To help start the conversation and keep the focus of this discussion thread, please consider the following questions:
- What does it mean for organizations to work in cooperation with corporations?
- Why do organizations chose to work with corporations in a collaborative way? What is to be gained from collaborating with corporations?
- What is the role of the organization in this kind of collaboration?
- What is the role of the corporation?
- When is it a good idea to use collaborative tactics with corporations versus more confrontational tactics?
Share your experiences, thoughts, ideas and questions by adding a comment below or replying to existing comments!
Nowadays we are facing a reality different than the one that was faced when international human rights law started to develop. At that time, National States were the main subjects of international law, and also the main violators of human rights.
Today, without diminishing National States importance, huge corporations —which sometimes have even more power than National States— play very important roles in world context, and sometimes they have the power to violate human rights, even in vast ways.
Assuming that as a starting point, we need to focus on how we can improve the situation of those persons whose human rights are being denied by the actions of corporations.
In that line, I think that history shows that as well as sometimes punishing the offenders (countries or state officials that violated human rights) might be effective, preventing the violation of human rights also might require working in a collaborative way with corporations, so as to make them comply the international standards of human rights. In that sense, there are many examples of countries that have improve their human rights record not by punishment but by positive influence of human rights organizations, or international organizations that work in a preventive way (for example, Interamerican Commission on Human Rights). Even some international finance organisms have had such influence.
Therefore, I think that that can work for corporations too.
Although it is essential to engage with corporations, we musn't forget that most forms of corporate abuse occur in countries with little capacity to enforce national and international protection mechanisms. This is made worse by the fact that often local NGOs lack resources, and that their activities in defence of human rights is criminalised. Take, for example, Guatemala. Despite a request by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in 2010 that operations at the Marlin gold mine in San Marcos department be suspended, the mine was still operational at the end of the year. After much discussion, the Guatemalan authoroties stated that there was neither any environmental contamination nor human rights abuse of the local Mayan population. This despite the fact that the IACHR resolution was the result of studying many complaints and hard evidence of human and environmental abuse. The IACHR deliberated for years before requesting that the government suspend the activities of the Marlin mine until all grave concerns have been dealt with.
Although in the past states were the culprit, nowadays we have a situation where states collude with corporations. The result is that affected groups feel powerless to influence either of them. From my experience, it is difficult to engage with corporations. How do you make comply, when there no consequences for ignoring standards? Some of them like Goldcorp (owner of the Marlin Gold mine in Guatemala which I have already mentioned) have been subject to relentless lobbying by their own shareholders and international organisations. I believe the solution lies in strengthening international mechanisms, and making governments responsible for not enforcing their own legislation. Among other things, this would require stamping out corruption and consulting communities.
Gladys, thank you for your interesting comment.
Regarding your comment on the Guatemala case, let me say first that what the IACHR issued against Guatemala was a precautionary measure, which is a provisory and non conclusive order to a certain country. That means that there is no definite and positive information of the situation when the decision is taken. So, after those measures were issued, the same IACHR took them away, because it trusted in the information given that there was no risk of contamination.
Anyway, and trying no to focus on one specific case —I think that that would impoverish the dialogue—, I do believe that there are benefits on engaging with companies. A closed position fixed in not engaging with corporations leaves one of the key players away, and to move forward you need them all. Somehow, it is difficult to say to companies to fulfill a certain human rights standard if you do not listen them the difficulties or problems they might have to achieve them. That is why even in the case you use a confrontational tactic, dialogue should never be left out.
Moreover, if I make a list of pros and cons, I don’t see any pro in leaving out of the dialogue corporations. And I see a big disadvantage: trying to solve problems without the one you suppose is causing it is much more difficult than including him in the quest for the solution
That is why, in my opinion, solving the real problems require some kind of engagement or dialogue among all the parties of the problem (States, Victims, and Corporations).
I do agree with you that international mechanisms should be strenghened, as well as that governments should be internationally responsible for not enforcing international or national legistation. But in my opinion these ideas do not contradict with the concept of opening dialogue with corporations in order of solving human rights issues.
Ignacio, you said:
Do you know if there are currently such dialogues taking place? If so, what have been the results of these dialogues?
If such dialogues are not currently taking place (or very few are taking place), how do you think dialogues between states, corporations, and victims could become more common?
Dear Josh,
Thank you for your question.
An example of what I am trying to say might be the following:
http://www.nus.org.uk/PageFiles/491/CokeEngagement%20v39.pdf ,
http://www.tdm.com/Politica/2012/03/13/En-Paraguay-acuerdan-mesa-entre-m... .
You can see here that there is a dialogue among the corporations and NGOs, and the state is somehow present, calling for the dialogue (Paraguay) or intervening in some other way (India)
The results of these dialogues are difficult to measure, but I tend to think that getting public compromises from corporations is a positive outcome (as you can see in the examples). These compromises, if states are involved in the dialogue, can be validated by them (the states). Thus, the compromise achieved, homologated by the state, acquires much more legal strength than if it is just a private compromise between communities and corporations.
Before answering your last question, I would like to say that what I am proposing is nothing more than a deliberative approach to solve these problems. It would be an application of deliberative democracy: everybody has to listen to everybody. So, to answer your question, I think that for this approach to become more common, it would be needed:
a) a State that calls all the stakeholders to dialogue;
b) NGOs and Corporations that respond to that call in good faith;
c) Publicity and transparency in all the process.
Great questions, Josh! And great examples, Ignacio! Thanks for sharing.
I also posted a comment in the discussion thread titled How do organizations work with corporations to improve human rights? about an example of this kind of dialogue (between orgs, communities and corporations). It is an example of how organizations are working with corporations to ensure that indigenous communities have free, prior and informed consent regarding the use of their land. A collaboration between the NGO Business for Social Responsibility and First Peoples Worldwide, an Indigenous advocacy organization, produced a corporate training initiative that helps the private sector to build more effective, constructive relationships with Indigenous peoples. Check it out and add your thoughts!
I believe it's important to engage with corporations... but as someone working in the field, also want to recognize the truth of Gladys' comments re the difficulty of engaging. What I've found is that a lot of problems stem from a fundamental lack of trust between NGOs and corporations. The corporations think that the NGOs are a bunch of irrational troublemakers, and the NGOs think that corporations are motivated only by financial returns. A lot needs to be done to build trust between the two camps. This can only happen if corporations are more transparent and open to engagement with NGOS, and if NGOs maintain professional research and campaign standards---for example, by ensuring their research is sound before publishing the results of negative studies, and refraining from using emotive language in their campaigns.
In Papua New Guinea there are various examples of NGOs collaborating with private industry - but this then raises the interesting question of these NGOs' independence from corporate interests. For example, some NGOs have been contracted by a LNG pipeline developer to carry out social mapping along the length of the pipeline. On one hand, this collaboration is important because experienced, committed environmentalists and community workers are involved in analysing community dynamics along the pipeline. On the other hand, these NGOs are viewed by some now as an extension of the company and no longer an independent voice.
How to engage with corporations, while maintaining independence? Particularly in an environment where funds are short, except within the private sector..
Thank you so much for highlighting these challenges, Naomi! It would be great great to hear from others how they have been able to maintain independence from corporations.
It would be very beneficial to also hear from you and your colleagues about what worked well in their initiatives working with corporations! We can learn a lot from what works well, just as we can learn from challenges and how they are overcome. Thanks!
I came across an interesting blog post - More on corporate responsibility NGOs and how to work with them - that lists the different kinds of NGOs that work with corporations, and how corporations can work with them. Did you realize that corporations were having this same conversation, but exchanging ideas on how to work with NGOs? Interesting...
The blog's author, Toby Webb, identifies 6 types of NGOs and offers advice to corporations for each regarding who they are, how a corp can work with them and what to watch out for (this speaks to the issue of trust that Naomi raised above). Here's an example:
4) Multi-stakeholder groups. Examples might include the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, The Ethical Trading Initiative, The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, The Fair Labor Association, the Marine Stewardship Council or the Better Cotton Initiative.
How can you work with them?
Clearly signing up to the relevant groups or using their standards helps! Multi-stakeholder groups are the only game in town for traditional credibility, although they are coming under pressure to deliver scale with many large companies, as are some partnership NGOs above.
What should you watch out for?
Their ability to deliver scale, to ‘protect’ you from media/campaigner attack, and a slow governance system that can often be behind where some companies are today. The variation in these groups is huge. Some are too small to change industries right now, others so big they move at the pace of the slowest member, which can be very slowly indeed. Another tip to remember is that working with an MSI is NOT an excuse for doing nothing else in your business, if you will forgive the double negative. These groups are often at the cutting edge, but scale issues will mean you need a dual system to drive progress in the value chain where they don’t yet reach. Nestle and coffee certification / internal management standards is a good example of this.
Frustration at the pace of change is also a common problem, but slow, steady and inclusive can deliver you sustainable results, even if the reach is limited, MSI’s mostly represent the ultimate direction of travel in your industry when it comes to sustainability.
This blog post is a great way to look inside what the corporations are thinking of NGOs! What do you think of this?
Hi Gladys,
Thanks for your insightful comments in why we should work with corporations. I’m Kristi, a student at St. Catherine University currently taking a Conflict Resolution class at St. Thomas.
In an earlier thread, you wrote:
“I believe the solution lies in strengthening international mechanisms, and making governments responsible for not enforcing their own legislation. Among other things, this would require stamping out corruption and consulting communities.”
I am curious to know if you have any input on how we, workers from the margin, can strengthen corrupt governments. I also see that the corruption of governments is what holds back a lot of justice that needs to be addressed in countries.
Thank you!
Great points, Kristi! Corruption is most certainly one reason why some corporations are allowed to work without regard of human rights impact. I wanted to point out that New Tactics has hosted a few dialogues on how citizens and NGOs can address and confront corruption:
I would encourage you to explore those converstaions to find lots of ideas on how citizens can fight corruption!
Hello Glevys,
I was reading one of your other posts from a different dialogue (Mining, CSR and Latin America). That in conjunction with your comments in the this last post made me wonder if you think a corporation puts a strain on a community in terms of relationships? Do you think there are instances where relationships have been broken or trust has been lost within a community because of the effects of a corporations? If so, have you and others at LAMMP worked to rebuild those ties? This last January, a couple of students in this class and I went to Ecuador and we saw effects of petroleum extraction on nature but also in the communities which is part of the reason why I am so interested in your work. Thank you again for sharing your experiences thus far.
Grace Laskowski
I also completely agree with glevys.
For most people at risk of corporate human rights abuse, the reality is that of a massive power differential between rights-holder and duty-bearers - both corporate and governmental. What´s more, to the extent there may institutions in place to support promotion and protection of the rights of at-risk groups (e.g. ombudsman, national human rights institutions, accessible local legal advice providers), awareness and knowledge of how human rights standards apply to businesses is still today, unfortunately, minimal.
The silver lining, though, is that this capacity deficit is now being widely recognised, and it is being responded to in various ways. For example, the International Coordinating Committee of National Human Rights Institutions set up a Working Group on Business and Human Rights with the aim of improving knowledge and awareness, and producing training materials, to address the specific needs of NHRIs Regional Networks and individual NHRIs have likewise identified priority areas and are undertaking measures of various kinds to strengthen business and human rights capacities (see e.g. http://www.humanrightsbusiness.org/icc+working+group+on+business+and+human+rights and http://nhri.ohchr.org/EN/Themes/BusinessHR/Pages/Home.aspx ).
OECD Watch is embarking on an 4-year programme of capacity building with civil society organisations focussing on grievance mechanisms for corporate abuses, including but not limited to the National Contact Point / specific instance procedure under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises (http://oecdwatch.org/home/view?set_language=en) .
ICJ has done incredible work in mapping obstacles to access across a range of jurisdictions (e.g. Nigeria http://documents.icj.org/Nigeria.pdf) and FIDH has produced amongst other things a great handbook on recourse mechanisms for victims and NGOs (http://www.fidh.org/-Business-and-Human-Rights-?id_mot=26) .
And there are many other examples.
Capacity building, peer learning, documentation and information will not, of course, trigger an overnight transformation of situations where inequality, disenfranchisement and collusion, as you mention, between state authorities and private interests conspire to perpetuate gross violations of human rights through environmental damage, land grab, suppression of legitimate trade union and civil society activities , conflict over or fuelled by natural resources, or unlawful diversions of state revenues through corruption or tax evasion. But rarely, in that kind of context, does enactment of national or international legislation have that effect, either. Again, I think the best solution is a combination of approaches in parallel - looking for opportunities to tighten legal regulation and enhance access and scope of legal remedies, while also maintaining a strong focus on capacity building at the local level, to ensure a genuine, bottom-up, participatory approach to enforcement driven by rights-holders themselves as far as possible.
Sorry I stopped contributing, but a nasty cold kept me in bed.
The discussion is very interesting, but I think it is important to realise that not all corporations are the same. For example, those involved in clothes/shoe manufacturing are more susceptible to public pressure because sales depend to a large extent on the public trusting that the company is neither involved in HR violations nor exploiting workers.
Mining companies are an exception, because there is very little public awareness of who the companies are and of how minerals and precious metals such as gold are produced. The exceptions are Shell, BP etc and several other household names.
It goes without saying that it is important to engage with governments and corporations. After all there is no solution to the problems without them!
However, there are barriers at every level of engagement. At the local level, communities ( and women in particular) affected by mining companies usually experience great difficulties in engaging with a mining company, and there are several reasons for this. First of all communities do not have scientific evidence to prove beyond doubt that water contamination (or cracks in the house or any-other problem) are the direct result of the company's activities.
Communities can tell that the water has changed colour or that there is a shortage of it, and can link these issues to the company's arrival; but apart from their "empirical knowledge" they have no way of providing the hard evidence that companies and governments require.
Companies on the other hand, can always hire experts who will provide evidence (as happened with the Marlin Mine in Guatemala) that there is no contamination. The end result is that nobody accepts responsibility for the contamination, and the communities live with the consequences.
As communities lack knowledge and resources, and have no political power, they request support from NGOs to document their situation and expose HR abuses as a means to put pressure on local governments and get a resolution to their problem. With a few exceptions, the great majority of NGOs cannot get a company to respond to concerns. This power imbalance, coupled with lack of consultation mechanisms, means that quite often the only recourse left open for communities is the protest.
In my experience, at the national level only a handful of NGO engage directly with corporations and usually not to mediate but either to provide training or carry out EIAs for them. Over the years with the support of the UN, some international NGOs (among them IUCN) have successfully engaged with corporations to discuss broad issues such as mining within protected areas or to obtain corporate endorsement of international standards. Many years ago OXFAM Australia advocated on behalf of Peruvian communities affected by an Australian corporation and was instrumental in setting up negotiating tables between communities and the company. The result is far from straightforward. Some grass-roots leaders and their groups walked out of the negotiations arguing lack of power, whilst the company felt that OXFAM's intervention had been crucial in resolving the conflict. But as already mentioned by others, NGOs that provide services to corporations risk losing credibility.At the international level too NGOs engage with corporations during their AGM. With the support of NGO during an AGM a member of the affected community makes direct representation. Unfortunately, at AGM companies usually deny responsibility. They even reuse to admit there is a problem but at least shareholders become aware of issues that are not discussed in the company's annual report
For those who asked about LAMMP's work.As a means to solve grievances LAMMP does not engage directly with corporations in representation of those affected . At the international level LAMMP supports the Working Group on Business and Human Rights but at the local level our approach is to strengthen knowledge among our partner groups and to provide them with resources and opportunities so that they are able to make direct representation with the authorities, expose corruption linked for example to lack of enforcement of legislation that impacts on corporations. Usually companies refuse to meet/engage with community groups that oppose their activities. This is because the great majority of grass roots groups challenge the current decision-making process associated with mining. They fight not for additional royalties to go to their communities but for the right to be consulted about government decisions that will have long-term impact on their communities and livelihoods.
Finally, I have noticed that much of the discussion under this thread is putting emphasis on the role played by NGOs in finding a resolution to the conflict on behalf of the communities. This is a tricky area because from time to time communities reject the support of NGOs on the grounds that they share different visions about the problem and its solution.
I believe increasingly communities are eager to represent themselves, and corporations do not accept NGOs during negotiations on the grounds that they are not directly affected by the activities.
Thanks so much for starting the conversation, Ignacio!
One helpful way of thinking about this, I think, is that it is sometimes effective to use confrontational tactics (like "naming and shaming" to embarass offenders) and other times it is more effective to use collaborative and cooperational tactics (like rewarding businesses that do something good for labor rights). How do you know when to use which type of tactic? I think it really comes down to understanding the incentive and motivation of the corporation. Reputation means a lot to corporations - but does it mean more than something else?
It will be great to read the thoughts and experiences of those of you that have had to make these decisions around which tactics to use. How did you decide? When do you know it is the right time to use confrontational tactics? When do you know it's right to use cooperation?
Your welcome Kristin.
Going to the question you propose —it is a very hard question— I have several ideas.
First, I think that confrontational tactics might be, sometimes, more effective for the organizations than for the real victims.
Second, I think that confrontational tactics should be accompanied with some kind of dialogue. Often it happens that corporations demonize human rights organizations, and human rights organizations demonize corporations, closing the door to dialogue. And that is not a good way of advancing in the situation towards the final goal, which is the respect for human rights.
Third. Reputation means a lot to corporations. No as much as money, but it means a lot. The challenge here is how to translate the loss of reputation into a loss of money.
Fourth. In my opinion, working with companies can be very useful. I would say that the conditions to engage in a serious fashion with a company are: 1) engaging at the top level of the corporation; 2) periodically evaluating the compliance of the goals set forth in the dialogue.
Ignacio,
Thanks for your participation in this dialogue. You have provided great perspectives on this topic.
I especially appreciate your comment,
It seems to me that the work of NGOs with a mission to protect human rights must be measured by outcomes for the people they serve. Yet I imagine this is difficult to do. Typical measurements of organizational outcomes - like reports, court cases, and media campaigns - provide indirect evidence of service to the victims of human rights abuses.
Do you - or others in this dialogue - know of examples of outcome assessment that measure the direct impact on victims? If so, please share those encouraging stories.
Mike Klein
Conflict Resolution Instructor
Justice and Peace Studies at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, USA
Mike,
it is difficult to find what you are asking for. Nevertheless, I have seen some of some organizations that are not related to business and human rights, but to human rights in general. There is an NGO that works on the right to food, agains infant malnutrition, and its results are measured in the number of children they have recovered (www.conin.org).
As you can see, it is not a typical human rights NGO. But they work directly with the victims.
Ignacio, your statement about the power of multinational corporations is affirmed in a disturbing way by a 2005 report from the Rand Corporation entitled, "Alternative Futures and Army Force Planning: Implications for the Future Force Era". One of six scenarios for the year 2025 includes this ominous forecast:
Perhaps the interests and activities of multinational corporations will continue to align with elite leadership in politically and economically dominant countries, which in turn may align - or not - with the protection of human rights. Given such dire predictions and related military planning in anticipation of these scenarios, it is the interest of all of us, of humanity, to find a different way forward.
If corporations are motivated by profit and returns to shareholders, how might military intervention - to counter them or support them - change corporate willingness to assess and improve human rights impact?
I completely agree with Ignacio´s comment above.
Which is more effective, punishing corporate actors for wilful or negligent failures to comply with national legal or international human rights standards, or incentivising, educating and collaborating to promote knowledge, internalisation of respect for relevant norms, and prevention?
Of course the answer is that neither is a complete solution. Both are necessary. The real challenge is in striking the right balance between the two, and finding the right combination - the "regulatory techonology" - for a given issue or context. There are no silver bullet solutions in this area, and the reality, in my view, is that only a diverse and continually evolving patchwork of approaches - some at local, some at transnational, some at global level, some internal to companies, some multistakeholder, some judicial and some voluntary can deliver the respect and compliance with human rights, and effective remedies for breaches where they occur, that we want to see.
In fact it was this very question that first triggered my interest in the business and human rights area. While researching on the issue of restraint-related deaths in police custody in the UK, I ventured into the regulation literature, a branch of legal sociology encompassing studies of different approaches to addressing police deviance, as well as on health and safety and environmental compliance in specific industry sectors (see e.g. amongst a number of seminal studies J Rees, Hostages of Each Other :The Transformation of Nuclear Safety Since Three Mile Island (1994, Chicago, University of Chicago Press), E Bardach and R Kagan, “Going by the book: The problem of regulatory unreasonableness (1982, Philadelphia, Temple University Press); J Braithwaite, “To Punish or Persuade: Enforcement of Coal Mine Safety” (1985, Albany, SUNY Press).
These studies, I thought, offered a compelling account of the complexity of attempting to regulate, through legislation, conduct of individuals and systems inside corporate entities - whether public or private - when each has their own distinct social reality, incentive structure and normative system. Indeed, a number of other theoretical perspectives would also suggest a need for nuance in this area - including law and society approaches (e.g. Selznick`s work of the 1970s and 80s on industrial democracy), systems theory (a la Luhmann and in particular Gunther Teubner´s work on MNEs), critical legal studies, and rights-based approaches to development - all of which add the dimension of whether standards should be determined globally or centrally, or via local, empowered participation - which is arguably the vision . While many human rights advocates and practitioners are very familiar with acknowledging contextual and sociological factors as challenges to effective implementation in civil society contexts (e.g. transitional justice), I think for a time we have been less sensitive the impact they have on trying to build a culture of compliance in the field of business impacts on human rights - leading to a debate on "regulation or voluntarism" which has at moments been over-simplified in its terms.
Some of my own ideas on the potential role and structure of global legal standards on human rights and business I tried to summarise in a recent submission to the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights (http://www.humanrightsbusiness.org/files/About%20us/Methven%20OBrien%20UNWG%20sub280212.pdf, and http://www.humanrightsbusiness.org/files/About%20us/NYU%20WP%20Outline%20O'Brien.pdf ). I would love to hear from any of you with critique of what I suggest!
Johnson & Johnson include the following in their Statement on Human Rights:
We work to support our commitment to human rights through strong governance and policies as well as through the provision of clear guidelines for implementation throughout our operating companies. Responsibility for human rights follows our management structure and resides in our local operating companies. Implementation of the many policies, guidelines, and practices that inform our commitment to human rights is managed by the relevant corporate and business group functions.
We also expect our business partners to commit to respecting human rights, as outlined in our policies, and encourage them to develop similar standards of their own. We require our manufacturing partners to operate within our Standards of Responsible External Manufacturing, and we regularly conduct risk-based audits of these partners to ensure compliance with these standards. In addition, we are working with industry partners as part of the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Initiative, a collaborative effort facilitated by Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) to improve social, economic, and environmental outcomes for all those involved in the pharmaceutical supply chain.
How closely do corporations follow such statements, if they even have them in the first place? Would it be possibly to ensure that complicance with local and international standards be included in monitoring and evaluation of programs? But most importantly, what can be done to make human rights as important to corporations as profits?
Ana, I appreciate your last question in the post above,
It reminded me of the good work some of our students are doing to tie human rights and profits together through the fair trade movement. Complementing top-down approaches toward compliance through governments and international bodies, the customers of corporations can have influence their impact on human rights.
I invite my Conflict Resolution students to share examples of their work to call attention to corporations that violate huamn rights, and promote corporations that uphold human rights as central to their mission, thus binding them to profits.
As a current student of Mike Klein's Conflict Resolution class and a Justice and Peace Studies Major it has been exciting to do research on different social issues that play a prominent role in the global economic sector. Something that has been a major focus for me these past couple of semesters have been the issue of sweatshops, fair trade and finding a way to work within the system of having garment factories and also providing safe working conditions and fair wages.
A prominent sweatshop free activist is Jim Keady and his work to pressure the Nike Corporation to instill safe working conditions for their workers and provide livable wages. He has traveled to different colleges and conferences to give his speech about sweatshops. Having attended his speech in November of 2009 I instantly became intrigued with this problem and how it could be addressed. At this time I was still in high school and so my work was focused on ensuring the clothing products that were used at my high school were fair trade.
After my first semester at the University of St. Thomas I was asked by fellow students Melissa Seymour and Elizabeth Phyle to join them and work towards increasing fair trade awareness on campus and fair trade clothing at our college bookstore. This is where trying to find a company that made college apparel and did it while providing livable wages and safe working conditions became interesting. The difficulty with many Corporation labor practices is their desire to reduce as much production cost as possible. This desire resulted in the outsourcing of products by many corporations. Nike being the most prominent and successful Corporation for college apparel has been the focus and target of many different case studies.
Much to the surprise of myself there is a company that makes college apparel and is also fair trade. Alta Gracia and their parent company Knights Apparel have worked vigorously to expand their brand and clothing across the States. Currently over 450 different colleges have Alta Gracia apparel, and to our happiness we are able to report that the University of St. Thomas is one of the 450 colleges.
Alta Gracia pays their workers $510 a month, and their legal minimum wage in the Dominican Republic is $150 a month (altagracia.com). The big attraction towards Alta Gracia is that they are fair trade and the misconception of fair trade products is that the fair trade products end up being expensive but their prices are very comparable to other companies. Alta Gracia prides themselves and explicitly say on their website that they are able to pay the fair trade wages of the workers and have comparable prices by taking in less of a profit. This notion of taking in less of a profit seems hard for a capitalistic society that thrives off profits and making more money to comprehend and to understand the reasoning.
So with a little back story about Alta Gracia and different corporations practices, I want to pose the question: Are you familiar with other organizations that use this business model? How might this tactic be applied with other corporations to promote human rights?
What a rich discussion in this thread already. Apologies I´ve been delayed in contributing due to travel in Bolivia out of range and a subsequent laptop meltdown! However I look forward to trying to respond to some of these most interesting questions in a few hours´time after I get off my next flight.
To be able to seriously break through the vicious cycle of humiliation so frequently found in the 'market" and for people to stop exchanging their equality for survival, it is an imperative for all members of civil society, any group, association, business and/or corporation to learn, know own and apply human rights standards and principles as relevant to their lives and to the lives of others..
Especially in the case of corporations --many often taking the place of governments --responsible for the future of humanity, their activities must be made to abide by the human rights framework which unfortunately --I can attest to it-- is known only to many as a litany of violations and not as a positive creative strategy for development.. --for building a just society from which we can gain in trust and in respect for all to have the five basic needs: Food, Education, Housing, Health and Work at livable wages. These are interrelated and interconnected... inalienable and not negotiable in the process of 'improvement'.
Therefore, all of us joining in a dialogue "to improve human rights" must ask ourselves if we really know that human rights are the foundation for development and for peace..-- and of course the guiding light for living together and for whatever we choose to be or do, even if we are CEOs of corporations.
I do not accept the idea "to improve” --from where to what?
It is not an issue of “improvement "; it is a call for adopting throughout everything we do including what b we do to control the lives of others to abide by the holistic and unpostponable mission of applying the comprehensive framework of human rights . No human right can violate another; and this is the case of what the market does.
-Shulamith Koenig, Recipient of the 2003 UN Human Rights Award
PDHRE- People's Movement for Human Rights Learning
Shula Koenig,
I agree totally with you. The laws have to be applied especially when we deal with people who are not educated.
Local authorities have the responsibility to make sure that their people are safe. if a corporation in any given country is violating people's rights it is because the government is not doing its work.
Corporations, governments and the people need to be informed of the human rights and the consequences of not respecting them. many times, victims don't even know that their basic rights are not respected because they don't know them.
I believe in educating all the stakeholders.