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A dossier of weekly information published by the International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples

06 Feb 2007
FRANCE
A contribution from Roger Sandri, from the World Pact to Corporate Social Responsibility
 
On June 9, 2007, the 14th ILC Conference will take place in Geneva, as it does every year.
 
Several important events have taken place since the Madrid Conference and the Geneva Conference of June 2006.
 
There was the General Assembly of the United Nations, which was a key event in 2006. There was the founding congress of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) in Vienna at the beginning of November 2006.
 
The members of the ILC were all informed of the proceedings and decisions of this trade union event.
 
In relation to the U.N., the discussion centered on the implementation of world governance took a step further.
 
The workings of the General Assembly, via the work of the Commissions, took place throughout 2006.
 
While this election was focused on by all the media, other much more important decisions were not covered. As we indicated in the special issue on December 19, 2006, the General Secretary of the U.N. nominated ‘a group of twenty leaders from business, labor, and civil society,’ to head the administrative council of the World Pact, called the Global Compact.
 
The participants are:
 
Business
Mr. Talal ABU-GHAZALEH
Chairman and CEO, Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Organization, Egypt
 
Professor José Sergio Gabrielli de AZEVEDO
President and CEO, Petrobras, Brazil
 
Mr. Guillermo CAREY
Senior Partner, Carey & Allende Abogados, Chile
 
Mrs. CHEN Ying
Deputy Director General, China Enterprise Confederation, China
 
Mrs. Suzanne Nora JOHNSON
Vice Chairman, Goldman Sachs Group, USA
 
Ms. Anne LAUVERGEON
Chair of the Executive Board, Areva, France
 
Ms. Ntombifuthi MTOBA
Chair of the Board, Deloitte, South Africa
 
Mr. B. MUTHURAMAN
Managing Director, Tata Steel, India
 
Professor Mads OEVLISEN
Adjunct Professor and Chair, Lego, Denmark
 
Mr. Hiroyuki UEMURA
Former President, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Co., Japan
 
International Labor and Business Organizations
 
Mr. Fred HIGGS
General Secretary,
International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions
 
Mr. Antonio PENALOSA
Secretary-General,
International Organization of Employers
 
Mr. Guy RYDER
General Secretary,
International Confederation of Free Trade Union
 
Mr. Guy SEBBAN
Secretary-General,
International Chamber of Commerce
 
Civil Society
 
Mrs. Habiba AL MARASHI
Chair, Emirates Environmental Group
 
Mr. Oded GRAJEW
Chair of the Board,
Instituto Ethos de Empresas e Responsabilidade Social
 
Dr. Huguette LABELLE
Chair, Transparency International
 
Mrs. Mary ROBINSON
Chair, Realizing Rights
The Ethical Globalization Initiative
 
Ex-Officio
 
Sir Mark MOODY-STUART
Chairman, Foundation for the Global Compact
 
Mr. Georg KELL
Executive Head, UN Global Compact Office
 
This is undoubtedly the embryo of what will be the "world governance," which is destined to implement the full capitalist orientation of the world globalized society where the multinational corporations are called on to play a determining role.
 
The fears that we've articulated for the past couple of the years are being concretized by the rise of powerful economic forces (the corporations) that are destroying the political sovereignty of nation-states, which are more and more reduced to accompanying this offensive. The blackmail of low wages, linked to permanent threats of off-shoring, is a natural part of the globalizing strategy.
 
The institutional organization of the world economy is built by the will of the corporations to push for their specific interests. The governments are only supposed to go along with this.
-----
In this context, the international unification of trade unionism under the aegis of the ITUC is an even more important event. We see with the Global Compact that the International Labor Organization (ILO) itself seems to be moving down this new world march.
 
I have already written on this in a contribution titled, ‘The ILO at the Crossroads.’ The dangers formulated at the time are becoming more and more real.
 
Of course, this is not a new question. Already, 30 years ago, the ILO discussed the question of the multinational corporations, though they were less powerful and numerous then.
 
The March session of the sub-commission mandated to discuss these questions, under the aegis of the Administrative Council of the ILO, has given its support to the call for a march on the 30th anniversary of the Declaration on tripartite principles for multinational corporations and social policies.
 
This demonstration will take place for two days, in November 2007.
 
The demonstration will bring together about 15 representatives of governments, employers organizations, trade unions, corporations, and technical specials.
 
A question is posed, An international organization like the ILO, which is an institution of the United Nations (UN), historically emanates from the founding charter of the UN adopted in San Francisco in 1945 (the UN was preceded by the League of Nations, founded in 1919).
 
Nation states are the founding members of this institution. In contradiction with the foundations of the international system, a few years ago, a report of the Conference of the United Nations on Commerce and Development (CNUCED) concerning multinational corporations clearly took a position in favor of ‘the progressive action of transnational corporations.’
 
While the implementation of the world economy run by corporations has created an economic and social disaster, the international institutions are supporting and even conferring social duties to these capitalistic entities.
 
We know that for a long time the strategy of the U.S. corporations has been to maximize profits by focusing on financial speculation and fictitious accumulation.
 
This is coming about through structural planning based on ‘lowering labor costs’ and ‘increasing productivity.’ The corporations' strategies are not random. Public education, public services, and environmental protections are being destroyed to assure the profitability of investments.
 
In the ‘secondary’ markets, China, which is considered to be the world's number one manufacturer, is at the center of the social questions. The mass of workers are subjected to a brutal capitalist exploitation, with the complicity of a so-called ‘proletarian’ power, which in reality is a totalitarian police state.
 
Several investigations demonstrate that the multinational corporations pressure the Chinese government to keep wages low and maintain the deplorable working conditions for millions of Chinese workers.
 
For the corporations and the states that are subordinated to or integrated into the system, the shameful exploitation of the labor force remains a permanent principle.
 
Concerning this central question, we would love to hear the opinion of the UN, the ILO, and, of course, the new ITUC. Unfortunately, they have said nothing. To the contrary, we hear Guy Ryder, general secretary of the ITUC, speaks on the French radio during the Davos Forum to express his "confidence in the transnational corporations' ability to pressure the Chinese government to authorize the creation by the workers of trade unions independent from the State." This must be a joke.
 
The offensive against workers' wages also leads to the destruction of industrial bases in the industrialized countries, leading to persistent mass unemployment. Faced with this situation, the international organizations such as the IMF and World Bank, in the same spirit as the head of the ITUC, put forward the idea of ‘corporate social responsibility’ meant at transforming social relations. Other important facets of this ideology are "sustainable development" and "decent employment."
 
Concerning Corporate Social Responsibility
 
Leaning on this new definition, some also add the demand for the ‘democratic control of the economic decisions.’
 
This is an ambiguous formulation. The corporation, as the structural unit of capitalism and its mode of production, aims to produce value by extracting surplus value from wage labor, with the goal of having as high a profit rate as possible.
 
The accumulation of capital remains the main objective of the capitalistic structure. In a work published in 1962, ‘Capitalism and Freedom,’ the champion of economic and industrial liberalism, Milton Friedman, who died in 1996, wrote:
 
"The idea is thrown around that heads of companies should accept a social responsibility other than making as much money as possible for their shareholders. This is a fundamentally subversive doctrine. If businessmen have a responsibility other than making maximum profits, how are they supposed to know what this responsibility is? Can self-appointed individuals decide what is in the interest of society?"
 
This at least has the merit of clarity.
 
The severity of the system provokes inevitable social reactions that threaten the capitalist mode of production and the private ownership of the means of production and exchange. Capitalism, under different political, national, and world forms, aims to channel protest movements and prevent them from taking on the capitalist system and exploitation as such. That is untouchable.
 
Most of those, who are doing this channeling, are NGOs created on the basis of funding from various foundations and corporations. They aim to take into safe channels for the capitalists the revolutionary aspirations of the masses by integrating protest into the dominant system.
 
Accompaniment substitutes protest.
 
Up until now, labor unionism has been able to remain outside the system by acting on the class terrain for the strict defense of the specific interests of the wage earners. This is in full contradiction with ‘accompanying’ trade unionism and integration to the so-called ‘general interest,’ i.e., the dominant system where the corporations make the laws.
 
The ITUC, born in Vienna in 2006, is today orienting toward an accompaniment trade unionism based on class collaboration.
‘Corporate social responsibility’ needs the instrument of workers' unionism to give capitalism a human face.
 
This immense reactionary movement is supported by all the international structures. Everybody is involved. The UN participates through the Global Compact, supported by the corporations, the ILO, and the European Union.
One example of this strategy of accompaniment: The French trade union confederations, with the exception of the GGT-FO, created an ‘Inter-union Committee of Wage Savings’ to orient the investment of these savings toward ‘socially responsible’ investments.
 
The French Democratic Labor Confederation (CFDT) took an active part in this operation. It occupies a central role in this sort of integrationist structure.
According to many observers, various big corporations are promoting ‘social responsibility’ and ‘sustainable growth’ to nourish a publicity campaign.
 
The example of Danone in France is characteristic of the practice of a ‘socially responsible’ company. After having pushed through lay-offs in various enterprises, Danone re-launched its altruistic banner by putting out a ‘socially responsible yogurt.’
 
During the World Cup of Soccer, we saw clothing companies publicize their actions against child labor. As the magazine ‘Political Economy’ rightly points out, corporate social responsibility "appears as one of the responses of the leading elites to the social movement that protest, with growing strength, the exorbitant power of the corporations. The policy of generalized privatizations and deregulation has only deepened this movement. For example, there are the struggles against the sub-contracting policies of Nike and Reebok and against the irresponsible negligence of Shell, Total, and Mark and Spencer."
 
Corporate social responsibility is nothing but an illusion. This is confirmed on a daily basis by those who are subjected to the brutal law of exploitation imposed by the investors who constantly want higher and higher profit rates.
From this mechanism springs the restructuring and the job cuts, wage blackmail, and the generalized destruction of the conquests won through decades of struggle.
 
Milton Friedman at least had the merit of openly stating that the only social responsibility of the corporation is to make as much money as possible for its investors.
 
The ILO would do well to refer to this position and admit that corporate social responsibility is a sham that has nothing in common with the historic mission given to the ILO by the United Nations in 1919 and 1945. This mission is to contribute to social progress throughout the world, for the good of humanity.