trade, formulated two centuries ago, is
valid in a radically changed world.
(For a new report on NAFTA, visit the Website of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace. For information on the
Free Trade Area of the Americas, check the Website of Global Trade Watch.)
Economist Takes
On the WTO Too
The U.S. media ignored the World Social Forum
held in Bombay, India, from Jan. 16 to 21. Even the New York Times paid very little
attention to it. That's unfortunate. U.S. coverage
of that event, attended by 80,000 people and hundreds of organizations
often dismissed as "anti-globalization,"
could have helped educate Americans to an important fact: that
the brand of
globalization being promoted by the United States government is not the
only -- or the best -- way of running the global economy.
Among the instructive features of the Forum was the participation of
Economics Professor Joseph Stiglitz as a panel member of a seminar on
"Globalization, Economic and Social Security" on Jan. 19. He
broadened his
usual critique of the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund to include the shortcomings of
the World Trade Organization (WTO).
All Three Agencies 'Hurting
Interests of Millions of Workers'
Stiglitz charged all those intergovernmental institutions with being
"responsible for hurting the interests of millions of workers,
including those who live in the rich countries like the United States,"
in the words of an article published Jan. 20 in the Jakarta Post
(but no longer available on the newspaper's Website). The Post's Evi
Mariani, writing from the Forum, quoted Stiglitz as saying: "The WTO
should not push for capital market globalization because this will
increase [economic and social] insecurity. And that will not be the
answer for economic growth in the developing countries."
(The Post's article featured
not Stiglitz but the leader of the
National Federation of Indonesian Labor Unions (FNBI), Dita Sari. She
stressed the need for "solidarity [support] from public pressure groups
in the
industrialized
countries to support labor movements in developing countries," Mariani
reported.)
In an interview
from Bombay published in the Jan 20 issue of France's Le Monde, Stiglitz denied the
accusation, often voiced at the Forum, that the U.S. has become
imperialistic, in the sense of 19th century colonialism.
"On the
other hand," he added, "it is certain that the United States uses its
economic and military superiority in the service of its own
interests and to the detriment of other countries. That's even more so
since the election of George Bush. The President speaks much of
democracy. But unilateralism is not compatible with democracy, and that
poses a real problem for which we have examples in the functioning of
institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade
Organization." (This is my translation of
the French text.)
Drugging the Free Market
Jeff
Ballinger, worker rights activist and director of Press for
Change, is now in Italy helping to develop a worker rights Website at
the human rights center of Pisa University. My thanks to him for
calling my attention to the following letter in the Jan. 8 issue of the
Salt Lake Tribune:
To the Editor:
A car company can
move its
factories to Mexico and claim it's a free market. A toy company can
outsource to a Chinese subcontractor and claim it's a free market. A
major bank can incorporate in Bermuda to avoid taxes and claim it's a
free market. We can buy printers made in Mexico. We can buy
shirts made in Bangladesh. We can purchase almost anything we want from
many different countries, but heaven help the elderly who dare to buy
their prescription drugs from a Canadian (or Mexican) pharmacy. That's
called un-American!
And you think
the pharmaceutical companies don't
have a powerful lobby? Think again!
--Jim
Beveridge, Springville, Utah
Human Rights for Workers: Bulletin No. IX-2
February 2, 2004
http://www.senser.com
Robert A. Senser, editor
Copyright 2004
(Send e-mail)
