McDonald’s and Halliburton Say Human Rights Are Too Expensive

Halliburton and McDonalds. One of them sells poisonous prehistoric sludge, and the other… is Halliburton.

OK, terrible joke. But these are two companies you don’t exactly associate with each other.

This year, they have something in common. They’re both the targets of resolutions filed by their shareholders asking them to identify and publicly report all the ways they impact human rights around the world.

And both of them refuse to.

The shareholder resolutions were filed earlier this year by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Pension Plan, a fund representing 1.6 million public service workers. The resolutions request that McDonald’s and Halliburton perform what’s known among NGO types as ‘human rights due diligence’ in their operations, and then make their findings public. A similar resolution was filed with Caterpillar, but the company got it thrown out on a technicality.

Crunchy shareholder resolutions are nothing new. The tactic began with the movement to divest from Apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, when religious institutional investors (megachurches have pension plans too) started asking where their money was going.

Since then, shareholder resolutions have proliferated, and have pushed companies to improve their environmental practices, appoint women and minorities to their boards and cap executive pay. In the 2000s, they began to increasingly focus on human rights, and just in the last five years, companies have been pressured by investors to adopt board-level Human Rights Committees (Yahoo, Google), conduct human rights impact assessments (Goldcorp) or report their political spending (Halliburton again).

According to As You Sow’s 2013 Proxy Preview (it’s more interesting than it sounds), this year 21 companies are the targets of human rights-focused shareholder resolutions. Goldman Sachs is being asked to establish a human rights committee. Chevron is asked to make public its criteria for choosing which countries to poke with holes. In addition to the AFSCME resolution, Caterpillar is the target of two others asking it to up its human rights game.

So what I’m telling you is that this year is no different from all the others: Bleeding-Heart Investor Files Finger-Wagging Resolution. What’s so newsworthy about these Hallburton and McDonald’s ones?

Two things: First, these resolutions are the first of their kind to ask that companies actually do something. In the past, shareholder resolutions have asked companies to adopt a policy or establish a committee recognizing human rights, but haven’t required companies to make sure they’re actually following those policies.

Nothing against policy commitments, but they’re just a first step. This year’s resolutions ask Halliburton and McDonald’s to go further than simply producing CEO-signed statements saying they want to avoid negative human rights impacts. These resolutions ask the companies to go find out what they are.

Which brings me to the second way these resolutions are new and different. They require Halliburton and McDonald’s to conduct human rights due diligence as defined by the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

I know, you stopped reading at ‘United Nations’, but hear me out, this is a big deal.

Everyone knows that in many parts of the world, multinational companies are richer, more present and more powerful than governments. Since 2005, the United Nations has been engaged in a process to, once and for all, define the human rights responsibilities of these companies, and the governments that host them. For eight years now, the UN has conducted a process where they have systematically asked governments, corporations and victims of human rights abuses: ‘What are the human rights responsibilities of companies?’

(full disclosure: I’ve been marginally involved in this process at various NGOs I’ve worked for. So maybe I’m hopelessly deluded and none of this matters and the UN should go back to alleviating poverty through celebrity adoptions.)

The Guiding Principles are the first time the UN has ever tried to answer this question. In 2011, the Guiding Principles were unanimously endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council, and since then, they’ve been endorsed by the EU, ASEAN, the African Union, the OECD and the IFC. They’re supported by the International Chamber of Commerce and industry confederations like the International Council of Mining and Metals. They’ve been discussed at the World Economic Forum and they’re referenced on company websites from Coca-Cola to Shell.

You get the idea: The UN Guiding Principles are supported by businesses, governments and civil society. So what do they actually say?

The UN Guiding Principles say to governments: You have to protect everyone within your borders from human rights violations, including violations by companies. And they tell companies that, no matter where you operate, no matter what you do, you have to avoid human rights violations. And finally, they tell ordinary people that if your rights are violated by a company, you have the right to have your complaint heard and addressed.

These sound like simple rules, but for the last 60 years, we haven’t had anything like this. Companies and governments argued over who was responsible for things like building roads to mining areas, providing housing for factory workers, cleaning up environmental damage in industrial zones. The Guiding Principles won’t solve all of these problems at once, but they draw a line around what companies have to do and what governments have to do, and that’s a start.

For businesses, the rule they impose is even simpler: Don’t violate human rights, wherever you are, whatever you do. This is the sentence supported by dozens of corporations in nearly every industry sector. And this is the sentence that McDonald’s and Halliburton want to be immune from.

Not violating human rights means identifying the ways your company affects them. For McDonald’s and Halliburton, this would mean publishing the results of company labor audits, contractual arrangements with governments and criteria for assessing business partners. It would mean looking into the labor practices of their suppliers, and the health effects of their products. It wouldn’t mean preventing every single problem, but it would mean knowing about them.

In their 2013 proxy statements, Halliburton and McDonald’s ask their shareholders to vote against the resolutions.

‘We believe that our policy statement, coupled with our continuing efforts to maintain and enforce these policies through our Code of Business Conduct, are sufficient and that further assessment and reporting are not appropriate,’ says Halliburton, right after a copy-paste of its four-paragraph human rights policy.

McDonald’s dresses up the wording a bit more, but makes the same point: ‘In light of McDonald’s unwavering commitment to human rights and ongoing reporting in this regard, we believe the additional reporting requested by the proposal is unnecessary.’

And add: ‘We further believe that the proposal represents the potential for a diversion of resources with no corresponding benefit to the Company, our customers or our shareholders.’

In other words, respecting human rights costs money and provides no benefits.

I’m not going to pretend to be offended by this. That’s exactly what you would expect a publicly traded multinational corporation to say. Their first duty, after all, is to their shareholders, to their profits. In a choice between respecting human rights and boosting quarterly returns, the latter wins, every single time.

This calculus, which sounds so icky when you put it like that, is the founding principle of our economy, and in spite of NGO types like me complaining about corporate greed all the time, actually works pretty well. Organising companies into markets fosters competition, efficiency, growth, all that stuff we talk up in generalities but smack down in specifics.

And this is why these shareholder resolutions give me so much hope. They’re not telling McDonald’s and Halliburton that they have to be perfect overnight, that they accept profound new responsibilities for the well-being of everyone who has ever ordered a Big Mac or pumped a tank of gas. The resolutions simply ask these companies to follow best practices as defined by the UN and supported by the business community. They ask that these companies take their own values, their own policies, seriously.

Make no mistake: These resolutions are going to lose, and bad. Last year, a shareholder resolution asking McDonald’s to produce a nutrition report on its products was rejected by 96.5 percent of its shareholders. And that’s OK. More resolutions like these will be filed with other companies next year, and the next.

This pressure isn’t going away. Every shareholder resolution asking for public reporting of human rights impacts entrenches the UN Guiding Principles and broadens the consensus that this is something companies should do and governments should require.

Reporting your human rights impacts is hard, I get it. But so is getting oil out of the ground, so is serving millions of hamburgers every day. I like to think that sometime in the future, you won’t be able to do one without the other.

Bleg: Anyone Else Going to Zimbabwe Next Month?

I’m going to be in Zimbabwe for most of June. Does anyone out there in the internet ether want to hang out in Harare, or know anyone who could help show me around? DM me on Twitter or write me at michael.hobbes.bln {at} gmail.com. Thanks y’all!

On Quitting My Job

Last week I was in Lisbon for work.

Well, one day for work. I went the weekend before and walked around before I had to get my game face on.

This is my last business trip for my current job. I put in my notice last week.

They say changing jobs is as traumatic as losing a loved one or getting a divorce.

I’ve never had either of those things happen to me, so I have nothing to compare this to.

Lisbon is a good place to walk around and ruminate.

The city is basically a series of hills, installed to allow it to view itself.

Even the locals look impressed.

For about 300 years, the Portuguese were a major European power.

Profitable pillaging, royalty in the tabloids, franchises in Asia, Africa, the Middle East.

At the time, Portuguese people must have thought it would go on forever. Conquest, expansion, power, wealth. Just follow the trend line from past to present to future.

Then in 1755 an earthquake shook Lisbon to the ground.

The empire never quite recovered. While Lisbon rebuilt itself, it lost its colonies to resistance, competition, neglect.

Now, for all its charms, Portugal is a minor power, alone, its former colonies still speaking its language, but no longer singing its anthems.

I was in Portugal to have meetings, shake hands.

Knowing it would be the last time didn’t make me do it any different.

‘Looking forward to working together’, I would say, realizing later I was lying. 

My boss asked me why I was leaving, and I told him ‘I think I’ll be happier doing something else’.

and he said, ‘You’re young enough for that to be a good reason. But just.’

I’ve got a bunch of projects lined up, but nothing permanent.

When I tell people I quit, the first thing they say is ‘You’ll be fine!’

I think that’s true. This weekend, looking outward from Portugal, it sometimes felt true too.

I’m not afraid for my future, or of it. I just wonder if that’s what you think right up until the ground starts to shake.

Happiness is Irrelevant

Claude S. Fischer’s terrific article about happiness research in the Boston Review:

What do we know about happiness? We know that people’s reports of immediate joy and misery fluctuate from activity to activity—sex is an upper; commuting is a downer—and often diverge notably from the summary answers they give to questions about their happiness “these days.” We also know that subjective well-being can be complex. People can be happy about work and sad about love; the latter usually matters more. The opposite of happiness, research suggests, is not necessarily despair, but rather apathy; some people just don’t feel much of anything.

Nonetheless, people who say they are generally happy tend to be economically secure, married, healthy, religious, and busy with friends; they tend to live in affluent, democratic, individualistic societies with activist, welfare-state governments. The connection between reporting happiness and personal traits often runs both ways. For example, being healthy adds to happiness, and happy people also stay healthier.

Human rights organizations debate these issues endlessly. What is development? If ‘happiness’ increases in Somalia, but access to drinkable water and primary education don’t, have we really achieved anything?

After doing this for eight years I’m convinced that happiness is too murky and conditional a concept to be measured. It’s like quantifying ‘grooviness’, or Gross National Awesome. Happiness is meaningless outside of a specific context—short-term, long-term, past, future, work, family. It’s liquid, it takes the shape of whatever container you put it in.

Imagine trying to measure its antithesis, something like frustration. We all want less frustration in our lives. But the things that cause frustration are so infinite, and so specific, that we can’t say anything about the feeling without them. Trying to measure or reduce frustration for a million people—or, hell, even two—at once is like trying to build a house with no nails. The means are so important, the end won’t exist without them.

All we really know about happiness is that everyone definitely wants it, and everyone probably deserves it. I’ll stay interested in the measurable stuff—corruption, public services, livelihoods—and leave happiness to the economists and self-helpers. Either that, or I could just work on cutting everybody’s commute times.

Education and Development Don’t Need Great Ideas, They Need Great People

Here’s a crackerjack story about how a school in New Jersey improved student performance by teaching the basics of grammar, vocabulary and composition:

One teacher noted that the best-written paragraphs contained complex sentences that relied on dependent clauses like although and despite, which signal a shifting idea within the same sentence. Curious, Fran Simmons devised a little test of her own. She asked her freshman English students to read Of Mice and Men and, using information from the novel, answer the following prompt in a single sentence:

“Although George …”

She was looking for a sentence like: Although George worked very hard, he could not attain the American Dream.

Some of Simmons’s students wrote a solid sentence, but many were stumped. More than a few wrote the following: “Although George and Lenny were friends.”

[..]

By fall 2009, nearly every instructional hour except for math class was dedicated to teaching essay writing along with a particular subject. So in chemistry class in the winter of 2010, Monica DiBella’s lesson on the properties of hydrogen and oxygen was followed by a worksheet that required her to describe the elements with subordinating clauses—for instance, she had to begin one sentence with the word although.

[...]

By sophomore year, Monica’s class was learning how to map out an introductory paragraph, then how to form body paragraphs. “There are phrases—specifically, for instance, for example—that help you add detail to a paragraph,” Monica explains. She reflects for a moment. “Who could have known that, unless someone taught them?”

Homework got a lot harder. Teachers stopped giving fluffy assignments such as “Write a postcard to a friend describing life in the trenches of World War I” and instead demanded that students fashion an expository essay describing three major causes of the conflict.

There’s a tendency to read specific stories and try to wring generics out of them. Maybe all of America’s students are deficient in basic grammar! Maybe a nationwide curriculum on prepositions, argumentation and sentence structure would make up our education gap!

I don’t know anything about education, but after spending most of my career working in NGOs, I’ve realized that in development, the hard part isn’t coming up with a great idea, or even implementing that idea in a specific place. The hard part, every single time, is making that idea work in more than one place at a time.

Whenever we face this problem at work, I can’t help thinking about the Hawthorne effect:

This effect was first discovered and named by researchers at Harvard University who were studying the relationship between productivity and work environment. Researchers conducted these experiments at the Hawthorne Works plant of Western Electric. The study was originally commissioned to determine if increasing or decreasing the amount of light workers received increased or decreased worker productivity. The researchers found that productivity increased due to attention from the research team and not because of changes to the experimental variable.

In other words, people don’t work harder because the bosses change the environment, they work harder because the bosses are watching them, and care what they’re doing. It’s like a group placebo.

This has societal implications. As William Baumol’s new book points out, the story of the last 50 years is steadily increasing productivity in farms, factories, computers, all the hard stuff. Efficiency gains in the soft stuff—healthcare, education, hair salons—haven’t kept up because in the service sector, someone fundamentally has to pay attention to someone else.

Some sectors of the economy, like manufacturing, have rising productivity—they regularly produce more with less, which leads to higher wages and rising living standards. But other sectors, like education, have a harder time increasing productivity. Ford, after all, can make more cars with fewer workers and in less time than it did in 1980. But the average student-teacher ratio in college is sixteen to one, just about what it was thirty years ago. In other words, teachers today aren’t any more productive than they were in 1980.

Growing 10 acres of corn doesn’t take 10 times as much effort as growing one acre. The more land you have, the more you benefit from irrigation, tractors, etc. But giving two haircuts takes exactly twice the effort of giving one haircut. There’s no way (now, anyway) for a doctor to examine 100 patients, or a teacher to pay attention to 100 students, the same way a factory makes 100 iPods.

And this is the hard part. Every time we come up with a new paradigm for education (Sentence structure! Standardized testing! STEM programs!) or development (Microcredit! Millennium goals! Mosquito nets!), we’re trying to get around the fundamental nature of the activity: Someone has to be there. They need to watch. They have to care.

I don’t want to take anything away from this school, its students or its achievement. What this principal has done is remarkable, and teachers and administrators everywhere should be given the freedom to try approaches that respond to the specific challenges of their students.

But every time an anecdote becomes a paradigm, and a paradigm becomes a rule, we risk forgetting that education and development aren’t always driven by great ideas or great methodologies. Sometimes they’re just great individuals. Standing there, turning the lights up and down, and paying attention to what happens.

Nobody Knows What News Is

You know how in high school dance troupes, all the dancers are sort of looking at each other to see what to do next? They’re not confident enough in the moves to go through them straight-on, so you catch them looking out of the corner of their eye at the rest of the troupe to guide them through the routine.

This is basically how modern journalism works. I was reminded of this reading Walter Kirn’s dispatch from the Democratic National Convention:

They predict with assurance that [Michelle Obama's] speech will be deemed a success, and I guess they ought to know because they’re the ones who will start the deeming process. Which, in fact, has already begun. And which, in fact, turns out just the way they said it would, which I learn when I finally get back to my room and turn on cable TV.

What I thought I was seeing clearly, through my own eyes—a wandering, vaporous, contrived display of middle-brow sentimentality and word-goo—I entirely misinterpreted, apparently. Or everyone else misinterpreted it, perhaps, which comes to the same thing.

Every newsroom I ever worked in had TVs on the wall showing CNN, the sound off, day and night. Every once in awhile a conversation with a colleague or editor would instantly veer as the newsroom, en masse, attended to the Breaking News banner.

‘Hey, we should get lunch at that Italian oh my god they found Laci Peterson’s body!’ your colleague shrieks, sprinting to his desk.

I didn’t work as a journalist very long (That ‘every’ up there? It’s two. Two newsrooms.), but what struck me then and since is that no one seemed to know what actually constituted news. Murders, accidents, disasters happen every day. Some of them produce great stories, or affect how we live, or change how we understand the world. Others are just remainders of calculations we’ve already made.

Here’s Kirn again:

It’s not just a journalistic challenge, either. It’s the challenge we all face as modern political animals, caught in the feedback loops and logic mazes that come of trying to know the truth, our own truth—the truth worth casting our one and only vote for—when we don’t even know where to look, or through whose eyes.

Why is this murder, this hurricane, this bridge collapse news? It’s easier when someone else has already decided. You look at the other dancers so you don’t have to learn the routine yourself.

Is Coca-Cola as Immoral as Phillip Morris?

At my old job we used to always have arguments about which companies we were comfortable working with. If Halliburton came to us and said they wanted to be better on human rights (and we believed them), would we work with them? What about Lockheed Martin? Or Philip Morris?

What about Pepsi?

Weapon and tobacco companies are probably the only American industries we conceive of as inherently immoral. The products they manufacture and sell are so damaging that it doesn’t matter how just or unjust their operations are. They’re so morally compromised by what they’re making that how they make it is irrelevant.

This is appealing as a principle, but its edges are more blurred than we acknowledge. Once you identify AK-47s and Lucky Strikes as products the world would be better without, you can’t just stop there.

Take soft drinks. Like tobacco, soft drinks deliver short-term pleasure and are hazardous if overconsumed. The soft drinks industry, also like tobacco, has specifically designed their product to encourage overuse (increasing portion sizes), addiction (caffeine) and consumption by youth.

Obesity kills more people than lung disease every year. Companies whose products are basically obesity-in-a-can bear a significant amount of responsibility for this. The line isn’t as direct as that between tobacco and lung cancer, but is that really the only distinction?

In my time in human rights, I did some work with mining companies. Would the world really be that much worse off if every diamond company threw up its hands and said, ‘From now on, the shiny rocks stay in the ground.’ With all the human rights violations linked to diamonds, fuck it, let’s find something else to decorate our fingers and our ears.

But while we’re at it, why stop at diamonds? Other than some industrial purposes, we could probably do without gold, too. All of our handheld electronics use a mineral called coltan, which is basically only minable from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where it fuels conflict and feudalism. We can do without that too, right?

OK, so there’s obviously a line between uzis and iPods. I’m not saying that we should start classifying industries into categories of moral acceptability. I just think that it’s more complicated than the products themselves.

If a tobacco company paid all of its workers a living wage and genuinely contributed to agricultural development in its supplier countries, would it be as morally acceptable as Wal-Mart, which has basically done the opposite everywhere it’s operated?

One of the great moral shifts of the last 15 years has been the growing acceptance of the moral implications of our consumer choices. From our Nikes to our oil, we accept that everything we buy is the end of a thread linking companies to governments to workers to suppliers to communities. No one gets to ignore that anymore.

But I don’t think we’ve worked out the full implications of it either. Pull on the It’s what you make thread long enough, and you disqualify every product other than bottled water and baby clothes. Pull on the it’s how you make it thread and you can buy a ballistics missile as long as the factory pays its workers and pays its taxes.

After working on human rights and business for the past five years, I’m no closer to weaving this together into a moral standard than I was when I boycotted Shell in the fifth grade. All I know is that certainty obscures more than it illuminates. And you should probably drink less soda.

Why Don’t Bad Employees Get Fired?

I know the purpose of this thread is to vent against our specific unproductive coworkers and marinate in middle-distance  smugness, but it mostly makes me sad. Every unproductive, overpaid employee is someone who would probably be better off doing something else, something they enjoyed more and were better at.

I think this phenomenon—people sleepwalking through their jobs—becomes an increasing problem in mid- and late-career employees, and I think it’s caused by a combination of America’s lack of a safety net for workers who quit or are fired and the extreme difficulty of switching careers after you have significant experience in one field.

People who realize at age 36 that their current job is not their passion have few options for finding another one. Going back to school is risky and financially ruinous. Leaving your current job means giving up healthcare. Employers are unlikely to hire a 40-year-old for an entry-level job. There might not be any better jobs in the city where you live and your kids go to school, etc.

We’ve built a whole labour market and economy on the assumption that workers enter and leave employment purely on the basis of their preferences and worth, but that’s rarely the case. Spending eight hours a day doing something you don’t enjoy is preferable to gambling your home, pension and security on a career change.

The real question isn’t why bad employees don’t get fired. It’s why they can’t quit.

Hand Over Fist

So I’m eight months into my first NGO fundraising job. I’m enjoying it, but the translation of genuine human need into effective marketing sometimes makes me feel cynical and complicit.

We were having a discussion the other day how to best communicate our issue in few words and strong images. We’re trying to strike a balance between enticing people to donate and ensuring that we aren’t manipulating them or blowing our issue out of proportion.

Convincing people to support your organization isn’t the same as selling them a bicycle or a spatula. There are actual human beings at the receiving end of the work we do, and I think that gives us an obligation for truth, sobriety and maturity in our communications that we don’t share with conventional marketers.

And then there’s Unicef:

You can imagine some bespectacled 30-something at a consulting firm (in fucking Brooklyn, undoubtedly) going, ‘You! Get me a picture of the cutest, saddest African baby alive! … And you! What’s the most tragic five words you can imagine? I want ‘em in all caps!’

I’m not offended or disappointed by this, exactly. Unicef’s a great organization, and if we all spent 200 bucks a year supporting them instead of updating our iPods or whatever, the world would probably be a better place. It’s just funny, in an inevitable sort of way, how marketing turns everything it touches into camp.

Or in other words, don’t hate the player, hate the game. Unicef is officially a ‘competitor’, so I clearly need to rise to this standard. Is that baby available for a photo shoot in Berlin? I’ll contact his agent.

What Is Your Boss Buying?

Here’s a post about the sellability of various college skills:

In order to do well in courses on 19th Century British Literature or Social Anthropology or Philosophy or American History in a properly running American college, what you need to do is get pretty good at reading and writing documents in the English language. These are very much real skills with wide-ranging practical applications.

Clearly relatively few people are professional writers, but a huge amount of what goes on at the higher levels of a typical business is a steady stream of production and consumption of reports and memos. If you can compose an email that’s 10 percent clearer in 90 percent of the time as the other guy, you’re going to get ahead in a wide range of fields.

Outside of office work, a big part of the difference between a hard-working individual who’s pretty good at his job and a person who’s able to leverage his skills and hardwork into an entrepreneurial or managerial role is precisely the ability to research things and write up plans. Everyone knows that a kid growing up in rural India is obtaining valuable skills if he gets better at English, but this is equally true for a kid growing up in Indiana.

Now of course perhaps not every liberal arts program is in fact imparting reading and writing skills to its graduates. But that’s a problem of execution not of concept. It’s a fallacy to think that in an increasingly technology-performed society that technical skills will be the only sources of value. Computers are going to put accountants out of business long before they start hurting the earnings of talented interior decorators. The important point is that mastering a specific body of facts is not nearly as useful in 2012 as it was in 1962.

I realized the other day that most of the things my employer pays me for aren’t technical skills or expertise on particular topic areas. Most of my day is spent building relationships within and outside of my organization toward goals (fundraising, partnerships, awareness-raising, etc.) defined for me by someone else.

It sometimes feels like my employer isn’t buying a set of skills from me, but rather renting my actual personality and applying it toward its own development.

I spend most of my day listening to colleagues describe their projects, telling other colleagues about them and describing them to people outside of my organization. I write lots of e-mails notifying internal and external people of things they need to know about. I try–flailingly–to convince other people to be interested in what my organization is doing.

If I had to sum up the skills that I use at work, it would be things like listening, reading between the lines, telling a good story and being empathetic. These aren’t job skills, they’re personality traits.

Sometimes I think jobs like mine represent some kind of post-Marxian dystopia where we don’t sell our skills to the highest bidder, but our selves. If there’s no difference between your personal skills and your professional ones, what is your employer actually buying?

I still fundamentally have the power to draw a line between my work-self and my weekend-self, of course. The convergence of the two simply reflects the fact that my work addresses an issue I’m personally passionate about, as well as my own failure to develop technical skills beyond liberal-arts faffery.

But I wonder what it means, at a structural level, for employers to requisition employees to this extent. As employee marketability shifts away from skills and toward selves, what will our employers start to expect from us?

A lot’s been written in recent years about the implications of employers checking the Facebook pages and Twitter feeds of their workers. Maybe our bosses aren’t monitoring us, they’re just assessing their purchase.