Royal Bank of Sustainability? No

So runs the headline (I added the last part!) in some media outlets today.

The story is here, if you can get into FT.com.

Their headline is: "Green groups to sue over RBS investments"

Environmental groups and the law firm Leigh Day, are asking the courts to force the Government to withdraw the high-carbon investments of RBS, long known by campaigners as the "oil and gas" bank.

This is a case worth following.

Although one would not expect the environmental groups to win, it raises interesting questions about how public assets should be steered in term of governance and strategy.

Forget Innocent drinks, Taco Bell is the ultimate green company

As you can clearly see by clicking on this story:

Taco Bell's New Green Menu Takes No Ingredients From Nature

What is it about Britain that supposedly makes us the leaders in CSR?

This article from the Independent newspaper shows just how poorly the UK is performing on sustainability.

As someone who works in UK CSR, when I go abroad to conferences and meetings one common theme I hear is the idea that UK companies are further ahead than the rest of the world.

When I look at some of our biggest companies I do see some market changing announcements being led from UK firms.

There's a piece on some favourite firms we picked out last month here

However, in this list we only picked a couple of UK firms. Most notably Cadbury and Marks and Spencer.

Companies such as BP, BT, the two above and a host of others have made enough noise to make people think the UK is the 'leader' in CSR.

Nestle's former CEO, Peter Brabeck-Lamathe, told me in an interview a couple of years ago that post-colonial guilt drove our NGOs to blame companies for poverty problems overseas.

While he perhaps had a small point about incentives for companies to get engaged in CSR, I think it's been the incredibly competitive media sector that has been a key player. That and the modern UK love of excessive corporate PR.

But I wonder if the 'leader' mantle, if appropriate at all, is now slipping due to economic conditions and poor government leadership and incentives.

We've heard about quite a few big UK firms laying off many of their CSR people recently.

That anecdotal evidence aside, whilst it remains so complex to market 'ethics' by big firms, sooner or later government incentives on key issues, particularly the environment, become very very important.

It appears clear to me that many countries such as Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands are streets ahead on many vitally important social and environmental issues.

If you look at comparative size, you'll find these nation's companies ahead of ours.

What I mean by this is if you look at activities in firms of say 5000 employees and above, you'll find a lot more action going on in those countries than here.

It's no co-incidence that their governments are much more socially and enviromentally progressive.

And their bigger companies are much less keen on PR than their UK counterparts, preferring action over announcements, another reason for the UK's apparent leadership position.

The UK Sustainable Development Commission's latest report, out on Wednesday, has some interesting details on how far behind on key national targets the UK is at the moment.

Some advanced leaked details are in the article I linked to above.

Companies could help make a more serious contribution to these, if our government knew how to engage them better. It's been made to work elsewhere in northern Europe.

Those of us working in this field for a while have grown increasingly tired of the UK government's poor performance in encouraging responsible and sustainable business.

It's time for a change. The post of CSR Minister should be abolished here, and responsibilities for encouraging CSR should made part of Secretary of State portfolios.

Roll on next May, when our election is due by, and let's hope David Cameron means what he says about both corporate responsibility encouragement and the environment.

Want green policy? Then look to the right, not the left...

This article from the Telegraph's new green guru, Geoffrey Lean (who does deserve the accolade) argues that conservatives have done more for the environment than left wingers.

There are some holes in his arguments, not least the rise of the left-leaning European Greens in the 1970's and 1980's, whom he gives little credit to.

These groups have generally had their environmental policy ideas stolen by mainstream politicians.

This is why the 15% vote for the greens in the 1989 European elections has never been topped.

But Lean is right that the political parties which have taken on green ideas in practice, have been more conservative than liberal in many cases.

We argued, in our policy suggestions to the UK Conservative Party last year that the right should re-take corporate responsibility as an issue from the left.

There's a summary article of our report here.

This should not deflect credit from NGOs in driving up labour standards and pushing hard on environmental issues. But many of these claim no political affiliation.

Thoughts?

Why do CSR people neglect customer services? And why that should change

This email from TripAdvisor.com may provide an insight into where customer service accountability is headed.

Here's the headline to convince you to have a look at it:

"Meals from Hell vs. Food of the Gods"

For any of you who don't use this site, it's essential for travel tips and has never let me down.

I once almost fell for the marketing of a holiday firm offering cheap trips to Kenya, until I checked on TripAdvisor.

I found the company slated by many (and I mean many) of its customers for not paying its staff in Africa on time, or at all in some cases.

No wonder the trip was cheap.

TripAdvisor is surely the model for customer service accountability.

It must be only a matter of time before something this clear and credible hits your industry. Unless you are purely business to business.

Whilst Facebook groups and sites like moneysupermarket.com will fill the space in the meantime, it's sites that move into the public lexicon, such as TripAdvisor, that companies should be even more concerned about.

So if you work in CSR or sustainability, make sure your focus is not just about the environment, community work, fairtrade or diversity.

Customer service, fulfilling your contract with your customer, comes first.

I am continually amazed that it features so poorly in corporate responsibility reporting.

Reporting on it honestly is a great innovation opportunity for a progressive company.

When corporate social media marketing goes badly wrong...

Such as in this case, we see headlines such as:

"Habitat blasted by Twitter users for using Iran election tag"

The piece covers a very cynical marketing move by UK home furnishings company Habitat to tag its twitter marketing with Iran election related tags, to drive traffic for gathering sales leads.

Not wise. And the company has been rightly pilloried for it, and climbed down.

The story was apparently 'broken' by Socialmediatoday.com

(As of 16:26 today, Socialmediatoday.com's site was down. Oops. Another lesson for would be social marketers...)

Who should head up your corporate responsibility approach?

I'm just about to interview our old friend David Grayson, director of the Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility at Cranfield University.

My colleague John Russell pointed me in the direction of this paper, recently published by the centre.

Entitled, "Who should head up your corporate responsibility approach?" It's an interesting read, on first glance.

The right person, of course, is the one that understands both sustainability as a global and corporate challenge, and who also grasps how your company really works from the inside.

Finding that person, on the other hand, is a lot easier said than done.

Update: 26 June: Here's the link to the podcast

16880 people like M&S Plan A website a lot

I write this because I just signed up to the Marks and Spencer Plan A 'pledge' website after seeing an advert on the environment page of the Independent.

Having signed up and logged in, the site told me that just under 17,000 people have done the same.

I don't know what to think about this number. 17,000 sounds like a lot, but then with over 65 million people in the UK, you could argue it's not.

Would would be good is to see what proportion of people visiting the site have signed up. That would be easy to show.

One of the reasons that I signed up is that, like Twitter, the site has a really good registration form. It's clean, friendly, and inviting, which is very hard to do.

If nothing else, if you want stakeholder feedback, make your online forms as good as this. I bet it would make a huge difference.

I am very curious as to what M&S will do now I have signed up. I haven't pledged to do anything yet, so it will be interesting to see how they encourage me to do so.

I'll report back when I get something from them...

Debate next week on global CSR initiatives in London

For those blog readers in London, you might be interested in the below invitation from my colleague:

"A discussion about CSR groups and initiatives and their effectiveness.

The discussion will be from 17:30 to 19:00 on June 29th in London, hosted by Birkbeck College, part of the University of London.

It's a roundtable debate, prompted by our recent report on the state of voluntary initiatives in CSR.

The discussion will cover some of the critical questions that CSR managers have about multistakeholder and private CSR initiatives.

Some of the topics we'll be discussing include:

What makes some initiatives so popular?
What business benefits do companies get from joining an initiative?
How can member responsibilities and costs be more transparent? How do successful companies achieve an ethical brand without logo overload?

Please let us know if you can attend. Places are limited to around 30.

If you can't make it, perhaps nominate a colleague to attend by contacting me below.

I can send you a free summary of the report if you would like.

Kind regards,

Pam

Pamela Muckosy
Research Manager
Ethical Corporation Institute (ECI)
7 - 9 Fashion Street, London E1 6PX
pam.muckosy@ethicalcorp.com
+44 (0) 207 375 7554"

Nobu, bluefin tuna and desperate newspapers

Search for Nobu on Google news and you get some interesting results:

Independent:
Celebrity diners say no to Nobu

Guardian:
Food is the new fur for the celebrity with a conscience

But then:

CityAm:
The winner from the tuna debacle? Nobu

The Telegraph:
Celebrities make me want to club a seal

It makes me wonder whether this is just the same old liberal/conservative divide in the press playing itself out in environmental issues, or a backlash against sustainability.

The Telegraph article in particular is rather visceral. I know columnists should be allowed to write more or less what they want, but encouraging the eating of endangered species is surely going a little too far.

So this is either the traditional conservative vs. liberal press debate, a backlash against responsible business, or newspaper columnists in a dying industry desperately trying to hang on to reactionary readers.

You decide...

The pointlessness of survey companies

It must be survey season.

I've had about a dozen calls from survey companies this last couple of months, asking for 25-45 minutes of time to answer mostly multiple choice questions on their client.

They generally offer £50 to charity. Although one was as stingy as £35.

Most of the time the questions are hopeless for informing on corporate strategy or reputation.

I actually think unless the whole interview is made up of open questions and they have someone who knows both the company and about sustainability / ethics to go over the responses, these things actually do more harm than good.

One third or less of the way through the survey, one gets bored (knowing the thing is unhelpful to the company due it its lack of nuance) and simply says, "pick C for the rest of this section", just to speed things up.

Am I right in suggesting the multiple choice CSR survey has more than had its day?

Alliance Boots story not all it seems

There's been a hoo-haa in the media this week about Alliance Boots.

The company has been accused of bailing on an 'ethics pledge' by the Guardian newspaper.

Have a look at the article by going here.

They have not renewed membership of the Ethical Trading Initiative, a group working on labour standards in big corporate supply chains.

I came back to the office and mentioned this above article to John Russell, my colleague who edits our magazine.

As so often, all is not what it seems if you only read the newspaper.

John provided the below, which give you a lot more context for this decision:

"According to Richard Ellis, group head of CSR at Alliance Boots:

Alliance Boots pulled out of ETI because it wanted to assess how its suppliers perform on a broad range of sustainability issues, not just labour standards.

The decision to withdraw from the multi-stakeholder group will not save the company money and has nothing to do with its ownership by private equity.

Boots will use the money that is was spending with ETI to instead pay Business in the Community, the membership group, to assess both the social and environmental performance of its suppliers.

The sum Boots paid to ETI is the same amount that it will pay BITC to assess the sustainability of the materials and packaging being used by suppliers, for example, as well as working conditions in factories.

“We cannot as a business fund both activities. Either we pay BITC to audit [the whole supply chain], or we pay ETI to audit labour standards,” Ellis says.

“We want the whole of our supply chain and processes to be as sustainable as possible. ETI is really interested in labour issues and not in broader sustainability issues.”

“We’ve spoken to BITC and they’re going to audit the whole of the supplier verification process from labour standards right through to the materials being used.”

“It’s not about saving money. It’s about being assessed more rigorously on a broader agenda,” he explains.

Before it left the initiative, Boots spoke to ETI directors to see if the group would expand its services to cover environmental issues. It would not.

So Boots instead opted to be the guinea pig for BITC’s first attempt at supply chain sustainability auditing. “This is a new area for them. They haven’t done this before,” says Ellis.

The partnership came about after Boots won a BITC award for ethical supply chain initiatives a couple of years ago.

Ellis says Boots wants to “progress the agenda” on supply chain sustainability. It will share the lessons from its work with BITC with other companies, he says.

Ellis admits that labour standards remain the number one priority for brands looking at ethical supply chain risks.

He says: “There’s always more to be done [on labour issues]. It’s still our number one priority when we look at a new supplier. But we want to expand the things that we’re audited upon. We’re genuinely interested in the whole supply chain. Not just labour standards.”"

So there you have it. A bit more complicated than the Guardian would like to admit.

But Boots does not get totally off the hook on ethics. Their supplier payment terms, in some cases, are unethical.

Paying anyone more than 30 days after they supply goods is wrong, let there be no debate about it.

And this story does raise questions about BITC's capacity to do this kind of work.

It's not what they usually do, and they are not as 'activist' as the ETI, nor anything like as public or multi-stakeholder in their work.

It's a risk for Boots. And clearly a bit of a cost rationalisation exercise.

We'll have to keep a close eye on this.

But the Guardian should be ashamed of itself for publishing the above story without the proper context.

Last one on reporting for a while, I promise!

I taped a podcast last week that might interest you all:

"Why corporate sustainability reporting is broken, and how to fix it"

Here's the blurb about it from the website

(Toby Webb talks to Jo Confino of the Guardian and Simon Henzell-Thomas of the Body Shop about why CSR reporting is failing, and what they are doing in response in their organisations)

More thoughts on improving CSR reporting...

Having chaired a lot of our conference last week on reporting, I was going to blog with a few thoughts on what I picked up.

But the customers and speakers have said it better than I could.

Here's an email I just had from Peter Truesdale, an associate director at the consultancy Corporate Citizenship, who came to the event last week:

"I very much enjoyed the Brussels conference especially the debate about GRI. There is quite a bit of mileage left in that one.

Mulling the two days over the following struck me as potentially positive topics for future sessions on reporting:

- Benchmarking in reports: who does it at all, who does it well, why hasn’t it caught on?

- Why do so many reporters fail to give any business sector or business processes context for their reports?

- Brand reporting: given that in many instances the consumer is engaging with a particular brand rather than a particular company, why is there relatively little brand reporting?

- Reporting on the full footprint not just the bit you control: who does it? Who does it well?

- Target setting (especially in the environment): are the targets being set really fit for purpose/stretching? Why are so many targets per unit of production rather than absolute?"

Peter makes some excellent points. Food for thought for you reporting folks out there.

Want more ambitious sustainability targets? Think American

Last week I was been chairing our CSR reporting conference in Brussels

One of the speakers, Ramon Arratia, European sustainability director for Interface, the B2B carpet company, said something very interesting.

European executives, he suggested, can be just too cautious on ethical business targets.

As a Spanish executive who worked five years at Vodafone and now works for a US firm, he speaks with some knowledge.

When setting sustainability targets, says Ramon, Europeans might suggest a 40% cuts target, and perhaps even cut that down to 20% in caution.

But American colleagues, (such as the founder of Interface, Ray Anderson) are sometimes much more ambitious, and pitch for 100% cuts in, for example, carbon.

Being so ambitious, they might not get there, but they might get 80% of the way, suggests Ramon, whilst the cautious Europeans could still be stuck on their 20-40%.

No-one likes generalisations, but American business is known for its consistent ambition.

Is it time to apply more 'big picture positive thinking' to your firms ethics targets?

Breaking news, Shell settles over Ken Saro-Wiwa case in Nigeria

As we recently reported, Shell is in court on business and human rights right now.

Activists and their lawyers accuse the company of complicity in the death of Ogoni activists in the 1990's at the hands of the Nigerian government.

In particularly Ken Saro-Wiwa, who has become an iconic protest figure for many campaigners.

An hour ago Reuters reported the company has settled the case, before trial, for more than $15 million.

IF this is true, I am very surprised.

I expected Shell to fight this all the way, given their trenchant position that they had nothing to do with the execution of Sawo-Wiwa and the oppression of the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta in the 1990's.

I've read a fair amount about the case and I do find it hard to believe any company would have approved of what Sani Abacha, Nigeria's dictator then, did to Sawo-Wiwa and the other unfortunate victims.

So I am a bit shocked that Shell settled the case.

However, settlement of Alien Tort Claims Act cases (civil cases for cash that use a 1789 US anti-piracy law), does have some precedent.

Unocal settled it's Burma ATCA case (due to pending takeover by Chevron) a few years ago.

The settlement was around $30 million US, much of which went to US lawyers, not villagers, according to my source on the case, who was a senior exec at the company.

So will Shell's settlement open the floodgates for more and more ATCA cases?

We'll see. I would expect an uptick. Tort lawyers in the US will be rubbing their hands.

For readers wanting more on this topic, search EthicalCorp.com for "Alien Tort Claims Act".

Evidence based management and mainstreaming sustainability

Sustainability and corporate responsibility managers (is there a difference now?) should take very serious note of Jeff Pfeffer.

Why is this?

Because he advocates something really quite simple (in theory) that can help companies trying to 'mainstream' sustainability in their business.

Pfeffer (who has written a couple of my favourite management books, along with Drucker), is a proponent of what he calls evidence-based management.

Sounds like a simple concept. But listen to this brilliant podcast and you'll realise it's something lots of companies fail to really practice.

Pfeffer is useful for sustainability because it's a nascent area of business management, usually utilises very poor research methodologies, and features even more decisions than usual made on emotion and hearsay, than the rest of business.

Check out and enjoy Jeff Pfeffer. He's clear, simple and even funny. You can't ask much more than that.

His analysis of "casual benchmarking" in business is worth thinking about if you work in CSR!

Thoughts on the future of CSR/Sustainability reporting

I've been discussing CSR reporting with a few people recently. For a couple of reasons.

Firstly, we have a conference coming up on the topic this week in Brussels, and another one in November in London.

Secondly, we are devising a new product to offer comment on reports for companies, based on our experience reading and reviewing them for years.

There's more on what we do on this right now, here.

Thirdly, I was exchanging emails with a reporting manager for a big company today and penned a few thoughts on how I think reporting should evolve.

Here goes:

For what it’s worth my view is that reporting should evolve thus:

1) Online data and CSR/Sustainability report on company website

2) Annual report and accounts

3) A brief summary of “this is our company” in PDF / HTML and Print sent out to investors, stakeholders, etc, well written and covering both financial and non financials in 'headline' manner (i.e. the main points)

4) Targeted stakeholder and investor communications taken from online report and annual report and accounts and carefully targeted, written for specific groups, and tested relentlessly for effectiveness.

These will tell a story, communicate on a specific issue or issues (depending on the target market), and contain credible data and external viewpoints.

Corporate PR only works if you give up an element of control in the eventual message.

Let others help you tell your story, and take a few risks. There really is nothing to lose, particularly these days…

The MORI/Insert any survey company here, product: “is our company 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 compared to BP” surveys have more than had their day.

I would argue they are in fact counter productive.

I truly think sustainability can be a key corporate reputation differentiator, if only looked at thus:

1) Holistically, as part of the business, and all business communications, not just to opinion formers and people who throw CR reports in the bin.

2) Therefore, resourced appropriately, with the right balance of good communications and sustainability expertise in the mix.

So what do you all think?

What do journalists want from CSR communications?

Here are some good pointers, resulting from discussions during an event at the Guardian last week.

The discussions involved editors, producers and researchers from the BBC, Guardian, the Age of Stupid, Forum for the Future staff and a few comms consultants.

Top 5 things media wish people promoting sustainability stories would do:

1) Know their audience: know the interests of the journalists they’re pitching to and the audience of the publications they write for

2) One page press releases! Selling the story in the first line

3) Originality

4) Timing, get it right

5) Relevance: Pitch the stories well

Here's a piece I wrote a while back on a similar tip:

How to work with the media to drive your message home, effective communication techniques for companies

It's worth reading for the note from the President of Firestone tires at the end in the comment section. I managed to annoy him a bit, but his views on what happened to him on CNN are fascinating, even though one needs to take them with a pinch of salt.

Key questions for corporate membership groups on CSR

Anyone working in responsible business knows that there a few types of corporate membership groups.

There's the big, "old school" business lobby groups, who largely move at the pace of the slowest (or biggest) members.

Then there's the general corporate responsibility member groups. Who try to tread a tricky line between encouraging action and annoying their members, some of whom have only really joined for show.

Finally, there's this fascinating and totally uncoordinated new grouping. These are based on either industries or new issues that cross industries. Examples would be cars, palm oil, sustainable coffee or cocoa.

We've been tracking some of these groups for years, writing about their work and trying to keep up to date with what they do.

Here's a recent article we ran on some of them, and their pros and cons.

And we've just published an in-depth 125 page report on different initiatives, and what companies make of them, get from them, and do because of them.

Details and a free summary are here.

Some of the initiatives we've looked at include:

Forest Stewardship Council
Common Code for the Coffee Community
International Cocoa Initiative
The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil
Fair Labour Association
International Council of Toy Industries CARE Process
Equator Principles
Business for Social Compliance Initiative
International Council on Mining and Metals
Council for Responsible Jewellery Practices
Social Accountability 8000

Here are some of the key questions that emerge from the research we have done:

1. Many companies are finding it difficult to promote both the brand of the initiative and their product. Is this why only 13% of initiatives offer the use of a product label to their members?

2. Are initiatives themselves ethically-run? Why do nearly all initiatives studied hide their costs of membership?

3. Many industry CSR initiatives have strong growth ambitions in membership. They are also moving away from providing standards on niche ethical issues, and towards standards that embrace social and environmental issues. Will they be able to handleexpansion of both membership and goals?

4. Are organisations that manage initiatives and standards able to find consensus. Can they meet the needs of different stakeholders?

5. How can member responsibilities and costs be more transparent?

6. Industry-specific initiative challenges. I.e. For initiatives that focus on agricultural commodities are often challenged by mixed sources. Companies struggle to source enough volume of products with an equal ethical standard. Other key issues include air miles, carbon footprint, water use and producer access to financing.

Much more to be done in this area then, and the initiatives themselves need to consider these questions, I would suggest.

The free summary is here for download.

Great blog on what economic stimulus packages may do for the environment

Take a look at this.

It's a blog by Fortis bank's SRI team on: "ongoing research into the link between sustainability and finance".

On first glance, it looks very helpful.

This paper "The Green New Deal: a new era for sustainable development", in particular, ought to be useful reading.

The Ecologist goes online only...

Readers of this blog may well know the Ecologist magazine.

With a long history of promoting environmentalism, the magazine has always been a labour of love for its owners, the Goldsmith family.

I once did the numbers on it, based on what I know of running magazines for almost a decade, and the economics never added up in print. Not even close.

Editorially it's now a half-decent magazine, having purged itself of some of its worst anti-corporate/capitalist tendencies.

I always wondered whether this shift had anything to do with its owner, Zac Goldsmith, attempting to become selected as a Conservative Member of Parliament.

This is all by the by. The point of this post is to alert you to the fact The Ecologist is going on-line only, from the end of this month.

The plan seems to be to generate online subscriptions revenue somehow.

This is in line with a whole shift in publishing towards paid content online.

If it's unique, hard to get elsewhere, then you can do it, so say the experts I have seen and heard hold forth on it.

It's something we'll be doing too, quite soon, on EthicalCorp.com.

Needs must, and all that. Hopefully other sustainability publications out there will do the same. It appears we all have little choice.

Where's the beef?

You almost sensed it was coming.

First oil, then gas, then sweatshops, then diamonds, then palm oil, cotton, soy and now beef.

Just a few of the products we consume every day where tracing back the supply chain can have shocking results.

Increasingly, findings back in the chain are becoming more widely publicised and companies are having to be ever-nimbler in their responses.

Greenpeace is now targeting high street brand names that source Brazilian leather in their latest campaign.

Typically, the companies named as not being good enough at tracing where in Brazil their leather comes from are some of the leading brands in sustainability.

Nike, Timberland and Adidas are all mentioned several times on the first page of the report's website.

And in going after the leaders in the field, Greenpeace do not mince their words:

"While the US-based companies behind reputable global brands like Adidas, Nike, Reebok, and Timberland appear to believe that Amazon sources are excluded from their products, our investigations expose for the first time how their blind consumption of raw materials fuels deforestation and climate change"

Greenpeace says the value of Brazil’s cattle trade in 2008 was: "nearly $7 billion, more than a quarter of which came from leather. One in every three tons of beef traded internationally comes from Brazil, and the country’s government forecasts that by 2018 almost two out of every three tons of beef will come from Brazil."

And, alongside deforestation there are human rights issues too:

"Trade data also reveal trade with ranches using modern-day slavery".

Many of the papers have covered the new report in various amounts of detail.

For the brands, here is the most important bit:

"...criminal or “dirty” supplies of cattle are being “laundered” through this supply chain to an unwitting global market"

Greenpeace is using the old tactic of highlighting the most visible and active brands in the supply chain space (Nike and Timberland particularly) to gain traction on others when they announce changes to their sourcing and supply chain auditing policies.

But asking companies such as these to police the whole supply chain, or drive systemic change on their own, is unrealistic.

Greenpeace wants these companies to put pressure on both the Brazilian government and the big producers of leather in Brazil (which aside from climate change has a really serious environmental impact) as a result of their campaign.

This may annoy some companies, who feel they are being made responsible for the state and structure of the Brazilian leather market. No doubt some of the big firms mentioned indeed source little or nothing from the Amazon region, whilst others do, often unknowingly.

Critics will argue that such campaigns often push the biggest companies into better sourcing, but many below that top tier, under the brand radar, simply carry on as before and not much changes except among 5-10 companies at the top end.

Advocates will retort that getting Nike and Timberland (for example) to guarantee their leather is not from the Amazon and to be transparent about where they do get it, could push other big players into action and herald some kind of market shift.

I can see the latter point, but with 90% + of the global apparel market unbranded, it will be a long time before the purchasing power of the well known brands can influence the other nine tenths of the supply chain. Unfortunately.

What is needed is investment into Brazilian institutions and law enforcement. And that is not something apparel brands tend to spend much time or money on.

A few other companies have given this a try in the past. We published a report on them last year that's available here and an article summarising is available, entitled Essay: Governance and institutions – Big brands’ capacity-building success.

Uzbek cotton and the power of brand boycotts

This recent article, from the Observer, is fascinating.

It's about big brands boycotting (or asking their suppliers to) Uzbek cotton.

This is because the Uzbek government uses forced child labour to get their annual cotton harvest picked.

This is so it can be ginned and sold, eventually, to textile factories in Asia.

Then it ends up in our clothes.

As the article reports: "According to a range of authoritative campaigners and journalists including the BBC, children work up to 11 hours without protective clothing, adequate rest or water leading many to suffer heat stroke."

As a result of NGO campaigns and media attention, Tesco, Asda Wal-Mart, Marks & Spencer and Gap are all trying now to stop sourcing Uzbek cotton.

This story is a great example of how brands CAN help deliver progressive change, just by using their combined purchasing power.

Others should join them.

For further reading, check out:

Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF)
"Still In the Fields"

"A hardline on cotton"

"Spinning a line – why the trail of cotton from Uzbekistan needs to be clearer"

"Uzbekistan cotton – A thread of hope in the retail fabric"

"Supply chains – Are big brands improving supply chain labour standards?"

Are CSR professionals part of the problem?

Interesting quotes from Adam Werbach (the green activist turned Wal-Mart sustainability adviser) in an interview he did with us the other day.

“The number of CSR people who are respected by the CEO as one of the up and coming future leaders of the company, someone who is expected to become a future CEO, is one in a hundred – maybe one in a thousand.”

“In my experience, most CSR people cannot answer the question: how does your company make money and how do you connect to that? They’re much more about license to grow, risk mitigation and corporate reputation than they are about core business strategy – how you sell more stuff and save money, to make more money to keep doing it.”

“The majority of CSR work is non-strategic. It doesn’t actually build bottom line or top line profits”...

“The truth is there’s a lot of great people in CSR doing the right thing. It’s an amazing group of people. My challenge is a lot of them were outsiders who are now insiders and they are very vested in their roles. The biggest barrier [to embedding CSR], to be honest, is frequently the CSR people. I find myself in the place I’m working and I freeze them out of corporate conversation because they are stopping the change the CFO or CEO wants to make.”

Does this ring true with you?

The interview will be published in our joint July/August edition.

Here's a link to what we've been publishing recently, and a link for more information on subscribing to the print version of Ethical Corporation.

For all the consultants out there...

Here's a great video depiction of the vendor/client relationship on YouTube.

It's a parody of how clients can sometimes treat vendors, transposed onto real life every day situations.

If you have a couple of minutes, it's worth a look, very amusing.

I have heard quite a few tales of large, apparently CSR-minded companies behaving like this with vendors over the years.

Consumers still like sustainability, and companies are responding

This note, from our main site, pulls some interesting quotes and stats together on consumer buying habits based on sustainability concerns.

For example:

"Rob Cameron, head of the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation at the Fairtrade Foundation, told delegates at the Annual Responsible Business Summit in London last month that consumption of cocoa, coffee and bananas under the Fairtrade label is continuing to rise strongly.

Retail sales volume is expected to increase from €2.4 billion in 2007 to €3 billion when the 2008 figures are released".

We've just published a new report on how companies are responding to the challenges back down the supply chain so they can assure ethically minded consumers.

Take a look at it here.

The report aims to examine leading global initiatives across a range of industries and analyses what works (and pays!), and why some initiatives are doomed to fail.

You can get a free summary here.