Tag: capitalism

Shining Light on Bad Practices: Re-assessing Tools for Corporate Accountability in Burma

by Kate Taylor

30 NOV 2017

Over the last twenty years, transparency has become a watchword within international policy-making institutions. Specifically, enhanced transparency has emerged as a critical component in the pursuit of corporate accountability for human rights abuses. Transparency-enhancing initiatives related to corporate accountability have proliferated enormously over this period, and their various forms have diversified substantially — from voluntary codes of conduct to mandatory reporting requirements. Despite this breadth, nearly all transparency-enhancing initiatives, whether legally mandated by the state or voluntary private initiatives, push corporations to make periodic public disclosures of financial and non-financial matters (primarily regarding human rights, labor, environmental and anti-corruption).

For human rights advocates embracing transparency as an accountability tool in the business and human rights arena, the broadly stated theory of change is that shining light on bad corporate practices can lead to remedy and reform. Of course, human rights advocates who promote such transparency do not accept corporate disclosures at face value — and many are willing to scrutinize their veracity and completeness. Yet, in assessing advocacy and accountability tools in the business and human rights arena, it seems necessary to examine the opportunity cost of this focus on transparency, querying what it both overlooks and obscures.

Recent reforms to Burma’s investment law illustrates the risks of over-emphasizing transparency as an accountability tool. Throughout 2016-17, the newly-sworn-in National League for Democracy (NLD) Burmese government rewrote its investment law, as well as its subordinate rules and regulations.  The reform process was undertaken by Burma’s Directorate of Investment and Company Administration (DICA) with technical assistance from the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

Human rights NGOs provided feedback with the aim of embedding respect for human rights and the environment within Burma’s new investment law regime. Ensuring that the Law and Rules incorporated rigorous transparency provisions was of fundamental importance to human rights advocates — bearing in mind the country’s egregious legacy of business-related human rights abuses and the opacity which has long-characterized Burma’s particular brand of crony capitalism.

Civil society feedback submissions covered a number of human rights issues and included transparency as a key concern. Notable among these suggestions was that the new government impose a set of “Responsible Investment Reporting Requirements,” which would require businesses investing over a certain monetary threshold to publicly disclose an annual report addressing a wide range of issues, including human rights, environmental matters, labor rights, anti-corruption measures, property acquisition and military communications.

Ultimately, civil society submissions regarding transparency were among the few suggestions taken up by DICA and the IFC in the re-writing of the new Investment Law and Rules. The final iteration of the Rules requires basic project information to be publicly disclosed before the government makes large-scale investment decisions. Additionally, it requires investors to submit annual reports on certain financial and non-financial matters to the Myanmar Investment Commission (which the Commission may decide to make public), including details of the investments’ impact on the environment and local community — but the disclosure requirements are bare-boned and are not accompanied by serious institutional buy-in on the part of the Myanmar Investment Commission. Ultimately, the drafters were hostile to rigorous human-rights based reporting requirements, which would have required due diligence on the part of companies, despite the urging of human rights NGOs. It seemed that the government, together with the IFC, was willing to incorporate only the smallest measure of transparency into the legal regime.

Without much more, embedding strong transparency requirements into Burma’s new investment law regime would do little to rectify the serious pathologies which characterize its business and human rights landscape. Enhanced transparency in Myanmar’s investment climate may begin to foster responsible business practices and encourage due diligence, but it does not promise to address broader structural issues that directly cause or exacerbate business-related human rights abuses extant in Burma, such as reckless investments in conflict-affected areas, systemic corporate tax avoidance, mammoth land grabs and displacement, and chronically weak labor-rights institutions.

Indeed, allowing irresponsible businesses to proceed as long as their disclosure requirements are met annually may actually legitimate a range of harmful business practices and obscure others that are undisclosed. Frequently, corporate disclosure efforts (especially in weak institutional contexts, where the prospects for audit and scrutiny are scarce) are little more than public relations exercises, with scant connection to the businesses’ real impacts on the ground. By emphasizing transparency as a global governance tool, we risk allowing corporations to give the allure of being a ‘rights-respecting’ or ‘socially responsible’ entities, with no substantive responsibilities being met to those most affected by their operations.

The focus on enhancing transparency also fails to support local communities affected by large-scale investments that frequently face intimidation and repression for speaking out against projects. Merely having information does little to open up spaces for contestation and access to justice. In addition, without linkages to domestic or transnational advocacy networks, ‘access to information’ means little for impacted communities. In the case of highly technical corporate disclosures, such reports can easily become sites of exclusion. The disclosure of a company’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is a salient example. EIAs are largely unintelligible for those untrained in environmental management (and in Burma, are frequently disclosed in languages and terms not understood by impacted communities). Yet, in producing and disclosing an EIAs, companies often claim to have met their obligations toward community consultation.

As a governance tool, information disclosure and transparency fit well within the prevailing neoliberal logic and its preference for due process rights over substantive equalities. Human rights advocates would be remiss in their work to solely focus on such tools. Transparency is a laudable beginning for investments in Burma, but it is the start, and not nearly the end of the broader accountability project. The risk that mere transparency is conflated with accountability and justice should not be overlooked.

Kate Taylor is a human rights lawyer and Postgraduate Fellow at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, and is a member of the 2017-2018 Working Paper Series Editorial Committee. Her impressions in this post are drawn from her experience working in Burma on human rights reforms to the country’s investment law regime. 

Nike’s Girl Effect and the Privatization of Feminism

by Megan Tobias Neely

21 NOV 2015

This commentary is a response to Maria Hengeveld’s paper, “Girl Branded: Nike, the UN and the Construction of the Entrepreneurial Adolescent Girl Subject.”

In 2009, Nike launched the Girl Effect, a “brand-led movement” targeting the alleviation of poverty among girls worldwide. The initiative advocates for investing in adolescent girls to create future workers and stimulate economic growth. For those who associate the Nike brand with anti-sweatshop movement protests over labor standards the Girl Effect may seem counterintuitive. Indeed, Nike moved to eliminate child labor in its factories only fifteen years ago, and the poor working conditions at Nike factories remain a concern for activists today.

Activists here at UT-Austin have taken up this issue. Our chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops demands the university to rethink its $250 million dollar contract with Nike. Last April, former Nike worker and worker’s rights activist Noi Supalai spoke on campus. She described how in Thailand—where women constitute a majority of garment workers—workers face unrealistic expectations for production, round-the-clock schedules, months of back wages, and little time to care for their families. Supalai led a worker’s union to negotiate improved conditions; however, Nike never responded to their requests.

Nike’s track record on worker’s rights raises the question as to whether the Girl Effect is a “brand-led movement” or a movement to re-brand Nike. In the winning paper for the 2015 Audre Rapoport Prize, Maria Hengeveld astutely argues that the Girl Effect only serves to legitimize Nike’s reputation and image by obscuring its own role in creating poverty while it rebrands itself as a proponent of human rights and gender equality. Hengeveld calls attention to how the campaign suggests simplistic solutions to alleviate poverty in the Global South that fail to consider how companies like Nike contribute to creating a global economy that exacerbates poverty among women and girls. By blaming gender inequality on the girl’s communities and placing the burden of alleviating inequality on the girls themselves, Nike does not offer viable solutions to patriarchy, explains Hengeveld.

The problem with Nike’s approach to girls’ empowerment, according to Hengeveld, stems from its neoliberal ideology that places the market as the appropriate avenue for promoting liberty, opportunity, and equality. Although the Girl Effect may have positive outcomes for individual girls, Hengeveld demonstrates how campaigns like Nike’s do little to alleviate poverty among women, because the employment available to them is low-paid and insecure.

Scholars like Radhika Balakrishnan and Jason Hickel, who spoke at the Rapoport Center’s recent Inequality & Human Rights conference, echo Hengeveld’s concerns. Balakrishnan has argued that women’s empowerment in the workforce cannot be achieved without improving conditions for laborers generally. Hickel (2014) too has examined the contradictions of the Girl Effect in which “women and girls are made to bear the responsibility for boot-strapping themselves out of poverty that is caused in part by the very institutions that purport to save them” (p. 1355).

Indeed, Hengeveld explains how Nike’s corporate agenda contributes to a neoliberal system that exacerbates poverty and inequality worldwide, with disastrous consequences for both women and men. An in-depth investigation of these consequences is the next step in Hengeveld’s research: Earlier this year, she interviewed 25 women who work for Nike in Vietnam about the factory and living conditions they face.

The solution to improving these conditions, according to Hengeveld, does not lie in resolving inequality between men and women workers in the Global South but in changing a neoliberal system that rests upon the disenfranchisement of the poor. As Hengeveld contends, “in practice, equalizing the labor standards, market access and wages of women in Nike’s factories with their male counterparts will hardly be emancipatory or liberating if male workers are not protected by decent job protections, collective bargaining rights and living wages” (p. 12).

While I agree with Hengeveld, I fear that campaigns to improve labor standards overall will not necessarily empower women unless addressing gender inequality is a central goal. Garment work is devalued precisely because it has been deemed “women’s work,” which is crucial to understanding the shortcomings of Nike’s gender campaign. Moreover, as Joan Acker (2004) argues, “gender is embedded in the structuring and ongoing practices of globalizing capitalism” (p. 23). Thus, finding a solution requires an analysis of how gender structures the exploitation of these workers in the first place. In particular, an intersectional lens can shed light on how garment work is gendered, racialized, and nationalized.

For example, in 2013, the deplorable conditions of garment workers came to the world’s attention when a factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,138 workers and injuring 2,500 others. Yet mainstream media coverage of the disaster paid little attention to the fact that women comprise 80 percent of Bangladeshi garment workers, who face precarious working conditions and unsustainably low pay.

In fact, women compose a majority of garment workers throughout the Global South and are at the frontlines demanding change. Ethnographers Leslie Salzinger (2003) and Melissa Wright (2006) demonstrate how corporations portray these women’s labor as pliable, temporary, and surplus to devalue it in the pursuit of capitalist profit. Thus, gender, race, and poverty are deeply connected in global capitalism.

Yet, liberal feminists maintain that employment will liberate women by providing them with more bargaining power in their families and communities. Nike’s Girl Effect is part of a resurgence of neoliberal feminism (also called transnational business feminism), which contends that the best avenue for women’s empowerment is through the private sector. This movement has gone global through campaigns led by U.N. Women, the World Bank, and the IMF to promote economic opportunities for women.

Socialist and women of color feminists, however, have long contended that greater participation in paid employment does not liberate women, because capitalism has been contingent on the exploitation of women of color and low-income white women (see Hartman, Hooks, Davis, and Nakano Glenn). Transnational feminist scholars like Esther Chow and Aihwa Ong pioneered intersectional scholarship on global capitalism, identifying how it constructs hierarchies according to nationality, race, class, and gender that perpetuate inequality.

While paid labor may, to an extent, improve some women’s status in society, it may also subject them to precarious and risky working conditions inextricably tied to their position as women of color in the Global South. Moreover, it is the devaluation of women’s labor that makes the profits of corporations like Nike possible. How might recognizing this lead to more effective campaigns to empower women in this neoliberal era?

Megan Tobias Neely is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the WPS Editorial Committee. Her current research is on gender and work in the financial services industry.