| Speakers spar over ways to achieve rights for overseas workers BY SALLY ACHARYA Can international corporations be forced to enact codes of conduct that improve the lives of workers? Or are such efforts too weak, too uncoordinated, and often too late? A Kogod expert on corporate ethics sparred last week over those questions with two lawyers from nonprofits. To Kogod executive in residence Brian Nelson, the most effective way to change corporate ethics is to work for change from within companies. But that’s not the approach of Natacha Thys ’96 of the International Labor Rights Fund, or Marco Simons, legal director of Earth Rights International. The panel spoke last week at the Kay Spiritual Life Center on the topic “Workplace Codes of Conduct: Are They Effective?” The discussion focused on international corporations and the effort to make them accountable for practices ranging from gender discrimination to child labor to complicity in murder. Both groups take corporations to court over international labor issues. Costly lawsuits can make corporations think twice about working in countries where rights violations are likely to occur, said Simons, who co-teaches a course on human rights and the environment at the Washington College of Law (WCL). Thys, a WCL graduate, agreed that an adversarial approach is often the only way to get action rather than promises. Nelson responded by holding up a stack of papers, with a list of organizations that work on child labor issues. The groups don’t collaborate with corporations, but they also don’t collaborate with each other, he said. “Do you expect Walmart to respond to 18 or 19 different approaches?” he asked. He supports many of the nonprofits’ rights agendas, but these groups are not as effective as they could be, he said. They fail to accept that a company’s main agenda will always be providing goods and services, and it won’t put its agenda aside for what generally amounts to a weak push by a small nonprofit. “If you want influence,” he said, “you have to work with, or in, a company.” Thys, though, was skeptical of voluntary measures by corporations. She cited the case of Nestlé. When faced with charges that its cocoa comes from West African plantations that use child labor, Nestlé promised in 2000 to adopt a voluntary protocol against child labor by 2005, she said. “I was there a year ago. What had happened? Nothing.” Simons added that rights violations are often so extreme—as in a case where, he charged, Chevron Oil Co. was involved in killings by Nigerian troops—that collaboration is impossible. “When the corporations are killing our friends, it’s hard to sit down and talk,” he said. Nelson retorted that by the time the lawsuit is filed, the damage is done. “Your litigation happens after your friends are dead,” he said. “Litigation deters bad conduct. It doesn’t prevent it.” The most effective preventions, he said, are codes of conduct developed by people who understand the corporate perspective and share the power of today’s international corporations, which he likened to the city-states of the ancient world. The most effective change agents, he said, are those who have a voice at the table and aren’t just shouting from outside. Nelson is the author of Law and Ethics in Global Business. He has practiced corporate law for over 20 years at multinational corporations and international law firms. The talk was part of the Kay Spiritual Life Center’s Table Talk luncheon series. |
