Ethical slum tourism

"Money good, working bad." Our guide, Ishaq has no shortage of aphorisms to capture the light and dark of life in Dharavi, one of Asia's largest slums. He points to the clouds of noxious fumes rising from the aluminium recycling unit where battered old containers are melted down and turned back into usable product. There are few if any environmental standards adhered to here, and health and safety is a concept seemingly irrelevant to the wage laborers whose safety boots are flip flops. But although the dangers are many, there is regular paid work. And for Mumbai's slum dwellers, that is what matters most. And besides, who else is going to do the dirty work of recycling the city's discarded junk and refuge, and returning it into productive use?

The life of a business ethics professor takes you to some pretty interesting places. It is not too often though that we find ourselves in the middle of a huge urban slum. Not that we've been short of opportunities having spent time in cities such as Rio, Cape Town, and Mumbai over the last few years. But there is always a profound sense of unease about stepping into the life of the city's poorest residents. Of course, in some cases it's just plain dangerous, such  in the favelas of Rio. But even when it isn't, or when there's a local guide at hand to provide security, there are significant ethical doubts too. Knowing that you can just saunter back into the air conditioned hotel at the end of your trip to the slum means that you're little more than a slum tourist exploring the underbelly of society for your own voyeuristic pleasure. However much you may claim it to be educational to see how other sections of society live, slum tourism can't but help to raise moral uncertainty. This New York Times op ed from last year summarizes these concerns pretty succinctly. As a result, we've stayed away from the dubious attractions of slum tourism. Until now.

On the advice of a colleague, we decided to investigate a so-called 'ethical' slum tour provider. Whilst in Mumbai teaching at our school's MBA program in India we hooked up with Reality Tours and Travel, which offers tours of Dharavi, the city's largest and most well known slum. Dharavi is pretty much slap bang in the middle of modern metropolitan area of Mumbai, and just a short ride away from the 5-star luxury hotel where our school puts up its itinerant professors. The contrast, as with much of modern Mumbai, couldn't be more stark. Air-conditioned comfort is immediately replaced by a sweltering cacophony of noise and dirt. And discreet service is replaced by perilous, unrelenting industry.

It's clear that this is not just any old slum tour. There is a strict 'no cameras' policy, and the focus of the tour is not so much the corrugated iron shacks of the residential quarters of Dharavi, but the remarkable commercial activity that powers the slum's economy. It is said that some 5000 businesses operate in the tightly packed lanes of Dharavi, accounting for an incredible $600m of turnover annually - much of it in the illegal or informal economy. Recycling, leather and pottery make us the largest proportion of this, and so it is these that provide the focus of Reality's slum tour. Ishaq leads us first to a fragrant bakery and then onto a micro plastics recycling business where piles upon piles of multicoloured plastics are dried and then painstakingly sorted on the roof, before being melted down and then formed into pellets for resale in the cramped concrete rooms below. A sink and a few rolled mats is the only evidence that this is also where the workers live and sleep once the days' work is done. After that we move on to other recycling businesses, before passing the leather cutting, tanning and treating area and then onto the more peaceful environs of the potters colony which called Dharavi home since the 1930s. Along the way, we also take in a popadom bakery to see how the cross legged women shape and bake the traditional Indian appetisers, and briefly pass through (but do not stop at) some residential lanes.

According to Reality, the aim of the tour is "to show the positive side of the slums and break down negative stereotypes about its people and residents". Our trusty guide certainly doesn't fail to offer a positive spin on what might otherwise simply turn into a grim picture of India's unrelenting filth and poverty. He engages amiably with local residents, and he shows us a local health centre, an English language middle school, thriving businesses - this is no sob story meant to induce pity but an encouraging (if realistic) glimpse into Dharavi's struggle to sustain and prosper against the odds. As if to reinforce this, the tour finishes at the community centre run by Reality's sister organization (the NGO Reality Gives) which provides English, computing and skills training to disadvantaged young people.

It's a nice touch, but the real kicker is that this is not just some minor charitable add-on to 'put something back'. When Reality talks about changing the image of the slum, it goes beyond simply refocusing the optics. The company is putting its money where its mouth is. Since setting up in 2006, Reality has pledged that a full 80% of the profits from the slum tours would go to local charities. They even publish a summary of their accounts on the web to prove it. The establishment of their sister NGO Reality Gives in 2009 has provided a focus for these efforts, and along with the community centre, has now opened a kindergarden to provide quality education for preschoolers in the slum.

'Ethical' or 'responsible' tourism of all stripes, is a work in progress. Ethical slum tourism, in particular, poses all kinds of moral challenges. In our opinion, Reality is doing a fine job in walking that tightrope. Whilst it doesn't appear to have yet addressed the critical questions of scale - the more it succeeds, the more it risks overwhelming the slum with tourists - it does tackle both the content of its tours, and what it puts back into the community. Training and employing disadvantaged young people as guides, focusing on slum businesses rather than people's private lives, and banning cameras all help remove some of the moral tensions that can give slum tourism a bad name. And making investments that help educate slum residents and give them a chance to improve their lives helps balance the one-sided equation a little. Just ask the Dharavi resident who reveled in taking snaps of our small band of tourists whilst our own cameras stayed firmly in our backpacks.

Photo by Meanest Indian. Reproduced under Creative Commons License.

Cruising to the quake?

In the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake last week a very interesting discussion on CSR has arisen. While thousands of people are suffering, lacking medical care, let alone shelter or food, cruise ships from all over the (developed world) keep arriving in Haiti, albeit it not in the direct earthquake stricken zone around Port-Au-Prince.
Many newspapers reported about this and the debate whether it is good taste, let alone ethically sensitive, to have people dining and wining in the resort of Labadee while 160 kms to the South people have hardly anything to eat for their naked survival. The case raises a typical dilemma for business ethics which shows how important moral imagination and a sound command of ethical theories can become for a company.
Royal Caribbean International, one of the companies whose ships still dock in Haiti, takes a clear utilitarian stance on this. Their CEO was quoted saying:

"My view is this -- it isn't better to replace a visit to Labadee ... with a visit to another destination for a vacation. Being on the island and generating economic activity for the straw market vendors, the hair-braiders and our 230 employees helps with relief while being somewhere else does not help. People enjoying themselves is what we do. People enjoying themselves in Labadee helps with relief. We support our guests who choose to help in this way, which is consistent with our nearly 30-year history in Haiti."

Indeed, cruise liners bringing business to the island is resulting in the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’, compared to them stopping it or going elsewhere. But it seems to be more a question of fairness and equity, which raises the eyebrows of some commentators. In some ways, the strongest argument comes from what we refer in our book to as the ‘postmodern’ view on ethical questions, as one blogger put it:

"To me it's like going to a funeral and singing and dancing around the casket."

Yesterday in the Canadian News they showed thousands of people sitting in the port of the capital but unable to leave the country because of lack of fuel. Watching a white cruise ship with a nine hole golf course swiftly gliding by is not what these people need right now. Maybe the fact that people ‘enjoy’ themselves in poor countries is a problem in the first place. The earthquake just makes this unfair and unequal distribution of wealth on the globe just that little bit more visible. Even on a normal day in Haiti, there is still this grotesque gap between luxury on the ships versus abject poverty starting meters away from the fence of the resort in Labadee. Why else would one need to guard it by armed security even on a normal day?

For companies such as RCI these are no easy times. But they are in the moral maze of solving this dilemma, as it were by default. And one cannot say they are not trying, having also pledged $1m in food relief which they will deliver with the help of a local NGO. Engaging in blogs, working with local players and to find a pragmatic solution on the ground, reflects some lessons in discourse ethics. At the end of the day, RCI's behavior just reflects the demands of their stakeholders, most notably their customers: only very few of RCI’s customers are reported to have cancelled their cruises...
(We would like to thank our colleague Nancy Sutherland at Schulich for alerting us to this story.)

And the Oscar for best business ethics movie goes to....

Those of you that have noticed the "Ethics on Screen" feature in our business ethics book, or that have come across the film series, Doing the Business that we were involved in starting up at Nottingham, will be well aware of our interests in exploring corporate responsibility issues at the movies. With the awards season in full swing, and Oscar night less than a week away, we thought we would reflect on a few of the films that have been released in the last year that have addressed business ethics issues in one way or another. Here, for starters, are four of our favourites...

There Will Be Blood
First up, and top of many people's list come Oscar time, is this quirky epic about the early days of the oil industry in the US. Tracing the fortunes of the oil man Daniel Plainview (played by Daniel Day-Lewis), the film provides a fascinating account of the emergent social compact wrangled out between industry and the local community. Day-Lewis plays a hard-grafting, hard bargaining, and ultimately hard headed prospector who pushes the ethical line in his somewhat underhand negotiations for drilling rights. But in an early manifestation of what some might recognise now as a shaky form of CSR, albeit of a decidely self-interested variety, Plainview's investment in the community sees one small town start to flourish as a result of its oil reserves, with a new church and other infrastructure coming to the once impoverished community. Most notable here is the battle between capitalism and religion that frames the film, as Plainview fights against the local preacher for power, control, and for the rich rewards from the precious resources that we are still fighting over today. In the end, it has to be said that the film's message, if it has one, about corporate responsibility is rather opaque. But there is lots of fun to be had poring over some of the allegories, especially at a time when companies such as ExxonMobil and Shell are breaking profitability records on both sides of the Atlantic, and when issues of oil, religion, and capitalism continue to dominate the debate about the war in Iraq.

Michael Clayton
Another Oscar nominated feature, this time staring George Clooney as a fixer in a corporate law firm. Here's what Warner Brothers say this one is about - as you can see, it is classic business ethics territory:

"...Michael Clayton is an in-house fixer at one of the largest corporate law firms in New York. A former criminal prosecutor, Clayton takes care of Kenner, Bach, & Ledeen's dirtiest work at the behest of the firm's co-founder, Marty Bach. Though burned out and hardly content with his job as a fixer, his divorce, a failed business venture, and mounting debt have left Clayton inextricably tied to the firm. At U/North, meanwhile, the career of litigator Karen Crowder rests on the multi-million dollar settlement of a class-action suit that Clayton's firm is leading to a seemingly successful conclusion. But when Kenner Bach's brilliant and guilt-ridden attorney Arthur Edens sabotages the U/North case, Clayton faces the biggest challenge of his career and his life...."

Like many films before it, including movies such as The Insider, Boiler Room,and Glengarry Glen Ross, Michael Clayton is all about how our personal ethics intertwine with the harsh realities of corporate ethics, and the choices we sometimes have to make in navigating between them.

Up the Yangtze
When programming the 'Doing the Business' series, we always struggled to find good quality Asian movies that dealt seriously with business ethics issues. With rapid economic transformations in India, China, and elsewhere though, a number of excellent movies have started to come out that chart some of these developments. Up the Yangtze is one of these - a sharly observed documentary about a luxury tour boat on the famous Chinese river that provides us with a unique view of the massive Three Gorges megadam project. The film traces the experiences of one of the workers on the boat and her role in the Chinese 'economic miracle'. Assembling insights from villages flooded by the dam project, the burgeoning tourist trade, and the brash urban elite, the movies provides a kaleidescopic view of a country undergoing enormous social and economic transformation - and the ethical issues and problems that inevitably come in their wake.


It's a Free World
Many of Ken Loach's films have provided a harsh but realistic picture of those at the bottom of the economic pile - the immigrant cleaners (Bread and Roses), railworkers (The Navigators) and others that are invariably the losers in the casino of capitalism. His latest, It's a Free World, explores the underworld of migrant workers in London, and the firms that recruit them. It focuses on Angie, a hardworking and determined recruiter who has suffered some some of the injustices of the flexible labour market herself, and is now to prove a point by starting up on her own. As Loach's film production company, Sixteen Films, puts it:

"... Angie sets up a recruitment agency with her flat-mate Rose, working in a twilight zone between gangmasters, employment agencies and the migrant workers they place. This is a tale set against the reality of the Anglo Saxon miracle of flexible labour, globalisation, double shifts and lots of happy, happy, happy consumers: Us."

It is not, it has to be said, a happy film. But as a gritty, realistic, and clear sighted view of a slice of the labour market that most of us rarely catch much of a glimpse of, it is hard to beat.