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THE ERA OF CORPORATE RULE
Arguing that corporate codes of conduct are never democratic
documents, the writer warns that if we let multinationals draft
global labour and human rights declarations, we would allow
ourselves to be ruled by the multinationals and become citizens of
corporate states.
By Naomi Klein
The verdict is in: transnationals have pulled off nothing
short of a corporate coup d'etat, ushering in what American author
David Korten calls 'the era of Corporate Rule'. In this context, a
growing consensus is emerging among progressive intellectuals and
activists in the North which holds that if citizens are to have any
input into their communal futures, they must deal directly with the
real power brokers - no longer just the politicians but the people
pulling their strings: the transnational corporations themselves.
The past decade has seen a marked increase in activist
campaigns focused on specific brand-name products. Shell,
McDonald's and nearly all the major mining companies have come
under fire for ecological devastation and for violent crimes
against indigenous peoples. Disney, Mattel, the Gap, Nike and
Wal-Mart have all faced public attacks for the working conditions
in their contractors' factories in Asia, Latin America and the
Caribbean. In New York, London and Vancouver, demonstrations are
now as likely to take place outside of a shopping mall, gas station
or superstore, as they are outside of a government building.
It is still unclear whether these brand-based campaigns will
succeed in changing corporate behaviour but there is one thing we
know for certain: they sure have changed the way corporations talk.
The most savvy multinationals have tried to quell the growing
outrage by drafting codes of conduct which are held up as
cure-all labour solutions, no matter what the problem. It has also
become popular for corporations to deflect the criticism that they
answer only to an elite group of shareholders by claiming
accountability to a broader cross-section of 'stakeholders':
customers, employees, the natural environment.
It's difficult not to get swept up reading these codes of
conduct: they are such deeply moral documents, more idealistic than
almost anything that has come out of the US Left in a decade. They
stare back at their critics with a look of perfect inevitability as
if to ask: what did you expect? We have been like this all along.
One starts to wonder (or at least one is supposed to wonder), if
perhaps the problem isn't as these benevolent patriarchs say... one
big misunderstanding, a 'communication breakdown' with a rogue
contractor, something lost in the translation.
Last summer, I travelled to Indonesia and the Philippines to
find out what codes of conduct mean to the garment and electronics
workers they are supposed to protect. What I found was the entire
debate around corporate codes seems to be taking place in a
parallel universe to the one where people in Asia do the work.
Without exception, all the workers I spoke with were confused by
the codes: some had never heard of them, some had heard of them but
didn't understand them, some had seen copies but didn't know what
to do with them.
The confusion is far from coincidental. Most workers in Asia
don't understand corporate codes of conduct because the codes were
not written for them. They were written about them, for someone
else - the crowds of protesters outside the mall. The codes, more
often than not, come out of the company's public relations
department in the North, not the labour departments in the South
(if they have one). That's why it wasn't until a year and a half
ago that companies even considered translating these workers'
manifestoes into any language other than English. And that's why
when Mattel finally unveiled its code of conduct this past
November, it did so at the beginning of the Christmas shopping
season. These are not codes for workers, but for shoppers.
Now that the codes exist, there is a belief among many
European and North American activists that campaigning should now
focus on ensuring that the documents are enforced. This project
raises a number of practical problems. For instance, how can they
be monitored in a systematic way when companies often have layers
of contractors and subcontractors - what sort of network could be
big and well-financed enough to cover every nook and cranny? If
NGOs become monitors, will they sign away their right to speak out
against labour violations, thereby taking the issue out of public
eye and losing leverage? What about workers who sew for up to 15
companies at once and for whom names like 'The Gap' or 'Eddie
Bauer' aren't those of employers, but simply names on a label.
In Jakarta last August, I attended the International Conference on
Trade Union Rights in Indonesia where I met Lonny Stella, Nike's
newly-hired labour practice manager. Her job is to make sure that
Nike's multiple Indonesian contractors abide by the Nike code and
I asked her how it was going so far. She said that her job is
pretty easy with the shoe factories because they only produce Nike
sneakers - without Nike's orders, they would be out of business
overnight.
She admitted, however, that the contractors who produce Nike's
garments are much less receptive to her input because these
factories also produce for The Gap, Levi's, Tommy Hilfiger and Liz
Claiborne, leaving Nike with less leverage. Besides, all these
multinationals have their own codes of conduct so one can hardly
blame the contractor for shredding the lot of them and
concentrating instead on getting the various jobs done.
For some, this type of story points to the need for
multinationals to draft industry-wide codes of conduct which could
be monitored across the board. There is no doubt that industry
codes are more practical than juggling multiple codes, but this
next stage in corporate codes raises a larger, more fundamental
question: who do we think should shape labour and human rights in
the global economy?
Corporate codes of conduct - whether drafted by an individual
company or groups of them; whether they are independently monitored
or useless pieces of paper - are never democratic documents. While
the codes may seem to place some restrictions on corporate
behaviour, giving multinationals the power to draft a new set of
global labour and human rights declarations actually hands them an
unprecedented kind of power - the power over rights which were once
in the public domain.
The subtext of these codes is an underlying hostility towards
the idea that citizens can - through unions, laws and international
treaties - seize control over a system gone wild. This results in
what the AMRC's Gerard Greenfield refers to as 'the privatisation
of labour rights'. In other words, even if companies do have to
make some sacrifices, the corporate sector controls the terms of
the discussion.
When we start looking to corporations to draft our collective
labour and human rights codes, we have already lost one of the most
basic principles of citizenship: the belief that people should
govern themselves. Rather than seeing corporations as but one
sector of our nations and communities, the corporation becomes the
over-arching framework in which we must fit our communities and our
rights as citizens. We become citizens of corporate states.
The good news is this: the avalanche of talk about ethics coming
from CEOs is a pretty strong indication that the corporations are
getting scared that if they don't step in quick and at least
pretend to solve the problem, we will. Which also means that if we
don't step in fast, they will. In fact they have already begun. -
Third World Network Features
-ends-
About the writer: Naomi Klein is a Canadian writer working on a
book about anti-corporate activism. The above article first
appeared in Asian Labour Update (October 1997 - January 1998).
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