VOICES: Getting corporations to do the right thing
I admit it -- the Dirt Diggers Digest is guilty of focusing on the badnews about corporate misdeeds. So in this post I will write aboutsomething positive: activist groups that are succeeding in changingcorporate behavior for the better.
The occasion for this shift in emphasis is the recent announcementof the winners of the BENNY awards, which are given out by the Business Ethics Network.BEN is an association of organizations and individuals involved incorporate campaigns that seek to pressure companies to end injuriouspractices relating to the environment, public health and the workplace.(Full disclosure: I have served on BEN's advisory committee.)
Since 2005 BEN has been giving awardscelebrating outstanding victories. During the past few years it hasalso honored groups that are making progress toward such victories andgiven individual achievement awards to veteran campaigners.
Each time attend the awards ceremony and hear the descriptions ofthe campaigns, I find my skeptical shell melting away in a wave ofoptimism about the prospects for undoing corporate harm. This year wasno different.
There was a tie for 1st place in the main BENNY award between the Campaign for Fair Food and Think Before You Pink: "Yoplait -- Put A Lid On It!"
The Campaign -- led by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and supported by the Presbyterian Church (USA) and others in the Alliance for Fair Food -- hasmade great strides in improving the working conditions of immigrantfarmworkers in southern Florida. The campaign has won a string ofvictories by going around the growers who are the direct employers ofthe workers and pressuring their major customers (fast food giants,supermarket chains, and major food service companies) to pay more forthe produce with the understanding that the difference will go towardhigher wages.
Think Before You Pinkis a campaign led by Breast Cancer Action that has taken a criticalapproach toward the growing corporate practice of putting pink ribbonson their products to raise awareness of breast cancer. The campaignstarted out examining whether those companies are contributing asignificant portion of the purchase price toward legitimate cancerresearch. More recently, it has challenged pink-ribbon companies thatmake products that have been linked to breast cancer (the campaigncalls it "pinkwashing").
One of its recent targets was Eli Lilly, which sells drugs meant toreduce the risk of breast cancer while at the same time distributingrGBH, an artificial growth hormone used by dairies that is a suspectedcarcinogen. Earlier this year, the Think Before You Pink campaign gotGeneral Mills to stop using rBGH in its Yoplait yogurt, which has extensively used pink-ribbon marketing.
BEN gave its first-place Path to Victory award to the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign, which is seeking to reduce use of the climate-destroying black fuel through efforts such as organizing studentsat campuses which depend on coal-generated electricity. The campaign,which is targeting some schools smack in the middle of coal country,has released a tongue-in-cheek online video with the tagline "Coal is Too Dirty Even for College."
The Individual Achievement Award went to Sister Pat Daly, a veteran shareholder activist who heads the Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment,an alliance of Roman Catholic groups in the New York City metropolitanarea. She is best known as one of the founders of Campaign ExxonMobil,which pioneered the effort to get the giant oil company to take a lessirresponsible position on climate change.
At the BEN awards ceremony, Sister Pat also described facing downformer General Electric CEO Jack Welch at a company board meeting. Foryears, she and other activists had been pressing GE to acceptresponsibility for cleaning up the PCB contamination it had caused inNew York's Hudson River. And for years the company resisted. Welch'ssuccessor Jeff Immelt eventually relented, and in May 2009 a clean-upeffort financed by GE finally began. Sister Pat's role in that victory certainly deserved to be honored.
Whether over the course of months or decades, the kinds of campaignscelebrated by the BENNY Awards show that corporations can be made to dothe right thing.
