ENGLISH SUMMARIES P+ #4
Dutch
Clothing Company We claims: No Child Labor
Business Leaders want responsibilies for Public Education
Industrial Ecology in Holland grows only slowly
Akzo Nobel stops with Mercury
Are Senior Managers the best for developing countries?
The old and special ICCO-Lula Relationship
CSR-manager David Rosenberg leaves Ahold
Can war investments be ethical?
Dutch Clothing Company WE claims: No Child Labour
Clothing company WE is the first big Dutch company to apply worldwide for
the SA8000 certificate of the producers. This certificate guarantees - amongst
other things - that there is no child labor in the production chain. When
a supplier in Hong Kong asked if WE was already certified in The Netherlands,
director Jan Huisman decided to go ahead and undergo the strict certification
process at home.
So far, the certificate has put WE behind the competition because of the costs
of compliance. Sometimes producers protest when they have to pay two thousand
dollars to get the certificate. The solution of WE is to pay the bill themselves.
Then there is still the time that suppliers have to put into supervision.
Still, these financial and practical drawbacks don’t weigh heavier than
the moral advantage that WE now has over competitors like C&A. Supervision
hasn’t led to drastic intervention yet. Director Huisman: "So far
that hasn’t been necessary, although we have had some heavy talks in
which we had to show how serious we were. We have once quietly moved to the
competition, because the supplier didn’t meet our environmental demands."
P+
Platform
Business leaders want responsibilies for public education
Sponsorship of education by the business world still doesn’t occur often
in the Netherlands. Even more than other public sectors, the education sector
is allergic to anything that smells like interference. This is not so strange
considering the vulnerability of children’s minds. Schools don’t
want to be used in the propaganda of businesses. But there are problems in
the education system that could be solved by the corporate world. They could,
for instance, supply temporary employees to diminish the terrible shortage
of teachers in science subjects. But how far can this public-private cooperation
go? Will paying companies want to make decisions over the content of education?
Does the corporate world have a hidden agenda when they offer to help through
sponsorship?
Tom Rodrigues, director of the consulting and IT company Ordina, is all for
giving the corporate world more responsibility: "That we would look for
profit is an outdated idea." Against responsibility is Professor of Empirical
Sociology Han Leune: "The corporate world has a hidden agenda, at minimum."
P+
Planet
Industrial Ecology in Holland grows slowly
A lot of Dutch cities are showing off with sustainable industry sites. Some
good results have been achieved, especially with collective waste contracts
and former public utilities. Journalistic investigation by P+ shows, however,
that there are very few true industrial ecosystems in the Netherlands. Such
systems demand a radically different way of conducting business in which imitation
of natural processes and recycling are the most important features, instead
of dominance and control. Best Practices in the Netherlands are the INES (Industrial
Ecosystem) in the Botlek and industry site ‘Zuid-Groningen’ near
Ter Apel. The fact that cities fight amongst each other to attract companies
obstructs the growth of balanced sites. The Netherlands only has eleven ecological
industry and office sites in which a significant amount of thought has been
put into the aspects of a balanced structure.
P+ Clean Case
Akzo Nobel stops with mercury
Mercury is very persistent and very harmful: it can destroy one’s kidneys
and/or mind. Nevertheless, nations cannot seem to agree on how to ban this
heavy metal. The United Nations Environmental Program recently agreed on ways
to reduce the amount of mercury in the environment, but the Bush administration
opposed the plans.
In Europe, there is still a dispute between NGO’s and the chlorine industry
on how and when to stop using mercury in the process of making chlorine. Another
difference in opinions deals with the way mercury should be treated once it
is freed from the chlorine factories. Eurochlor wants to send it back to the
mercury mine in Spain; NGO’s want to immobilise the material and give
it back its original form: cinnabar. But Akzo Nobel announces in P+ it will
stop using mercury in the year 2005. This means the feared transportation
of chlorine through the country by train will stop as well.
P+ Classic Case
25 Years Program for Sending Managers Abroad
A quarter of a century ago the Programma Uitzending Managers (PUM - Program
for Sending Managers Abroad) sent its first retired manager, a mechanical
engineer, to Tanzania, in order to help a small meat factory with its refrigeration.
Today 3,500 senior advisors have joined the PUM and there are 1,700 projects
per year. The program sends ex-managers between the ages of fifty and seventy
to developing countries for a period of two to seven weeks, in order to assist
companies free of charge with knowledge and advice. Twenty-five years ago,
the PUM was started by the employer organizations VNO and NCW, and the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs. Until then, development cooperation had mainly been an
affair of government and social organizations. The government felt that the
business world should stay out of it. The employer organizations felt that
the economic centerfield - companies with between fifty and a hundred employees
- formed the true driving force of the economy. In 1977, the new Minister
of Development Cooperation, Jan de Koning, felt the same way and helped to
start PUM. The program was very successful. Little factories with only a few
employees often grew with the help of knowledge of PUM-ers into companies
with hundreds of employees.
Nowadays, the government is convinced of the importance of building small
and mid-size businesses in developing countries. The government has promised
PUM an increase in subsidies of 20 percent. With this extra money, the program
plans to greatly expand the number of their missions.
P+
Social Case
The old and very special ICCO-Lula Relationship
Dutch development organization ICCO is starting partnership after partnership
in Brazil. Goal of the Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation
is to enable economically successful projects, which can be reproduced elsewhere
in the country. By joining a partnership in 2001, hundreds of small fruit
farmers around the northern city of Belem became co-owners of their own processing
company, Nova Amafrutas, which supplies Dutch juice producer Passina. Another
partnership is being prepared, which could mean a future for the poor who
live on the garbage dumps of the ten largest Brazilian cities. By restructuring
the waste flow and the re-use of recyclable waste, the waste mountain of the
metropolis of Recife could mean a future in waste-disposal to more than fifteen
hundred families. ICCO president Tineke Lodders visited the Brazilian network
of employers, professors, union leaders, politicians and even President ‘Lula’
himself. In order to understand life on the garbage dumps, she even climbed
the dump of Recife. Her point of view: "We live in a world of mass consumption
and produce a mass of waste, which we prefer not to see. But we have to try
not to be blind to the people who try to build a living based on this waste."
P+
Biography:
CSR-manager David Rosenberg leaves Ahold
For more than five years, David M. Rosenberg had been responsible for the
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of supermarket concern Ahold, which
is still involved in a scandal. He experimented with skylights in order to
cut back the energy bill. He pointed out risks, like child labor and selling
tuna (sometimes fishermen accidentally catch sharks, removing the fins - for
soup - before throwing them back). He experienced how ‘boring’
it is to do good, if the customer already expects you to do so. "It is
like saying that you don’t beat your wife. Nobody expects me to do that
anyway." Rosenberg worked with heart and soul for Ahold: "I would
have gone through fire and water for them." Now that Ahold is involved
in a scandal (because of messing with the books by an American daughter company),
he is disappointed. "I haven’t lost any money, but I have lost
my belief in something. I still don’t know what to do with it. But I
still have a sense of idealism and optimism, because it’s the only way
to have a future. Otherwise the cynics would win and what kind of future would
we get then?" This year Rosenberg will leave Ahold in order to focus
full time on the Foundation Utz Kapeh, which strives for a bigger market share
for sustainably produced coffee. He started his career in Costa Rica and achieved
the avoidance of the damming of a wild river.
P+
Last Words
Opinion: Can war investments be ethical?
War is an evil, but sometimes it is a necessary evil. Does that also count
for investors who have to ask themselves if they want to invest in weapons?
The aversion to war and the use of weapons is understandable. According to
the Campaign Against Arms Trade, 90 percent of the victims are civilians,
half of which are children. However, the use of weapons can be legitimate.
"Any sovereign state has the right to defend itself", Hugo de Groot
stated in ‘The Right of War and Peace’ (1625). But sometimes wars
are unjustifiable offensives. This difference makes it understandable why
Operation Desert Storm had the support of the public, while the international
community is justifiably critical about Operation Iraqi Freedom.
When an investor has to make a decision on an investment, he doesn’t
have insight into - or control over - the goals of (future) wars. And that’s
just as well. The (international) community decides how the means will be
used. Neither does the investor have any insight into the morality, effectiveness
and proportionality of the weapons to be used. An investor should therefor
choose a ‘better safe than sorry’ course.
In choosing weaponry in which to invest, the investor should remember that
the weaponry in question should not lead easily to immoral or disproportionate
effects, that it should carry the possibility of an adequate and specific
response, that it should not be aimed at civilians and that it should promote
the maintenance of the (international) justice system and the soverignty of
states.
This puts nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, cluster bombs, riot-control
agents, electroshock equipment and manipulated ammunition or land mines outside
the scope of the (institutional) investor. Also, handguns are best avoided.
Investments in non-lethal weapons, intelligence, surveillance and ‘directed
weapon systems’ are permissible. Even with proper means, war is still
an evil. But sustainable investors can invest responsibly in weaponry. The
first step in this process is improvement of information. Research providers
who generate corporate information have to become as advanced as the weapon
systems of the defense industry: direct, proportional and effective.
You have to know what you invest in if you don’t want the investment
to explode right into your face.
by:
Harry Hummels
Professor of Sustainable Investments
University of Nyenrode