September
28, 2004: Multinational corporations have clearly
become the most powerful institutions on earth. It is also
clear enough, even to big business enthusiasts, that such
companies are often guilty of exploiting workers and degrading
the environment, whether in First or Third World nations.
What is less clear is how best to reduce the harm. Some argue
for increased governmental regulation and stiffer penalties
for corporate malfeasance. Others, especially businessmen,
argue for trade liberalization and minimal bureaucratic interference.
Jeffrey Hollender and Stephen Fenichell, co-authors of What
Matters Most, are more interested in a third approach:
convincing big business of the “need for a good reputation,
a strong brand, and a reduced risk of liability, not just
legal, but moral liability” (95).
It may sound pie-in-the-skyish (“Now be nice, Mr. Megacorporation”)
but Hollender and Fenichell are not naïve about the profit-maximizing
nature of multinationals. Hollender is the CEO of Seventh
Generation, a company that makes household cleaning products
based on sustainable principles, and he did not develop the
company by holding hands with his employees and singing "We
Are the World" (although a masseuse does show up each
Thursday morning, compliments of Seventh Generation). He knows
that ‘fiduciary responsibility’ to stockholders
can drive businesses into a tooth-and-fang approach to moneymaking
and that it is hard to disclose unsavory information to the
public when no one is demanding transparency. At the same
time, Seventh Generation is devoted to the sustainable principle
behind its name, derived from the Great Law of the Iroquois
Confederacy: “In our every deliberation we must consider
the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”
By holding to this principle, Seventh Generation has developed
a loyal base of customers who want products free of petrochemicals
and other toxins. In this light, sustainable business practices
are not only commendable but also profitable.
Only in the epilogue does Hollender go into extensive detail
about the rise of Seventh Generation. Instead, he and Fenichell
devote the bulk of the book to demonstrating how other companies,
especially the largest ones like Dow, Nike, McDonalds and
Intel, are making small but important changes. In 1998 the
CEO of Nike, Phil Knight, announced a six-step plan to improve
labor conditions in its factories, including opening them
to independent NGO monitors, raising the minimum age of workers,
expanding worker education programs, and ensuring that all
offshore factories meet U.S. Health and Safety Standards for
indoor air quality. Nike factory conditions did subsequently
improve. Of course, this did not stem from a sudden upwelling
of humanitarianism in the Nike leadership. Activist groups
like Global Exchange helped make public Nike’s factory
conditions, and it was not long before the Nike swoosh became
equated with sweatshops. Nike didn’t want the bad press,
and so it made minor but significant changes. In the age of
information, the public’s perception of a company is
crucial to the company’s success. Transparency, accountability,
and responsibility (all chapter titles, tellingly, in What
Matters Most) may seem anathema to many CEOs, despite their
rhetoric. But a tarnished corporate image will bode ill for
that important asset known in business jargon as ‘brand
equity,’ or in English, customer loyalty.
Hollender and Fenichell do not deny that greenwashing—the
disinformation spread by a company to present the image that
it is environmentally responsible—exists. It is not
without reason, after all, that ‘greenwash’ is
now listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. Nor do they gloss
over corporate corruption and criminality: Shell’s complicity
with a brutal Nigerian government in order to extract oil
from the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta; Intel’s schmoozing
with local and national government to evade environmental
reviews of its toxic emissions; Union Carbide’s refusal
to claim responsibility for the gas leak that killed thousands
in Bhopal, India; Exxon-Mobil’s continuing effort to
fight damage claims for the Valdez oil spill “to their
everlasting dishonor” (93). But the authors also argue
that in times where the public is more attuned to looming
environmental catastrophe, companies are doing more than just
spreading disinformation: Starbuck’s has introduced
a fair trade and organic line into its coffees; McDonald’s
Sweden branches recycle ninety-seven percent of their solid
waste, and fifty percent of those stores run on sustainable
energy; Nike uses three percent organic cotton in all of its
materials (a small percentage but a large amount of the global
organic cotton market) and is the only shoe brand to have
eliminated all PVC from its sneakers.
Although Hollender and Fenichell seem to think these are
all laudable steps taken by the titans of the corporate world,
they acknowledge that many others committed to socially responsible
business would disagree. For example, they quote Paul Hawken,
author of The Ecology of Commerce (one of the holy books of
sustainable business) on McDonald’s Corporate Social
Responsibility Report:
“[The] Report presupposes that we can continue to have
a global chain of restaurants that serves fried, sugary junk
food produced by an agricultural system of monocultures, monopolies,
standardization and destruction, and at the same time find
a path to sustainability… [N]othing could be further
from the idea of sustainability than McDonald’s Corp.”
(102)
Another critic of the ‘greening of big business’
is Judy Wicks, a friend of Hollender's and owner of White
Dog Café in Philadelphia. She sees big business as
fundamentally opposed to social responsibility: when wealth
and power are so concentrated, sustainability becomes a pipe
dream.
The charm of What Matters Most is that it offers a mélange
of ways to examine what is called ‘social corporate
responsibility.’ Can there be anything positive in the
fact that conglomerates are buying out the small independent
organic companies? Gary Hirshberg, founder of organic yogurt
company Stonyfield Farm, thinks so. In his view, selling 40
percent of Stonyfield to food conglomerate Group Danone was
a way of ‘infecting’ them with organic products.
Ben Cohen, on the other hand, regrets the decision—made
under financial pressure—to sell Ben and Jerry’s
to the giant Unilever. His advice to others who are considering
selling off their independent companies: “Don’t
do it!” At the end of the book (after a handy ‘Resources’
section that gives a comprehensive list of books to read and
organizations to contact on sustainable business practices)
is an appendix of “Who Owns Who.” An example from
the appendix: Company—Ben and Jerry’s. Which Makes—Ice
Cream. Now Owned by—Unilever. Which Produces—Lipton,
Slim-Fast, Skippy, Dove Soap.
Although I may raise a cynical eyebrow at What Matters Most
when I read, “Like Starbucks, Nike’s heart certainly
appears to be in the right place,” I can also shrug
a shoulder and keep reading. The writing is intelligent and
refreshingly replete with a rainbow of perspectives. The authors
are not out to knock corporate scoundrels and ideological
scalawags off their pedestals (although they do make a few
gleeful stabs at Milton Friedman’s economics) but rather
to sing to the public and to big business—using non-toxic
biodegradable dishwashing liquid for their guitar—that
the times they are a-changin’.
Constantine Markides is a writer and former farmhand
living in Portland, Maine. He can be reached at cons76@yahoo.com.
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