Tag Archives: Ruggie

Is Respect Really All That Simple?

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Last week, John Ruggie addressed the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit, where a “new global architecture” for corporate sustainability was unveiled and celebrated. Ruggie started out by talking about the special challenges — the “problems without passports” — that the world’s “tightly-coupled” systems present, and the inadequacy of our “largely self-interested politics” to address them. This was not, however, the brief he’d been given, so he had to move on; and I hope he’ll have more to say on the topic in the future. Instead, Ruggie had been asked, he said, “to say a word about respect,” and — not surprisingly — he took the opportunity to talk about the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and how the framework helps companies meet their obligations to respect human rights.

I have been asked to say a word about respect, specifically about respecting human
rights. Its meaning is simple: treat people with dignity, be they workers, communities in which you operate, or other stakeholders. But while the meaning is simple, mere declarations of respect by business no longer suffice: companies must have systems in place to know and show that they respect rights. This is where the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights come in. [pdf.]

Fair enough, but I found myself pausing here, and wondering whether the meaning of “respect” is really so simple as Ruggie makes it out to be, or at least whether “treat people with dignity” is sufficient guidance.

I understand that Ruggie’s intention here is largely rhetorical: we all know what respect means, but we need more than fine words, declarations and definitions. We need practical and consistent ways of acknowledging, checking and demonstrating human rights commitments — “systems” like the UN Guiding Principles.

Still, there are good reasons to start unpacking — and challenging — this simple definition, if only to ward off misconceptions.

First, to say that “[to] respect” human rights means “[to] treat people with dignity” (and leave it at that) invites confusion, because it passes the semantic buck from respect to dignity. If we are to treat people “with dignity” — if that’s our definition of respect — then we had better have a good working definition of dignity to govern or temper our treatment of others.

Of course, the word “dignity” is a staple of human rights discourse, so we’ve got to make allowances for shorthand here. If we don’t — if we want to take the long route and spell things out — we will most likely find our way back to Kant’s moral theory. I’m not going to attempt a summary here except to say that for Kant, dignity imposes absolute and non-negotiable constraints on our treatment of other people. Our dignity derives from our moral stature as free, rational and autonomous agents — ends in ourselves — and cannot be discussed in terms of relative value (or usefulness, or any other relative terms). It must be respected: in other words, dignity imposes strict and inviolable limits, absolute constraints, on how we treat others and how others treat us.

Most obviously people may not be treated merely as means to our ends; and that caveat is especially important when it comes to business, where, for starters, people are valued and evaluated as priced labor or “talent,” in terms of services of they perform or as “human resources.” To respect the dignity of people — “be they workers, communities in which you operate, or other stakeholders” — is to recognize them as persons (or ends in themselves) and not just mere functions in an efficiency equation.

This is hasty pudding, but suffice it to say that in the Kantian idea of dignity there is the suggestion that respect follows from our recognition of others as persons: this is an idea suggested by the word “respect” itself, which comes from the Latin respicere, to look back, to give a second look. Every person deserves a second look — or I should say, demands it. Recognition is something we demand of others and others demand of us.

I like to put it this way: respect is always the first, and sometimes the only thing we ask of each other. How we respond to this demand will depend in all cases upon whether we understand that our dignity as persons makes us mutually accountable or answerable to each other in the first place. So before we can talk about how we “treat” others — before we jump, with Ruggie, to considerations of behavior — let’s take a couple of steps back, and make sure that when we talk about respect we are also talking about recognition as well as accountability.

Of course all of this may be implied in Ruggie’s definition, and I wonder if recognition and accountability are just other ways of saying that companies must “know and show” that they respect human rights. My concern is that when you gather business leaders at the UN and tell them that to respect human rights is to treat people with dignity, you may leave them with the mistaken impression that dignity is something they have the power to confer on others, rather than something that makes them answerable to others. Dignity is not something the mighty can grant or deny the meek, and respect is not another word for benevolent gestures companies might make toward communities, workers and other stakeholders. Where people stand, business must yield.

The Limits of Corporate Benevolence, from Mongolia to Michigan

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The phrase “human rights” is nowhere to be found in the Oyu Tolgoi Investment Agreement, a document [pdf] that will play a critical role in guiding Mongolia’s development over the next decade. The Agreement sets the terms for the $6.2 billion investment in the Oyu Tolgoi gold and copper mining project, which promises to account for no less than one-third of Mongolia’s GDP by the year 2020. Rio Tinto has a 66 percent stake in the project through its subsidiary, Turquoise Hill Resources Ltd; the Mongolian government owns the rest.

Along with the serious environmental concerns cited by the United States when it abstained, in February of this year, from a World Bank investment scheme in Oyu Tolgoi, there are a host of human rights issues to address — from migrancy to land seizures, rights to the scarce water resources of the Gobi desert region, conditions in Ulaanbaatar’s Ger camps, and the survival of Mongolia’s herder communities. (The Bank Information Center provides an overview of these concerns, here and here.) The Investment Agreement briefly addresses some of these points, but it resorts, in all instances, to what I would call the language of corporate benevolence.

So the Investor agrees to abide by the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (a voluntary agreement to publish payments made by the Oyu Tolgoi mine to the government); in another place (section 4.13; but cf. also section 4.6) the Investor consents to “build and maintain productive working relationships, based on principles of transparency, accountability, accuracy, trust, respect and mutual interests, with non-governmental organizations, civic groups, civil councils and other stakeholders.” Beyond this, there is not much else to guide or govern the company’s conduct vis a vis civil society and its responsibility to respect human rights.

Given the high stakes, the scale of Oyu Tolgoi and the involvement of the World Bank and IFC in the project, it is surprising the Agreement does not explicitly incorporate — or reference — the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Instead of creating binding agreements or even practical mechanisms to ensure that Oyu Tolgoi and the government of Mongolia meet their respective human rights obligations as the economy accelerates and the social terrain continues to shift, the Investment Agreement relies on the language of corporate social responsibility to smooth things over.

Part of the trouble with CSR isn’t just that it tends to replace binding agreements and articulated responsibilities with vague sentiments, the language of corporate benevolence, and promises of sustainability and shared prosperity. That’s bound to happen when social responsibility meets public relations. A bigger problem is that the commitments companies voluntarily make to contribute to economic development and social progress — and to respect human rights — will last only as long as the business requires them.

For an example of how abruptly a company can ditch stakeholder communities, what happened in Michigan yesterday with another Rio Tinto project may turn out to be more instructive than what’s happening right now in Mongolia. In the face of serious environmental and human rights challenges to its Eagle Mine project over the last several years, Rio Tinto all along touted its good corporate citizenship, promising to “leave more wood on the woodpile” and to take an active hand in the long term, “sustainable development” of the Upper Peninsula. That is just part of “The Way We Work,” as the title of a Rio Tinto CSR publication would have it — or at least it was the Way We Worked. Yesterday, the company announced that it had sold the Eagle Mine project to Toronto-based Lundin Mining for the tidy sum of $325 million cash — part of CEO Sam Walsh’s strategy to divest from “non-core” assets and protect the single-A credit rating the company currently enjoys. A community of stakeholders whose future Rio Tinto promised to make happy, bright and prosperous became, overnight, a disposable asset.

Polluting the Future — A Question of Human Rights

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Last week, the organization Earthworks released Polluting The Future, a report focusing on “the staggering amount of our nation’s water supplies that are perpetually polluted by mining” and the “rapidly escalating national dilemma” of perpetual mine management.

Perpetual is the key word here. Forty existing hardrock mines pollute 17-27 billion gallons of water per year, “and will do so in perpetuity,” for hundreds if not thousands of years. Include other mines likely to contribute to the problem, and take into account four new big mining projects currently being proposed, and the number jumps: to 37-47 billion gallons of polluted water every year. Pour that all into 8 oz water bottles and stack them one on top of the other and you can go to the moon and back about 100 times.

When Earthworks adds up the cost of treating this perpetual pollution, the figure is staggering: 62 to 73 billion dollars a year. That’s one very powerful way to talk about the social cost of mining — a cost that the mining companies (many of them foreign-based multinationals) are passing directly to the American public. The EPA “questions the ability of businesses to sustain” treatment and management efforts for the required length of time. That’s putting it mildly. As Earthworks points out, “most corporations have existed for far fewer than 100 years… Mining corporations simply won’t be around to manage water treatment that will continue for thousands of years.” They are passing along the true costs of their operations to all of us, for generations to come.

I was hoping to find some discussion of the proposed mining on Lake Superior. It’s a subject I’ve blogged about before — here and here, for instance — and I’m trying to put together a documentary project on the subject as well. So I was left wondering where the Rio Tinto / Kennecott Eagle Mine and the many other new mining projects around the perimeter of Lake Superior fit in the scheme Earthworks presents here.

It seems largely to be a question of scale. It may be easier for the mind to grasp the horror of open-pit projects with a “high risk for perpetual pollution” due to acid mine drainage, but acid mine drainage is also one risk of the sulfide mining projects about to be staged in and around the watershed of one of the world’s largest freshwater lakes — Lake Superior. Again, the report singles out the Pebble Mine in Alaska, another Rio Tinto project, to talk about the threat that mine poses to “the nation’s largest wild salmon fishery”; but the new mining in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula threatens the natural habitat of the coaster brook trout, the Salmon Trout River in northern Marquette County. So there are a couple of ways to make connections between the mining around Lake Superior and Polluting the Future.

Then there are the policy recommendations in this report — which range from enforcement of the Clean Water Act to other legislative and regulatory changes to hold companies accountable. Those all deserve careful consideration. What’s missing for me is something that came out of another report issued last week, this one by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. At the end of a ten day mission to assess the state of business and human rights in the United States, the UN delegation “noted the allegations of significant human rights impacts of surface mining, particularly the rights to health and water, and the deep divisions between stakeholders on the most effective ways of assessing and addressing the impacts.” (Significantly, for those who have followed the controversy over the Eagle Mine project, the UN team also looked at “the rights of Native Americans, particularly as regards the lack of free, prior and informed consent for projects affecting them and sites of cultural and religious significance to them.”)

So I would like to talk about the Earthworks report in this human rights context. The discussion might start with the very first sentence of the report, which characterizes water as “a scarce and precious asset.” The word “asset” makes me a little uneasy (but I would have to defer on this to people like Jeremy J. Schmidt, who together with Dan Shrubsole just put out a paper on the ethics and the politics entailed in the words we use about water). Think, for a moment, about how this discussion of perpetual pollution for immediate profit might be reframed as a human rights discussion. Or at least how the two perspectives — the environmental perspective and the human rights perspective — are complementary, and more powerful when taken together. The problem isn’t just that freshwater is a precious asset in increasingly high demand and short supply; it’s that when we permit big mining projects to pollute our water for generations to come, we are also failing to protect the human rights of our children and our children’s children, and so on, in perpetuity.

Rio Tinto and the Rhetoric of Respect – Notes from the 2013 AGM

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“Your mining is not unproblematic.” That understatement nicely summed up the Rio Tinto Annual General Meeting held yesterday morning in London. But by the time a representative from the London Mining Network had uttered it near the end of the question period, Rio Tinto Chairman Jan du Plessis appeared to have stopped listening.

Up to that point it had been a lively and contentious meeting. Shareholders were miffed about the company’s blunders in Mozambique and the Alcan write off and confused by the executive compensation scheme. Some wanted to know why Tom Albanese wasn’t there to answer for the company’s troubles in 2012, when he was still CEO; another said it was time to stop scapegoating Albanese, and hold the board accountable: “every few years,” he said, we have “a resounding chaotic blunder…What has the board done?”

They were not the only ones to talk about blunders and bad decisions that put the company at risk. Activists, environmentalists and indigenous leaders who attended the meeting testified to the destructive effects of Rio Tinto’s large-scale industrial mining operations on the land, local communities, and traditional ways of life. These speakers all said they and the groups they represent would continue to oppose the company. In fact, their opposition is only growing; a couple even suggested that Rio Tinto could start cutting costs (a big priority for the mining giant right now) by abandoning or divesting from places where mining operations are not welcome. The message to shareholders was clear: protests, lawsuits and continued local opposition will put projects at risk, disrupt schedules and cost money.

Did the board get the message? Not likely. When an Alaskan Yupik elder spoke in opposition to the Pebble Mine project and urged the company to divest, Rio Tinto CEO Sam Walsh thanked him for his “sincerity” and both du Plessis and Walsh complimented the elder on how “articulate” he was. It was a patronizing gesture, a pat on the head, not serious engagement. There were some further comments shouted from the audience but du Plessis shut the discussion down and moved to the next question.

Du Plessis repeated a talking point about how much he respects those who had to travel long distances to attend the meeting, but (as I saw it) this was an effort to recover from a stumble. Only minutes earlier he had impatiently dismissed a question about the Eagle Mine – citing “shoddy environmental protections,” poor design work, “fraudulently issued permits,” and the fact that the mine desecrates ground sacred to the Keweenaw Bay Ojibwe — as “not particularly new.” He was having none of it.

There was lots of talk at the meeting about respect, and I’m afraid “respect” is becoming a word corporate boards use to deflect criticism and politely dismiss human rights, environmental and ethical issues. (Whether this is the unfortunate rhetorical fallout of the Ruggie Protect-Respect-Remedy human rights framework is a question for another day.)

For example, when asked what Rio Tinto has done to improve the lot of miners in South Africa, du Plessis responded that the company has developed “very healthy, respectful relationships not just with employees but with the community” in its South African operations. But what sorts of real commitments do those relationships entail? While the company is “not anti-union” –Walsh rejected that characterization — it nevertheless wants a free hand to “maintain direct contact with all our employees” for the sake of safety, efficiency, and (Walsh iced the cake with this) “value.”

One participant said that he couldn’t see how Rio Tinto reconciled its “corporate rhetoric” with its “actions on the ground.” At Oak Flat in Arizona, he went on to explain, Rio Tinto is trying to gain control of public lands sacred to the Apache. The reply was (again): “we will be respectful.” The company would like to “open up direct dialogue” on the Oak Flat project; the trouble is, dialogue can only be direct and truly respectful if the other party actually has an opportunity to be heard and – this is important — heeded.

Dialogue, community engagement, respect, responsibility – all these were floated at the meeting as remedies to the many problems communities face when Rio Tinto moves in. But what doesn’t get taken into account is that the company and these communities are not on equal footing. Nowhere near it. Rio Tinto has enormous influence and power, billions to invest, and – it should not be forgotten – shareholders who want a return on their investment.

So, during the question period, a woman representing Mongolian herders who will be displaced and deprived of water by Rio Tinto’s Oyu Tolgoi project spoke eloquently about a looming “catastrophe.” She had a soft voice that trembled a little as she spoke. Walsh listened, thanked her for traveling all that way to speak, and then replied that in Mongolia (as in Michigan and elsewhere) the company has “developed a participatory environmental water monitoring program.” If you see something, say something, I guess.

Never mind that she had just finished telling him about the threat of toxic leaks, environmental damage, pollution and river diversion. The IFC and “the people of Mongolia,” Walsh said, will hold Rio Tinto to account. He can’t really believe they will. The community of herders has little recourse and not even a fraction of the power Rio Tinto has; and Oyu Tolgoi, when completed, will account for 36 percent of Mongolia’s GDP. The scales are hopelessly tipped in Rio Tinto’s favor.

Maybe the question period of a shareholders meeting is not the place to have constructive dialogue on serious issues. Maybe those conversations have to happen after the meeting is over, or even behind closed doors. But if and when they do happen, will Rio Tinto really be listening?