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6 Reasons Why Corporations Fail to Do the Right Thing
Six reasons why international business remains dangerous to workers and the environment, even when its leaders genuinely want to do better
Four years ago yesterday, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing 11 men and spilling thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf. This Thursday is the first anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,100 garment workers.
What has happened in the time since these disasters? BP was barred from drilling in U.S. deepwater—until last month. Western clothing brands are upgrading Bangladeshi factories, but the fundamentals of their business haven’t changed: Brands outsource production to factories serving multiple clients in low-wage, low-regulation countries (not just Bangladesh).
The lack of fundamental change in these industries—and others, such as financial services after the 2008 crisis—suggests disasters like these are bound to happen again.
Indeed, every corporate crisis evokes a sense of déjà vu. The Rana Plaza catastrophe bore echoes of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The unfolding story of General Motors’ faulty ignition switches brings back 1970smemories of the Ford Pinto, whose infamously fire-prone fuel tanks went unfixed because upgrading them would have cost more than the $200,000 Ford set for a human life.
Why does the corporate world fail to learn from its tragic past? From 1999 to 2008, I worked for BP in Indonesia, China, and at the company’s London headquarters. It was my job to assess and mitigate the social and human rights risks to communities living near major BP projects, a role that existed because the executives I worked with understood that what was good for those communities was good for our business.
I did innovative, progressive work bringing in experts and setting up partnerships and programs to benefit contract workers and neighbors of big BP projects in the developing world. But, obviously, I did not manage to prevent the Deepwater Horizon disaster, or the 2005 explosion of a BP refinery in Texas City that killed 15 people and injured many more.
I wanted an answer to that question, and I decided to write a book, reflecting on both my own experience and, also, documenting the experiences of my peers in other companies who similarly thought they were making progress mitigating risks to stakeholders, but then were faced with evidence to the contrary: supply chain managers in apparel companies who were sourcing at Rana Plaza; tech executives working to protect privacy but still seeing users persecuted with the data their companies collect.
Why, with this global invisible army of people working to prevent them do these disasters still happen? Why do they still happen when there are an unprecedented number of CEOs talking about corporate social responsibility (CSR)? More importantly, what does this “invisible army” need to succeed?
Here are some of the themes that emerged from my interviews and reflections:
1. People lie. More than one person I interviewed told me a story of touring a factory, doubling back on the pretense of forgetting something, and catching workers turning in their goggles or other protective gear. Factory owners will hide bad news if failing an audit means losing business.
A few companies like H&M are said to have committed to multi-year contracts with suppliers, which are hoped to strengthen relationships between firms and suppliers, enabling them to address problems together, and remove incentives for suppliers to lie about conditions for fear of losing business. But in the meantime, as Jeremy Prepscius of Business for Social Responsibility, where I’m a human rights advisor, told me, “There’s always one good factory, and there’s always one that lies better than everybody else. So guess which one would have the cheaper price?”
2. People don’t talk to each other. Big organizations often operate in distinct, siloed divisions, and multi-disciplinary issues like human rights and sustainability often fall through the cracks. As director of corporate citizenship at Microsoft, Dan Bross oversees assessments that cut across multiple functions like legal and product development to identify potential risks to users. He told me, “I have a horizontal job in a vertical world.”
3. Safety and responsibility cost money—and no one gets rewarded for disasters averted. Even those companies not living explicitly by Ford’s 1970s model have to perform some sort of cost-benefit analysis. Since the work that I did for BP and that my peers do for their companies is preventative and complex, it can be hard to justify the expense of any one intervention.
Source: http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/6-reasons-corporations-fail-right-thing/
