Top 10 corporate responsibility stories of 2013

Plus ça change in corporate responsibility. If nothing else, 2013 provided ample evidence that, contrary to popular belief, corporate responsibility issues, even the huge stories that dominate the media, do not exactly come out of nowhere. So many of the top CR stories of the year, like the Rana Plaza disaster, Apple's tax problems, and JP Morgan's huge fine, were already prefaced by the big stories of the previous year. Among our top 10 of 2012 were a Bangladesh factory fire, corporate tax avoidance, criticism of tech companies, and prosecutions in the financial sector. So the writing was already on the wall for most of the big stories of 2013. It would appear, as Ethical Corporation editor Toby Webb said recently, that with all the excitement about new opportunities and win-wins, companies are underestimating the importance of sound ethical risk management in the corporate responsibility equation. So, if you want to know what CR risks lie ahead for 2014, you could do worse than checking through our list of the big stories of 2013.

1. Rana Plaza building collapse
Back in April 2013, more than 1100 people, mostly garment workers, died when the Rana Plaza building collapsed near Dhaka in Bangladesh. It was probably the single worst garment factory disaster yet, in an industry that has suffered more than its fair share of needless fatalities. But Bangladesh had already seen a series of major industrial accidents leading up to Rana Plaza, which had been met with little tangible response from business and government leaders. Rana Plaza looks to have at last changed that. The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, signed by nearly 100 global retailers, as well as labour unions and NGOs is a legally binding agreement to ensure worker safety through independent factory inspections, mandatory repairs, financial support, and sanctions for noncompliance. More than 2m vulnerable Bangladeshi garment workers are already covered by the Accord. A competing agreement, signed by Walmart, Gap, Target and other North American companies was criticized for having weaker enforcement and failing to involve labor unions. Nonetheless, both pacts are evidence that factory safety in Bangladesh is finally getting the concerted attention it deserves.

2. Apple's tax avoidance
Corporate tax avoidance had been a growing story in the UK and elsewhere prior to 2013, as evidenced by our top stories listing of 2012. But the issue exploded onto the public consciousness when Apple's CEO Tim Cook was forced to testify to a Senate committee in Washington back in May of this year. The company had avoided paying literally billions of dollars in tax by exploiting various loopholes in international tax treaties and funnelling its European profits through a shell company in Ireland. All completely legal, of course, but hardly what the public expects of a good corporate citizen. Now that attention to corporate tax avoidance has gone global, and with inequality and government debt the two biggest global risks today, the obvious questions are which country will be next in taking aim and which company will be in the firing line? Corporate tax reform is also undoubtedly going to loom even larger in the coming year.

3. NSA spying
Without doubt, Edward Snowden's whistleblowing on the US National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance programs was the story of 2013. Nothing else even got close. However, the corporate responsibility dimensions still remain somewhat murky, which is why it doesn't quite make it to the top of our list. We do know, however, that telecoms companies like Verizon are required to hand over all call records  (or "metadata") to the NSA about cell phone calls made in the US. We also know that none of these companies ever sought to challenge the legality of the action. Another revelation was that the secret PRISM spying program allows the NSA to tap into the servers of internet companies like Google and Microsoft to access customer data. We also know that NSA pays millions of dollars to these same companies. We do not yet know exactly how complicit tech companies have been in the whole mess but one thing for sure is that they now realize that the NSA spying story is undermining their customers' trust and are calling for government reform. Expect much more to come in 2014.

4. JP Morgan's $13bn misconduct settlement
Our annual list of major corporate responsibility stories would not be complete without an entry from the finance industry. As we predicted at the beginning of the year, 2013 was marked by the return of government and some major financial sector scalps. None of these was bigger than the whopping $13bn fine landed on JP Morgan for misleading investors in the same of mortgage backed securities in the lead-up to the financial crisis. To date, it is the settlement ever between the US government and a corporation, and will come as some (though probably not enough) relief to those who have viewed most of the finance sector giants as getting away with the crisis relatively unscathed. On the other hand, JP Morgan is probably pretty sore about catching the flack for misconduct that was less about their own practices and more down to firms like Bear Stearns that they were encouraged by the US government to acquire at the height of the meltdown. No one comes out of this looking good.

5. Europe's horse meat scandal
At the beginning of the year, the big news was all about horse meat turning up in products it wasn't supposed to be in. Like those clearly labelled as "beef". The scandal started in the UK, quickly spread to a suspect supplier in Ireland, and soon rocked much of Europe. Customer trust rapidly evaporated as it became clear that effective oversight of the food industry was sorely lacking. Companies acted quickly to withdraw potentially contaminated products and shore up confidence but further revelations of large scale criminal activity in the food supply chain will do little to restore trust in a thoroughly compromised industry.

6. India's new CSR law
The world's largest democracy now has the world's most extensive CSR legislation. But that is not necessarily a good thing. Under the new Companies Act, passed by the Indian Parliament in August 2013, large Indian companies must spend at least 2 per cent of their net profits on CSR each year from 2014 onwards. It also requires firms to set up a CSR board committee and institute a CSR policy. The new CSR legislation has met with a mixed reaction, especially as it seems to institutionalize a somewhat backward looking approach to CSR which emphasizes philanthropic giving whilst ignoring the core strategic business of the firm. It will also be incredibly hard to enforce in a country already hamstrung by an overburdened legal system. On the plus side, the legislation does force many of India's laggard companies to finally take some responsibility for the various social problems faced by the country's citizens. For better or worse, CSR is no longer something that can be ignored in India.

7. Chevron's Ecuador pollution case
It has been a big year for Chevron and Ecuador in their long-running, aggressively-fought pollution case. In November, the Ecuadorean high court made its long-awaited appeal decision which upheld the original 2011 judgement requiring Chevron to pay $9bn to compensate for contaminating the rainforest during crude oil extraction over two decades ago. Chevron has never operated in Ecuador but inherited the lawsuit and its toxic legacy when it took over Texaco, the original operator, in 2001. For its part Chevron continues to dispute the legality of the ruling and has refused to pay. The appeal was at least partially successful for Chevron by halving the original $18bn damages bill, but not in overturning the decision. Chevron is now awaiting the outcome of a counter-suit heard last month in the US against the plaintiff's main lawyer, who the company claims engaged in bribery and fraud to secure the conviction. Meanwhile, attempts by the plaintiffs to seize Chevron's assets overseas to pay the fine also had their ups and downs in 2013. For example, Canada first denied them the rights of enforcement in May, only for a judge to overturn the decision on appeal in December. Other actions are underway in Brazil and Argentina. This has fast turned into a test not only of the Ecuadorean legal system, but of the global legal system's appetite to prosecute international legacy corporate responsibility issues.

8. Rosia Montana mining protests 
2013 saw major protests against mining operations all over the world, including Australia, Canada, Columbia, Greece, Niger, Peru, even Tibet. But the biggest of the lot was probably in Romania, which saw a mass protest movement arise in response to plans to mine around the town of Rosia Montana. If approved, it would be Europe's largest gold mine but critics claim that it would inflict untold social, environmental and cultural damage. Mass street protests erupted after the government proposed a new law that would enable the Rosia Montana Gold Corporation (majority owned by the Canadian mining company Gabriel Resources) to finally start operations after years of failing to acquire the necessary environmental permits. At stake here then is not just the proposed mine but the legitimacy of the democratic process, which protesters feel has been fatally undermined by the hastily forced through legislation. As one protester put it: "People today confront a corrupted political class backed up by a corporation and a sold out media; and they ask for an improved democratic process, for adding a participatory democracy dimension to traditional democratic mechanisms."

 9. New UN Global Compact 100 Index
There were several entrants to the new corporate responsibility standards and guidelines category in 2013, with the G4 guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative probably being the most talked about. But September's launch of the Global Compact's new stock market index, the Global Compact 100, for us represented the most significant development. First, as John Entine noted, it offered a welcome new development in a social investing field "hungry for innovation and dogged by ideological correctness". But more than that it showed just how far the UN was willing to push the needle on its voluntary approach to corporate responsibility that heavily prioritizes incentives rather than enforcement. While many are still criticizing the Global Compact for not having sharp enough teeth to weed out laggards and green washers, the new index makes it abundantly clear that the UNGC is moving in a very different direction. Ten years ago it would still have been unthinkable, but the reality is that the UN is no longer just in the business of accords, declarations, and principles but is now also firmly in the finance industry.

10. South Korea's nuclear corruption scandal
GSK's corruption scandal in China may have got most of the headlines, but in our book, the corruption scandal that has engulfed South Korea's nuclear industry this year tops it for potential impact. Two short years after Japan's Fukishima disaster, neighbouring South Korea is also facing a devastating loss of confidence in its nuclear industry which supplies about a third of the country's energy needs. The scandal has centred on a swathe of faked safety certificates that have been issued for critical nuclear reactor parts over the years, and the bribes that have allegedly been paid to look the other way. Most commentators pin the blame on the closed structure of the nuclear industry in South Korea with only a single national operator and close ties between the operator, suppliers and testing companies. The prime minister has likened the industry to the mafia. A number of reactors have been shut down, trust in the industry has plummeted, a national energy shortage is underway, and now some 100 officials have been indicted for their part in the scandal. Corruption that compromises the safety of the nuclear industry is probably about as bad as it gets. And its unclear yet whether South Korea can really turn this one around.

Photo by rijans. Reproduced under Creative Commons licence

The “IT-Industrial Complex”

A while ago we commented on whistleblowing in the context of Edward Snowdon’s revelation of the current practices of the NSA. The entire story though is much bigger and has been ongoing for a while now. Just Monday this week, Glenn Greenwald’s partner got detained at London’s Heathrow Airport in a rather unusual manner. Greenwald, as most of us will know, is the journalist who was contacted by Snowdon and has been publishing the crucial pieces of Snowdon’s material in The Guardian.

While in essence the ongoing revelations have the political sphere as the key target, it now more and more emerges that the role of private businesses is far bigger than so far known. From the perspective of scholars interested in business ethics then this case, as it unfolds, raises some rather daunting questions, which – besides being troubling from a normal citizen’s point of view – offer some challenging questions for further research.

1. A new industry

Ever since the Washington Post published Top Secret America we are aware of the fast growing security industry which was created by the US Government in the aftermath of the terror attacks of 2001. What was not that clear is however how far the reach of this industry has gone.

The fact that phone companies provide their records to the NSA, that in principle all our email traffic is public and stored somewhere - just to name a few aspects - takes the entire debate to a new level. It now emerged that in fact most wireless phone providers, many internet service providers (including Google and Facebook) share data with the NSA, as do many classic IT hard- and software producer such as Apple and Microsoft.

When these revelations were made it was conspicuous to see the rather muted reaction of these companies. For long we thought that Google, certainly in their varied approaches to Chinese censorship struggled for an ethical approach here; with regard to their own government though very little of these, in essence similar, concerns obviously played a role. The main defense of these companies overly seems to be the need of compliance. While that argument might carry some way, it is not understandable how for instance Apple, who as a ‘footloose’ company manages to deal with ‘compliance’ to tax legislation in very creative ways just caves in with regard to the privacy of their ‘users’ when the NSA asks for access to their accounts.

So what we see here is not only the emergence of a new industrial sector, which combines rather diverse set of companies (see the list of companies in Top Secret America); it is also not clear anymore where the lines between private business and public administration/government lie. After all Snowdon himself was employed by a private company many of us would primarily remember as a strategy consulting firm (Booz Allen Hamilton). While the blurring of lines between sectors is nothing new, the level and dimensions of the 'securocracy' currently dismantling in front of our eyes in the context of the NSA takes it clearly to a new level.

2. The business model and its ethical implications

Ethical issues in the IT industry have garnered attention for a while in business ethics. Given the numerous court cases, for instance Google and Facebook had to weather recently in the US and Europe it is clear though, that with the growth of the internet and the degree, to which the internet is morphing into a social space, many more questions will arise.

Given that we now know that Google, Facebook, Apple and others are not only basically supplying the government with information but have been monitoring, searching, and organizing our data all long it raises some new questions. In particular it raises the question about the very essence of their business model from an ethical perspective.

Lets stick to the Facebook example. We are told that basically the company will make its money through advertising. Looking at the pathetically annoying adds on our Facebook feeds, for instance, the question really is whether this is the whole story? $800bn for some potentially ingenious advertising platform?

As Facebook ‘users’ we know that we are not their customers. We are their suppliers. What they ultimately want to ‘sell’ is information. This, rather than advertising, is ultimately the business case. This similarly applies to Google, Yahoo, Apple and other who store and ‘use’ many of the data we create through our various internet usages. Most of it is ‘free’ so far, yet still these companies are worth billions of dollars.

This raises some questions, which admittedly can easily be confounded with conspiracy theories. The most important of which is that under the post 9/11 legislation the ‘harvesting’ of our data which for long had been prohibited, is now in full swing. These companies are not primarily in the business of social media, web search or email hosting – they are sources of data about the most intimate details of our lives. While this was always clear to those who bothered to read the small print of the ‘Terms and Conditions’ of these companies, it emerges more and more that this is not just material of value for marketing purposes.

Just today we read in The Guardian that in fact many IT companies such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft made millions out of providing the NSA with our data. The euphemistic term for this is to see it as a reimbursement for ‘compliance costs’ – but from the perspective of those companies’ CFOs, what else is this other than ‘revenue’? This is certainly the first hard proof that there are clear financial ties between the US government and these companies. But could this also be another hint at what the real business model of these companies is about?

3. The Political role of business

That corporations are political actors in societal governance beyond their direct economic role is by now well established. Looking at the IT-industrial complex though adds some aspects. First, and very much on the surface, it strikes one to see the close ties between senior executives in the industry and the current US government. Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) had and still has key roles in the Obama administration to the degree Google has been called the 'Halliburton of the Obama Administration'; Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook CFO) worked for years in Washington, most notably with Larry Summers.

These are just two examples. Looking at the ferocious reaction to whistleblowers recently, one cannot overlook the commonality of interests between the US ‘government’ and the IT industry. Obama winning a second election was seen by many as a proof that maybe – despite of new campaign financing laws for corporations – business influence on politics is limited and that money alone cant buy campaigns and determine election outcomes. But maybe Obama’s re-election is just THE showcase of what ‘Citizens United’ has done: it got the very president elected whose campaign was crucially supported by Silicon Valley, but whose government now appears to be all long deeply engaged and intermingled with this new industrial network.

As business ethics scholars we see here a new opportunity for research. It is foremost about understanding the structure and value creation models of this industry. But it is also about evaluating the implications of these changes for our democracy, for how society is governed and what the rights and status of citizens in this context morphs into. In short, it is a research field rife with ethical question and issues.

Artwork by Susanne Waldau-te Brake, reproduced under the Creative Commons License

Why all these whistleblowers recently?

Whistleblowing, this obscure practice discussed in most business ethics textbooks (we do so in Chapter 7), has become a big topic of discussion these days. The latest incident is Edward Snowdon and his revelation about the ongoing surveillance of phone and internet usage of American citizens by the US government. But he is not alone: currently on trial is Bradley Manning, who provided Wikileaks with the material for exposing the diplomatic correspondence of the US government.

The general contention with whistleblowing is becoming clear in both cases: are these individual traitors who defaulted on their duties by breaching the rules and codes they had agreed to abide by when entering their job? Or are they ‘heroes’ whose behavior is governed by higher, more general, and persistent ethical standards than their day-to-day job environment would allow them to follow?

It is useful to look at some historic cases of whistleblowing – and indeed cases, where certainly by hindsight the general agreement seems to be that the whistleblowers are in the second category of ‘ethical hero’. Think of Jeffrey Wigand, the executive of tobacco company Brown&Williamson who exposed the practice of enhancing the addictive potential of cigarettes of his employer (famously turned into the movie The Insider). Or think of Sherron Watkins, who initially blew the whistle on the practices at ENRON and contributed to the uncovering of the scandal in 2001. Turning to the political sphere, currently many references are made to Daniel Ellsberg who in 1971 leaked the ‘Pentagon Papers’ disclosing that the US government for years had systematically mislead the public about the impact, casualties and costs of the Vietnam war.

Whistleblowing commonly seems to occur in a situation where the moral status of organizational practice – be it a private company or a public institution such as the NSA or the Pentagon – deviate from the wider moral values which society deems appropriate. And crucially, it has to be added, these actions also deviate from the professed moral standards of the organization against which those individuals blow the whistle.

This is rather evident in the case of Ellsberg: by the early 1970s, the public in the US all long thought that the war in Vietnam had lost its moral cause; his revelations proved that the US government, too, was all along aware that what it did in Vietnam no longer could live up to the public mission and norms according to which the American government professed to act. Similar are the cases of Wigand and Watkins: in the same way the Tobacco industry outwardly professed that they were not aware of the addictive impact of cigarettes, ENRON had always claimed to be an ethical company. The same applies to the current Manning and Snowdon cases: Obama ran on the promise to stop the abuses by the previous Bush administration and to restore basic civil liberties – and is now found out to do the same or worse.

The dilemma of whistleblowers all points to the fundamental differentiation established by Max Weber a century ago: Members of a social group (incl. an organization) can act according to an ethics of responsibility or according to an ethics of conviction. The first looks at the consequences of an action and basically suggests that a virtuous individual is one that lives up to the expectations of all who are affected directly by the consequences of an action. In practice, this boils down to abiding by the rules and procedures of the organization. The main arguments against whistleblowing then all come in the shape of what the effects of the revelations are on other people (that was the big argument against Wikileaks) or how it affects the general functioning of a secret service where everybody potentially can leak anything (the current debate on Snowdon).

What justifies whistleblowing then is Weber’s ethics of conviction according to which an individual makes an ethical choice based on personal moral convictions. The act is based on principles, rather than anticipated consequences. In most cases whistleblowers refer to general principles of either good business practice regarding customers (the tobacco case) or shareholders (ENRON) or good government based on some basic democratic principles (such as the Ellsberg, Manning or Snowdon case).

Historically, such reasoning based on an ethics of conviction always becomes more relevant at a time when fundamental values of society are in question and challenged. The Vietnam war raised basic questions about the moral limits of the cold war; the tobacco scandals exposed the lack of basic moral rules of consumer protection; ENRON initiated the ongoing moral scrutiny of a shareholder value dominated form of capitalism; the Manning and Snowdon cases now raise fundamental moral questions about civic liberties, civic rights to privacy and protection of personal data and the appropriate powers of the state in protecting these liberties.

It is somewhat tragic – as probably the cases of Ellsberg and Wigand best illustrate – that whistleblowers are mostly recognized as moral, conviction-driven human beings quite some time after the events. At the time of the whistleblowing defenders of the status quo always wield two crucial tools: they can either invoke arguments following an ethics of responsibility and point to the potential harm and the anarchic nature of the act; Bradley Manning’s trial can be followed as a textbook example of this reasoning.

Or, they can try to discredit the ‘convictions’ of the whistleblower. Since these often reflect a wider moral consensus in society it is hard to attack those principles or norms directly. More effective seems to be an approach that discredits the whistleblower on a personal level. In Ellsberg’s case the CIA broke into his psychiatrist’s office to obtain information on his mental health and love life; in Wigand’s case a similar smear campaign was initiated. Currently with regard to Edward Snowdon, it is conspicuous how the entire political spectrum in the US is more or less embarking on this trajectory. From Bill Maher’s jokes last Friday night on Real Time to David Brook’s notorious profile in the New York Times - most seem eager to present him as some sort of self-aggrandizing nerd.

Whistleblowers turn up at a time when societies or organizations are deviating from commonly accepted and widely shared moral values. Whatever our concrete judgment about individuals and their motives - the fact that whistleblowing occurs at this point in history clearly points to a wider epiphany. Ironically, Snowdon relocated to the very country which for so long has been accused by the West of not respecting the human rights of their citizens in exactly this issue arena – much to the distress of Google, Yahoo or other companies. It looks like Obama currently has a bit of a hard time to explain to China, Russia or even his European allies, how his approach to privacy and data protection still reflects basic values of liberal democracies.

Picture by DonkeyHotey, reproduced under the Creative Commons License.