Green business feeds

The new GRI G4 leaves known defects firmly in place, says one commentator from Amsterdam.

A report from Day 1 of the Global Reporting Initiative conference in Amsterdam on the latest changes to the reporting standard.

By Giles Hutchins

“At times of great winds, some build bunkers, while others build windmills,” goes the ancient Chinese proverb.

We are in the midst of the “great winds” of economic instability, social upheaval and environmental un-sustainability. Will it be bunkers or windmills that we build?

Transformational times of destruction and re-construction inevitably invoke fear. It takes great courage to break rank from business as usual. The challenge with any paradigm shift is that it requires us to both let go of the old, tried-and-tested ways that are ingrained in our collective psyche and embrace novel, as yet unproven ways of being.

There is a threshold which individuals, organizations and communities need to cross. It takes real leadership to transform a business in such volatile times. Incidentally, the root of the word leadership is “leith” which means to go forth and cross the threshold, to die and be reborn.

The “new norm” of dynamic non-equilibrium in business requires a shift in conventional management and leadership styles from over-reliance on top-down, hierarchical, risk-based approaches to managing within complexity. This new style of management juggles and combines varying styles and techniques. It encourages bottom-up ideas and thinking to flourish; establishing an all-pervasive values-led work ethic while guiding and coaching.

Complex, adaptive, resilient businesses of the future recognize that change emerges unpredictably, and that over-arching bureaucratic mechanisms no longer assist emergent organizational evolution. The role of leadership is to actively participate in enabling and facilitating local change, by encouraging effective communications with clarity of understanding of how to act and interact.

Each and every one of us plays our part in leadership of the future by helping others to co-create towards positive outcomes.

Leaders of the future unleash human potential by instilling trust through authenticity, clarity of purpose and openness to continual learning. Leaders are the learners, the ones who seek “personal mastery” (as Peter Senge puts it) while remaining interconnected to the collective whole.

Leaders are people who understand who they really are, aspire towards greatness and inspire greatness in others (not egoic greatness but soulful greatness). Leaders become teachers, taking time to assist and empower others to lead themselves. The quest for optimal leadership is about encouraging a creative tension — balancing personal mastery with openness and a deep sense of belonging amongst a diverse community of stakeholders.

Leaders first transform themselves and then guide and coach others, creating a safe passage for the followers to cross the threshold. Here are some tips which can be applied by each of us today at no financial cost, but with much benefit to lead in transformational times:

A quiet mind helps ensure a successful outcome. Be still and allow the mind to quieten as often as possible throughout the day. From silence the mind is more able to identify the right choices for the road ahead. As profoundly said, ‘the success of the intervention depends upon the state of the intervener’.

Be in the moment. Learn to really listen to yourself and others. The local environment provides vital feedback, “feel” this feedback, tune-in and act/adapt accordingly.

Ensure clarity of direction for the meandering path ahead. What are your instincts saying? What really turns you on? What makes your heart sing? Why are you doing what you are doing? Follow your heart with a clear mind. Allow it to navigate your transformation with passion and conviction; this way successful change is made.

Each step provides chances to make positive change happen. We need to endeavour to take each step, each interaction and intervention with authentic­ity.

Recognise, engage and empower the interested parties. Ten­sions may be uncomfortable and energy/time-consuming, yet they are inevita­ble and can help hone right navigation for the path ahead. Through stakeholder engagement, tension can become a constructive force stimulating learning and development.

Transcend perceived boundaries to see the ‘inbetweenness’; the intercon­nected systems of relationships and resources within and across our business ecosystems.

Problems and challenges abound and the glass can often seem half-empty in challenging times. Explore solutions, the art of the possible; what can be done (rather than what cannot) through solution-creating, collaborating, prototyping and experimenting. Channel energy from fear and worry to the exploration of solutions. This requires courage.

A Rainforest Alliance workshop found common threads emerging among pioneers in sustainable production and sourcing.

By Philip Monaghan

You may have missed it, because you had more important things to do – like worry about your mortgage, choice of kids school, extreme weather events or the Syrian conflict. Earlier in 2013, the chief executive of Toyota Motors mentioned plans to begin to eradicate the use of Terbium from all its cars. 

This casual mark was in fact a major statement of intent by a forward looking business leader. Why so? 

Terbium is used in the magnets of electric motors in Toyota's hybrid vehicles. The problem is that Terbium is a rare earth element, the type also used in computers and mobile phones, and increasingly in such short supply that many analysts predict supply to outstrip demand in a couple of years.

Worries are so acute that the world’s biggest producer -- China -- is now beginning to restrict exports, resulting in the U.S. re-opening previously uneconomical domestic mines. In short, this remark was about ensuring the resilience of Toyota's supply chain and future competitiveness.

So what, a few less cars on the road is not a bad thing, right? After all, even electric ones do nothing to counter congestion, right? Maybe, maybe not.

We have all seen the mega trend figures: in an era of a global population boom and rapid urbanization, combined with fast changing weather and diminishing natural resources, “smart” cities that harness the latest technologies in transport, building and utilities can provide a platform to decouple consumption from growth.

But how is the ensuing mushroom of smart city initiatives around the globe factoring in the type of concerns raised by Toyota?

Recently, Infrangilis attempted to map the various smart city initiatives around the world – led by networks of cities, big business, academia and think-tanks – or some combination of the above. The goal was to understand what the strategic intent (e.g. resource security, cost effectiveness, poverty alleviation etc) and type of intervention (e.g. redesign production processes, reduce consumption, recover materials, etc.) was of the variety of initiatives in the marketplace, with a view to identifying and filling possible gaps that need to be filled.

This mapping exercise was part of a wider study to be released later in 2013. Initiatives included Connected Commuting (New Cities Foundation), Embarq (WRI), Low Carbon City Alliance, Smart City Stakeholder Platform (European Commission), and Urban Age Programme (London School of Economics), amongst others.

We stopped counting when we crossed 50. It was like painting San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. By the time we thought we had an answer, a couple of new smart cities initiatives were launched.

None of the set of initiatives we examined had a focus on rare earth elements though. There was a clear bias toward energy consumption in buildings and transport, lowering carbon emissions and reducing operating costs.

In short, the various smart city initiatives appear to be over focused on connecting the wires, at the expense of joining up the dots when it comes to systemic change.

This raises a very important question. Is it still appropriate to let a thousand flowers bloom to simulate innovation on the smart city concept, or is it now time to bring order to the market place, through standards for sustainable urbanization?

Yes, standards are boring, but they also play a pivotal role in guaranteeing quality outcomes: like they do in food hygiene or children’s toys – so why not do the same for smart cities?

Like it has in the past, the UN can and should play a vital convening role here to ensure different voices from the private sector, state and civil society are heard in formulating a universally recognised approach. The newly convened Sustainable Development Solutions Network is a good place to let this important work begin.

Other suggestions? Leave a comment or connect with the author via Twitter and Facebook.

Meet the chief of staff who helped make San Francisco International Airport a leader in sustainability.

With carbon dioxide levels past the 400-ppm threshold, risks to businesses are looming even larger, driving the needs for faster, and bigger, action.

At last week's Living Future conference, engineers and architects discussed designing and operating buildings that achieve net zero energy use.

How 15 entrepreneurs fared in Boston in front of two VCs and thousands of viewers.

It aims to address social justice and equity issues, including diversity, worker rights, health care and occupational safety.

How is large-scale systems change accomplished? A 10-year project called Re-AMP may offer a few clues.

By Ron Schultz

I have spent the last dozen years of my life dedicated to the world of social entrepreneurship and helping social entrepreneurs become more successful in their endeavors. And, if you ask my very patient wife, it has not been as financially rewarding as it has been Karmic-ly worthwhile. But make no mistake; it has been incredibly worthwhile and rewarding work. 

 And with the recent publication of Creating Good Work – The World’s Leading Social Entrepreneurs Show How to Build a Healthy Economy, I am starting to attain a certain recognition within the community, which is greatly appreciated and highly valued. And having gained this perception from my colleagues and peers, I find it necessary to apply to myself what Craig Dunn, at Western Washington University, so aptly coined in CGW and what social entrepreneurship is all about: Deliberate Disruptive Design.

Over the last two decades, social entrepreneurship has grown and begun to mature… well, many of the early social entrepreneurs have certainly begun to mature. And with that maturation, new innovative approaches have surfaced. 

There is no question in my mind that the must-do role of the social entrepreneur is a critical step in the process. But in our justifiable need to venerate these early adherents and their amazing accomplishments, we have begun to stray away from what will make this work even more effective and successful. And from my perspective, that is a distinct shift from the rugged individualist we call a social entrepreneur, to the rugged collaborationist, or members of Social Innovation Collaboratives. 

If -- as Todd Khozein, Carrie Freeman, Michael Karlberg and Ron Garan insist in Creating Good Work -- collaboration is our only real hope to attain the kind of reach we are seeking to solve our social challenges, then continuing to focus and proclaim the lone and heroic efforts of individuals goes against the tide.

Social Innovation Collaboratives certainly contain social entrepreneurs, but they also include many others who share the vision of the common good, but may not be as entrepreneurial. And that is good and necessary evolution.

In moving from social entrepreneurship and the 17th century inspiration of the rugged-individualist conquering the wilderness, Social Innovation Collaboratives are the logical next step into the future. We can’t do this alone and affect the reach we require.

That is a very specific choice of words. One of the driving forces behind social entrepreneurship has been this notion of scale. Will the idea scale? Like the rugged-individualist, scale is a concept from another century. Scale is an industrial age term that applies to mechanical processes.

Social Innovation is not a mechanical process, but a complex relation-based undertaking. It is not a linear network, either. If anything, it is a cloud of interaction that is far less ordered than a network and far more fluid. It spreads. Our human connections may feel like a network, because we encounter a series of connections and they seem as if they are happening linearly, but again, the continuity can only be seen when we look back, not as we move forward.

And within that cloud of complex interactions, we stretch, reach, reform, combine and collectively join together to rain down and bring renewal. We can only reach the ground and bring the vitality and re-vitality toward which we endeavor by joining together, and forming Social Innovation Collaboratives.

The fact is, this is how it has always been done.

We find our partners, our co-conspirators for good, and we get to work. This is not to say that an individual can’t have a profound impact on the process but our true success as a global effort comes in, well, our global collective efforts together.

We need to consciously begin creating Social Innovation Collaboratives, that have at their core not the veneration of the individual, but the salvation of our society. It is together, as social innovation collaborators, that we can reach our goals.

And in this reformulation process, we don’t have to exhaust ourselves trying to lift the burdens we face, alone. We aren’t made for that kind of Herculean labor. We simply aren’t as effective alone as we are when we join together as a social unit reaching far into our societies, to shift the often un-shifting with our collective effort. 

So social entrepreneurs: don’t let go of your vision, but do let go of your need to do it alone.

We don’t need a gazillion social entrepreneurial efforts vying for the same scant resources and accomplishing only a bit of the picture because the focus settles on the idea that “I have to do it” rather than “only we can do it together.”

Social Innovation Collaboratives find funding together, share capacity together, reach deeper and further together, and accomplish more together. More than we can ever hope to accomplish alone.

By Ron Schultz

I have spent the last dozen years of my life dedicated to the world of social entrepreneurship and helping social entrepreneurs become more successful in their endeavors. And, if you ask my very patient wife, it has not been as financially rewarding as it has been Karmic-ly worthwhile. But make no mistake; it has been incredibly worthwhile and rewarding work. 

 And with the recent publication of Creating Good Work – The World’s Leading Social Entrepreneurs Show How to Build a Healthy Economy, I am starting to attain a certain recognition within the community, which is greatly appreciated and highly valued. And having gained this perception from my colleagues and peers, I find it necessary to apply to myself what Craig Dunn, at Western Washington University, so aptly coined in CGW and what social entrepreneurship is all about: Deliberate Disruptive Design.

Over the last two decades, social entrepreneurship has grown and begun to mature… well, many of the early social entrepreneurs have certainly begun to mature. And with that maturation, new innovative approaches have surfaced. 

There is no question in my mind that the must-do role of the social entrepreneur is a critical step in the process. But in our justifiable need to venerate these early adherents and their amazing accomplishments, we have begun to stray away from what will make this work even more effective and successful. And from my perspective, that is a distinct shift from the rugged individualist we call a social entrepreneur, to the rugged collaborationist, or members of Social Innovation Collaboratives. 

If -- as Todd Khozein, Carrie Freeman, Michael Karlberg and Ron Garan insist in Creating Good Work -- collaboration is our only real hope to attain the kind of reach we are seeking to solve our social challenges, then continuing to focus and proclaim the lone and heroic efforts of individuals goes against the tide.

Social Innovation Collaboratives certainly contain social entrepreneurs, but they also include many others who share the vision of the common good, but may not be as entrepreneurial. And that is good and necessary evolution.

In moving from social entrepreneurship and the 17th century inspiration of the rugged-individualist conquering the wilderness, Social Innovation Collaboratives are the logical next step into the future. We can’t do this alone and affect the reach we require.

That is a very specific choice of words. One of the driving forces behind social entrepreneurship has been this notion of scale. Will the idea scale? Like the rugged-individualist, scale is a concept from another century. Scale is an industrial age term that applies to mechanical processes.

Social Innovation is not a mechanical process, but a complex relation-based undertaking. It is not a linear network, either. If anything, it is a cloud of interaction that is far less ordered than a network and far more fluid. It spreads. Our human connections may feel like a network, because we encounter a series of connections and they seem as if they are happening linearly, but again, the continuity can only be seen when we look back, not as we move forward.

And within that cloud of complex interactions, we stretch, reach, reform, combine and collectively join together to rain down and bring renewal. We can only reach the ground and bring the vitality and re-vitality toward which we endeavor by joining together, and forming Social Innovation Collaboratives.

The fact is, this is how it has always been done.

We find our partners, our co-conspirators for good, and we get to work. This is not to say that an individual can’t have a profound impact on the process but our true success as a global effort comes in, well, our global collective efforts together.

We need to consciously begin creating Social Innovation Collaboratives, that have at their core not the veneration of the individual, but the salvation of our society. It is together, as social innovation collaborators, that we can reach our goals.

And in this reformulation process, we don’t have to exhaust ourselves trying to lift the burdens we face, alone. We aren’t made for that kind of Herculean labor. We simply aren’t as effective alone as we are when we join together as a social unit reaching far into our societies, to shift the often un-shifting with our collective effort. 

So social entrepreneurs: don’t let go of your vision, but do let go of your need to do it alone.

We don’t need a gazillion social entrepreneurial efforts vying for the same scant resources and accomplishing only a bit of the picture because the focus settles on the idea that “I have to do it” rather than “only we can do it together.”

Social Innovation Collaboratives find funding together, share capacity together, reach deeper and further together, and accomplish more together. More than we can ever hope to accomplish alone.

The chain's grocery stores no longer will send food waste to landfills; instead, biogas generated by the waste will help power a distribution center.

by Les Leopold

On the first day of autumn 2011, I’m driving to leafy Chatham, New Jersey, to get my first live look at a trading room. Located in a bright new office townhouse complex, it’s exactly like what you see in the movies, only smaller. Eight casually dressed traders speak in hushed tones to one another and to clients on the phone, each monitoring multiple screens. One desk holds five screens, including two Bloomberg terminals and another streaming Twitter.

Yet beneath this modest, ordinary trading room, powerful forces lurk in dark pools.

At this very moment, the traders are struggling to protect their clients from invisible sharks that can gobble up foes at the speed of light. They are doing battle with strange predators who shun the sunshine and others whose mysterious movements will entrap you without your ever realizing it. If this is a movie set, it’s for the Twilight Zone, not for Wall Street.

My guide into this netherworld is Joe Saluzzi, the cofounder of Themis Trading, LLC. Joe and his partner, Sal Arnuk, run this small firm, which navigates the shoals of electronic trading for its 35 or so institutional clients. They seem as if they’re doing all right, but they don’t make a million dollars an hour.

They don’t trade any of their own money. Instead, their focus is helping their clients trade stocks, while protecting them from the predators that now stalk electronic markets.

Joe, a slim, athletic Brooklyn native, fills the room with his energy and friendliness. A born storyteller, he makes me feel right at home in this foreign world as he bubbles with ideas and insights.  Joe obviously loves what he’s doing. In fact, he’s on a mission, an urgent one that gets him talking faster as he warms to his subject. He is on a crusade to expose the dangers of high-frequency trading and the perils of a fragmented electronic financial market.

Joe starts by giving me a crash course on how our modern financial markets work. Until a decade ago, a few stock exchanges had a three-hundred-year-old market monopoly on trading. Then it all broke apart. “The market” turned into an arena for rapid electronic trading, and new competitors flocked to the scene.

There are now 13 electronic exchanges in the United States on which you can buy the same financial instruments. “They are the same shoe store,” Joe says. “There are 13 shoe stores selling exactly the same item.”

Yet, buying and selling on these exchanges without getting fleeced is a lot harder than going to your local shoe store for a pair of Keds. “That’s where it gets really tricky,” says Joe. “Because sometimes there are the invisible shoe stores called dark pools, which are basically exchanges that are not lit up.”

He explains:

“Each of the 13 exchanges is a lit venue, something I can see on my machine. I can see their quotes. And then there are dark pools that are inside these quotes. So they sell shoes, but you also don’t know what shoes they are selling because no one sees them. But you can still buy them if you want."

Naturally, this all makes perfect sense to Joe, who’s been navigating these dark pools for years. Yet I’m still wondering how you buy shoes in an unlit shoe store, and how quotes can harbor dark pools. Joe tries to help me out: 

“You go in there, and you’re just guessing. You’re hoping there is something in there. Other traders will hide in the dark. They will say, ‘Okay, I’m willing to sell something at $12.16 when the [lit] quote was offered at $12.19.’

Then I come along to see if anyone is hiding in the dark, and I buy it at $12.16. Boom, we’ve got a match. Nice trade. Theoretically, that’s how it’s supposed to work.”

So Joe saves some money for his client by hooking up directly with a seller who was hiding in the dark pool. The lit shoe price on his screen was $12.19, but Joe got it in the dark for $12.16, for a savings of three cents per share, which adds up if you are buying a lot of shoes.

All in all, Joe says that beyond the 13 “lit” shoe stores, we can shop in 40 to 60 dark pools that also sell the same shoes. The downside of pool shopping, though, is that we don’t know which shoes and what sizes until we wade in.

On the upside, however, at least with all of those lit shoe stores and dark pools, we have many venues for buying and selling shoes. All of that competition should ensure that we’ll get good prices and low transaction costs wherever we go. Yes?

No, says Joe.

Because lurking in all of these markets, whether sunny or shady, are high-frequency traders (HFTs) — mostly hedge funds and investment banks. With their super-computers (and super-programmers, mathematicians, and computer scientists), these guys can complete trades in nanoseconds. They trade so often during the day that they now account for up to 50 to 80 percent of all of the volume we see on the stock exchanges.

This is a very big deal: HFTs are estimated to rake in from $8 billion to $20 billion in profit per year. Now, this is the business you want to get into. 

The problem, says Joe, is that many HFTs — though not all — are predators. They lurk in the dark pools waiting to ambush you. So as Joe wades into a dark pool to buy or sell a certain stock, he has to protect himself from predator HFTs.

You have to find the [stocks] before someone realizes that you’re looking to buy them. If they realize that you’re doing it, they’re going to buy them ahead of you and sell them back to you later [for a higher price]. That’s a predatory hit.

When Joe wants to place a large order for a client, he often has to scour all 13 markets and many dark pools to find enough reasonably priced stocks to buy. He has no choice but to venture into dark pools from time to time. If he’s not very, very careful, though, a high-frequency trading computer owned by a hedge fund or a large investment bank will sniff him out and front-run his trade, squeezing money out of Joe’s clients.

To understand how this works, let ’s follow Joe deeper into his Twilight Zone.

Joe wants us to understand that the stock quote we see on our computers is not reality. It’s a picture of reality that is slightly delayed. When high-frequency traders look at their screens, they see something different. In fact, they see the future. It’s as if they occupied a parallel universe that runs on an accelerated clock. We’re not talking about minutes here. Not even seconds. According to Joe:

“They can see in microseconds, which is a millionth of a second. They can see in nanoseconds, which is a billionth of a second. They are approaching the speed of light. So they can see inside the quote. It’s getting really crazy.”

And it gets even crazier. HFTs buy data feeds from the electronic exchanges that contain a trove of information about who is doing what on the exchanges. Joe explains that “every nugget, every little key stroke that I enter is being tracked by some exchange and is in the feed.” That includes “What time did you enter your order? How long was the order in? Did you cancel the order? What time was the order canceled? Did you reenter the order? What price did you adjust it to?”

HFTs use that information to develop models for figuring out exactly how orders are flowing. “That’s how they make their predatory assessments,” says Joe.

It all happens at a warp speed the rest of us can’t even see. To ensure that they can move at close to the speed of light, HFTs “co-locate” their machines right next to one or more of the electronic exchanges. That’s extremely expensive, but it cuts down on the distance their data have to travel and therefore reduces the time. The aim: to predict the quotes before they are posted. An HFT, says Joe, “can build a quote faster than what the public sees. You can see the future.” And if you, the HFT, are seeing the future, he adds, “You can pretty much make money guaranteed every time.”

So next time you see that cute baby on the E-trade commercial buying and selling his stocks, remember that between the time he hits the trade button and the time the trade goes through, he's being fleeced by a high frequency trader.

It's like taking candy from a baby.

_______________________

Step 8: Have the Right People Whispering in Your Ear

Step 7: Don’t Say Anything Remotely Truthful

Step 6: Rig Your Bets

Step 5: Betting Is For Chumps

Step 4: Use Other People's Money

Step 3: Rip off Entire Countries Because That's Where The Money Is

Step 2: Take, Don't Make

Step 1: How To Make A Million Dollars An Hour In Twelve Easy Steps

Missed the conference? Read the rundown from an attendee's perspective.

The tool gives facilities a score for their water management efforts by shedding light on water use and prioritizing opportunities for conservation.

[View the story "Unilever's #SustLiving Trends Worldwide: Goals, Challenges & the Way Forward" on Storify]

 by Francesca Rheannon 

It's rare to have something good to report on Bangladesh, but it happened on May 13th.

That’s the day the global garment industry began to wake up to its collective responsibility to make sure that something like the Rana Plaza building collapse in Savar -- and the Tazreen factory fire before it -- never happens again in Bangladesh.

First to get the ball rolling was H&M, the largest buyer of garments from Bangladesh, responding to a mounting chorus of pressure. Spanish firm Inditex (parent company of Zara) quickly followed. Other firms soon fell into line; among them, Primark and Benetton, which also responded to public pressure to sign. Only two American retailers were among the group, PVH and Abercrombie & Fitch.

As the May 15th deadline drew to a close, 32 garment retailers had answered the call to enter into an accord with NGOs, trade unions and the government of Bangladesh to substantially improve safety conditions in the factories supplying their goods.

The terms of the accord include inspections by independent auditors, public reporting of the findings and mandatory fire and building safety reforms, paid for by the retailers. In addition, the firms are required to cut off business with any factory that refuses, or is unable, to correct the hazards.

Not least, the pact empowers workers and unions to be part of the process, with union-led worker training and worker-led health and safety committees. In addition, workers will have the right to refuse dangerous work, according to the Clean Clothes Campaign. The accord is legally binding.

And that’s what stuck in the craw of most of the major American retailers, which refused to sign on.

Gap, which has been praised for its previous work to ameliorate factory conditions in Bangladesh, came under extraordinary public pressure to sign the Savar Accord. In an attempt to make the agreement more palatable, the company tried to strip out the language mandating binding arbitration with the unions.

But the move prompted a firestorm of condemnation and, rather than backing down, Gap backed out of the deal. Garret Strain of the group United Students Against Sweatshops -- which carried out a online petition urging Gap to sign garnering more than a million signatures – tartly noted to CSRwire:

“if Gap actually believed in social responsibility why wouldn’t they agree [to mandatory controls]?” 

Wal-Mart, and J.C. Penny, along with all other major American retailers refused to the sign the Accord, objecting to the binding nature of the agreement and the level of power granted the unions. 

So, why is it so important for the unions to have an equal place at the table? Why can’t the companies rely on NGO partners that they’ve been working with all along to carry out reforms in the factories? 

Verité founder Heather White wrote in a recent post that the NGO’s have compromised their monitoring function by entering into confidentiality agreements with the companies, rendering the process nontransparent and allowing the retailers to escape true accountability. She told CSRwire:

“The role the NGOs have been playing has not succeeded in preventing these devastating fires. These factories have been monitored many times -- and millions of dollars are being spent on these social audits by the companies without resulting in any positive changes"

White says the unions’ participation in the Accord was a key new step:

"When you get the unions involved, I'd be very surprised if they'd be willing to sign nondisclosure agreements and make the entire process nontransparent. Normally when the unions get involved, things have to be quite a bit more open so that they can share information with their networks and allies.”

Without independent unions empowered to make them accountable, any plans by U.S. retailers to improve conditions for workers in their supply chains would be virtually unenforceable.

Workplace health and safety is a core human right – as basic as the right to life, as we understand when we contemplate the terrible toll of the Rana Plaza and Tazreen disasters in Bangladesh.

It brings along with it all the rights workers need to ensure their health and safety: the “right to know” about the hazards they face on the job, the “right to refuse” to work under hazardous conditions, and the right to seek redress of harm without risking retaliation. Those rights lead in turn directly back to the right to organize unions, because without them, workers have no real power to improve their conditions.  

In the years since I started to write about CSR, I have seldom heard the right of workers to organize in strong independent unions mentioned in polite company. To me, the omission has been glaring; I spent nearly 20 years working with unions as an advocate for health and safety on the job, training workers and providing emergency assistance.

I cut my teeth in the occupational health movement under the tutelage of the man who wrote much of the OSHAct, the great union organizer and environmentalist, OCAW Legislative Director Tony Mazzochi. Back before Reagan de-fanged American Labor by firing striking PATCO air traffic controllers, I wrote a study for OSHA about worker health and safety education programs in the U.S. I compared worker-led programs with those led by employers and universities.

The result: worker-led programs were by far the most effective, because they empowered workers to understand the real hazards they confronted every day, to establish union health and safety committees that could go head-to-head with management and to engage in collective bargaining with the company over workplace conditions. 

Real health and safety on the job means that workers share power over the conditions of their labor with their employers. That is why so many companies loathe the idea of robust unions. It is also why The Gap and Wal-Mart refuse to join the accord. Management resents any encroachment on its control – even when it otherwise commits to CSR.

But after Rana Plaza, it’s no longer tenable to pretend that CSR in the supply chain of global corporations is possible without real worker empowerment. 

If its promises are fulfilled, though, the Accord will be a huge step forward for worker rights.

And it will be a laboratory for the real world implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, developed by John Ruggie of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The Guiding Principles lay out three areas of concern: responsibilities of states, of corporations, and access to remedies for negative impacts caused by business operations.

As David Schilling of the faith-based investor organization ICCR explained to CSRwire:

"Under the UN Guiding Principles on Human Rights, it is the state's duty to protect the human rights of its citizens, including the actions of external parties; that includes companies. In Bangladesh, there have been huge challenges because, as the industry has grown rapidly, basic workplace human rights have not been fully respected. Clearly the government of Bangladesh has not enforced the laws on the books related to workplace human rights and in many instances has been hostile to the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively"

In addition to the state’s responsibility for safeguarding the human rights of its citizens, the Guiding Principles establish the corporate responsibility to respect human rights. That involves “putting into place serious human rights due diligence to assess the impacts that companies have in their operations and supply chains on the full range of human rights,” including workplace human rights, Schilling says, with ILO standards part of the process.

The third pillar of the UN Guiding Principles focuses on access to remedies to correct and compensate for the harm caused by business operations. The principle says:

Having effective grievance mechanisms in place is crucial in upholding the first two UNGP. The UNGP dictate that non-judicial mechanisms, whether state-based or independent, should be legitimate, accessible, predictable, rights-compatible, equitable, and transparent. Similarly, Company-level mechanisms are encouraged to operate through dialogue and engagement rather than with the company acting as the adjudicator of its own actions [emphasis added.]

In their response to the Rana Plaza disaster, Gap, Wal-Mart and the other U.S. companies are still trying to be “the adjudicators of their own actions,” rather than allowing “predictable” and “transparent” – as well as legally accountable – mechanisms to be put in place to assure workers’ rights. In this, they are swimming against the stream.

But as the groundswell of support for Bangladeshi workers grows, investors are taking note – and joining.

On Tuesday, May 21st, an “investor statement on Bangladesh” will be formally announced, signed by 123 investor “companies and stakeholders” representing more than $1.2 trillion in assets. According to an email from ICCR member Rev. Séamus P. Finn of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the statement calls “on industry leaders to implement systemic reforms that will ensure worker safety and welfare, and to adopt zero tolerance policies on global supply chain abuses.”

It is tragic that it took such a horrendous loss of life to finally put the issue of worker rights on the table. But if it leads to an honest and open discussion of what is needed to safeguard those rights – empowering workers – then those lives will not have been lost in vain.

Water pricing, the business value of water and the human right to water are all issues that businesses face, especially in developing nations.