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Blog | Wednesday July 27, 2022

Business Leadership in the Great Fragmentation: Part 1

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Editor's Note:

It is obvious that we are living through a time of profound and accelerating change. Our world has been rocked by a series of disruptions: COVID-19, war and social conflict, rollback of rights and democracy, and now high inflation and the risk of recession. These developments have jolted society, and business.

To help our 300+ member companies navigate this volatile environment, we're releasing a series of blogs over the coming weeks to build insight into how to shape business approaches that address this unique moment. Following last week's piece on changing expectations of business in protecting rule of law, rights, and democracy, today's piece is the first of two blogs on the role of business in combating societal fragmentation. 

We’ll conclude with a deeper dive look into how BSR’s 2025 strategy can help your company to navigate these turbulent times—and how you can collaborate with our global network to push us further, faster, to achieve a more equitable, just world for all.

The recent US Supreme Court hearing that overruled Roe v. Wade is yet another reminder of the profound divisions plaguing the United States. The decision has caused states to take wildly different approaches to women’s rights, business to face the question of how to respond, and a society at each other’s throat.

As momentous as this decision is, it is but one example of the many ways that the world is fragmenting: politically, economically, environmentally, and culturally. Signs are everywhere: growing conflict between illiberal governments and liberal democracies, generational splits regarding the value of market capitalism, and culture wars in the US and many parts of Europe. 

This fragmentation is driven by a set of interconnected and accelerating factors, which present not only serious risks to human progress, but also a massive challenge for business. This is particularly true for those of us advocating for more just and sustainable business. 

Sources of Fragmentation

To understand—and address—our current context, it is essential to understand the six interlocking factors that are accelerating fragmentation. Each is potent, and taken together, they reinforce and amplify each other, creating challenges that metastasize by the day. 

• The Digital World: Digital technologies and social media are both sources and enablers of fragmentation, with three key elements. First, social media enable communities of interest to gather in ways they never could in the physical world. While this is not inherently negative, the phenomenon is clearly corrosive. Second, disinformation and misinformation are turbocharging the digital communities’ embrace of their own realities, untethered to fact. Finally, the rise of the “splinternet,” with multiple walled off internets replacing the initial vision of a single, connected web (e.g., the Great Firewall of China and the “Putin-net”), prevents universal access to information, fostering further division.  
• Social Progress…and Backlash: The rise of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter and increased recognition of LGBTIQ+ rights are, on balance, leading to more equitable societies, with greater awareness of the structural inequities that plague us. There is also a powerful backlash, resulting in expressions of hate and violence. Business is increasingly being pulled into these culture wars, with competing claims of “woke capitalism” from the right and expectations from many, including the rising generation of employees and consumers, that business speak out for social justice. 
• Income Inequality: Our societies also continue to face income inequality that both reflects and reinforces fragmentation. According to the New York Times, the CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio in the US reached 339-1 in 2021, a tenfold increase from the late 1960s. Coming at a time of structural change and dislocation, this fuels extreme distrust, as well as populist movements from both right and left. Brexit, Trump, and Le Pen all galvanized widespread political support, often expressed through and with fear and xenophobia, by capitalizing on income inequality as proof that the system is rigged for the benefit of the wealthiest, leading to further social division.  
• Political and Geopolitical Division: Political divisions within and between countries are also on the rise. The recent French parliamentary elections spread votes across four coalitions, including two that are far to the right and left. The US has been mired in gridlock for two decades. “The Great Sorting” of populations has created urban and rural political divides in Europe and North America. The same is true globally, with sharpened geopolitical tensions. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s increasingly muscular nationalism, and competition between liberal democracies and illiberal regimes are creating a more politically volatile environment than we have seen since in decades. 
• Social Impacts of Environmental Collapse: Human-caused environmental collapse also fuels fragmentation. The direct impacts of climate change already are more than enough for society to manage. The second- and third-order effects of climate change, however, are sparking additional social division. Climate refugees are adding to human migration, both to Europe from Africa and the Middle East and to the US from Central America, exacerbating already sharp divisions over migration and contributing to further xenophobia. The sheer scope of the energy transition, with the undeniable fact that there will be winners and losers, and pitting historical emitters against vulnerable nations, also magnifies fragmentation. Whether and how to act is also politicized, especially in the United States, where one political party has systematically—and cynically—denied climate science.
• Maximalist Thinking: Finally, these factors, which are powerful enough on their own, are also amplified—and at times weaponized—by the troubling rise of maximalist thinking. Various communities see “their issue,” whether climate or equity or democracy protection as the issue of existential importance. No matter how legitimate—indeed important—their vision and objectives, this kind of thinking has contributed to an environment in which tribes of reformers fail either to achieve their goals or to build needed coalitions. As Ford Foundation President Darren Walker put it recently in The New York Times, “[W]e are mired in a culture of absolutism and tearing ourselves apart at the seams. Everything right now, it seems, is black or white, all or nothing, perfect or unacceptable.” Indeed, if every cause is presented as an existential threat, advocates will retreat to their own corners, many others will simply tune out, and the consensus needed to make progress is rendered impossible.

Each of these developments has immense significance for business. Taken together, they are reshaping the expectations of customers, employees, and other stakeholders; the ways business communicates; and the policy environment shaping crucial issues from climate to employment to reporting and disclosure. 

In Part 2, we will spell out how business can respond to reduce these sources of fragmentation and adapt their activities to address them.

Blog | Thursday December 12, 2019

A Human Rights Review of the Facebook Oversight Board

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Facebook makes decisions to take down, leave up, or restore content every day, and some of these decisions can be very challenging, with strong arguments for either removing or leaving up the content. Many users can disagree with these decisions, and millions are appealed each year.

In November 2018, Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to “create a new way for people to appeal content decisions to an independent body, whose decisions would be transparent and binding.” This idea has since become known as the Facebook Oversight Board, with the Governance Charter for the Oversight Board released in September.

The Oversight Board is intended to assess difficult content decisions and provide policy opinions, particularly where there is tension between the freedom of expression rights of users with other values, such as safety, privacy, and dignity. In this sense, the Oversight Board represents a new opportunity to provide enhanced access to remedy for individual users while also informing actions by Facebook to mitigate potential future harms.

Today, we are releasing a human rights review conducted by BSR to inform how the Oversight Board will work in practice.

The purpose of our human rights review is to inform the governance and operations of the Oversight Board such that it is consistent with human rights-based approaches, principles, standards, and methodologies. To achieve this outcome, we used an assessment methodology based on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), combined with a review of the various human rights principles, standards, and methodologies upon which the UNGPs are based.

One important challenge was immediately obvious to BSR upon commencing our work: Efforts to provide access to remedy in other industries typically meet the needs of a limited number of rightsholders, based in clearly defined geographical areas, and speaking a limited number of languages. By sharp contrast, the Facebook Oversight Board needs to meet the needs of billions of rightsholders, who could be anywhere in the world, and who may speak any language.

Combine this issue with the Oversight Board’s independent decision-making authority, and Facebook is creating an institution unlike anything ever previously created by a company. It’s a real leap into the unknown—to our knowledge, no company in any industry has ever established an oversight mechanism with binding decision-making power—and a leap that should be made in a manner consistent with human rights.

With this context, BSR’s review explored seven key human rights themes for the Oversight Board:

• Harms and Impacts: Addressing a wide variety of human rights issues and prioritizing the most severe cases
• Vulnerable Groups: Addressing the rights and needs of individuals from groups or populations at heightened risk of becoming vulnerable or marginalized
• Remedy: Providing pathways to effective remedy (i.e., efforts to restore the victim to the same or equivalent position before the harm) and adhering to the access to remedy and operational-level grievance mechanism expectations of the UNGPs
• Decision-Making: Ensuring that Oversight Board members are fully aware of the international human rights standards and that Oversight Board decisions are effectively integrated into Facebook
• Informed Consent: Ensuring that relevant users (e.g., those posting or featured in content) provide consent for each case and understand both their risks and their rights when consenting
• Safety and Integrity: Addressing new human rights risks arising from the existence of the Oversight Board
• Transparency: Accounting for how human rights impacts are addressed through external communications

In our report, BSR provided recommendations for Facebook and the board itself in each theme. In addition, three high-level insights emerged:

1. We determined that all human rights—not only freedom of expression and personal safety and security—can be impacted by content decisions. This implies that it will be important for the Oversight Board to understand the various human rights impacts at stake in each case.
2. The Oversight Board can help prevent and mitigate future human rights harms through both policy recommendations to Facebook and through the action Facebook takes to implement Oversight Board decisions. Policy recommendations could include new or modified language in the Facebook Community Standards, revisions to guidance on how content moderators interpret and enforce the Community Standards, and potential expansions to the scope of the Board’s mandate itself.
3. We believe it will be important for the Oversight Board to have a mechanism to identify novel cases, emerging trends, and cases that may become more prevalent or severe alongside upcoming social, political, or economic developments. This will enable the Oversight Board to proactively address areas of risk and anticipate future harms.

BSR undertook the human rights review at the same time that Facebook created the Oversight Board, thus enabling Facebook to integrate many of our recommendations into the governance and operations of the Oversight Board. The result is an Oversight Board more consistent with human rights-based approaches, principles, standards, and methodologies. We welcome the following steps already taken by Facebook:

• The charter requires the board to pay particular attention to the impact of removing content in light of human rights norms protecting free expression. In his letter on the Oversight Board Charter, Mark Zuckerberg sets out how the values accompanying Facebook’s Community Standards—authenticity, safety, privacy, and dignity—are guided by international human rights standards.
• When prioritizing cases to refer to the Oversight Board, Facebook will consider factors consistent with the UNGPs, such as the severity of impact on someone’s voice, safety, privacy, or dignity, as well as the number of people affected.
• The board will be composed of a diverse set of members, including those who have familiarity with free expression, civic discourse, safety, privacy and technology.
• Facebook will provide resources to enable the board to hear cases in multiple languages.
• Facebook has designed the tooling and submission process with accessibility to vulnerable groups in mind, including prompts to assist users in submitting their cases and allow individuals to submit their case using a mobile device.
• The board will be empowered to instruct Facebook to allow or remove content, which is a form of remedy for users.
• Facebook commits to implementing decisions in a timely manner and communicating the implementation of the decision to the user, in line with some of the effectiveness criteria contained in the UNGPs.

Facebook is by no means the only social media platform facing the challenges of content moderation, and we hope that the BSR human rights review provides considerable value to other social media platforms, stakeholders, and policymakers addressing similar challenges.

While many companies have created advisory committees to provide guidance on human rights topics, to our knowledge, no company has ever established an independent body in this way. We are hopeful that this report will have lasting impact on the Oversight Board. It will be important for dialogue with the international human rights community to continue, especially as the board starts in earnest to formalize and implement its procedures for deliberation and decision-making.

This board represents a significant innovation in the field of business and human rights, and we look forward to learning how such a novel idea proceeds in practice.

Blog | Friday March 31, 2017

Emptier Refrigerators as Social Capital: Redefining the Value of Food in the United States

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Today, I came home to a barren refrigerator—for many, the calling card of a bachelor living on takeout and dinner dates. But in my house, it’s the sign that we’re cutting food waste: I’ve challenged my family to eat everything in our refrigerator, and I mean everything. But that’s not the typical U.S. household … yet.

If you grew up in the United States during the middle of the 20th century, you very quickly learned the American social code around food—fresh cooked food every day meant mom (always mom) cared, a party of 15 meant you cooked for 30 for fear of running out, and an empty refrigerator was considered cause for embarrassment. While grandma or mom, who survived the Great Depression, took extra time getting her doggie bag after dinner at the local restaurant, the rest of us didn’t risk the faux pas.

Food abundance was, and still is, considered a sign of wealth, love, and social capital. But what’s the impact of all that abundance if it’s under-used?

U.S. consumers produce an estimated 27 million tons of food waste annually. Wasted food, left to sit and decompose in landfills, emits methane, which is a leading cause of climate change. That waste also presents a critical social problem, where food is thrown away instead of going to the 40 plus million people in the United States struggling to feed their households.

Of course, there’s even more food thrown away long before it gets to our homes. Another 25 million tons of food are wasted by consumer-facing businesses, 1 million by manufacturers, and another 10 million lost on farms—for a grand total of 63 million tons, equaling an estimated US$218 billion.

The good news is that the food waste landscape is improving. The past two years have seen an increased focus on food waste, ranging from individual business commitments to collaborative commitments, such as YieldWise by the Rockefeller Foundation to reduce global food loss and waste, the Consumer Goods Forum Food Waste Resolution, and the U.S. government pledging to cut food waste by half by 2030. Some commitments were inspired by the UN Sustainable Development Goals—Target 12.3 calls for a 50 percent reduction of global food waste by 2030.

However, most efforts exclude consumers, who in the United States are responsible for 43 percent of the food wasted per year. But there are some examples of successful attempts. For example, in April 2016, the National Resources Defense Council partnered with the Ad Council on a “Save the Food” campaign, which encourages consumers to alter their behavior. The campaign is a step toward raising public awareness—and there is a clear opportunity for companies and organizations to capitalize on the momentum and broaden the impact of these types of efforts.

This past February, BSR, with support from The Rockefeller Foundation, challenged 15 participants from companies and civil society organizations to consider what it would take to engage consumers on food waste prevention in the United States.

Throughout a day of case studies, new research on messaging to drive sustainable behaviors, and a group activity leveraging the BSR/Futerra Sustainable Lifestyles Frontier Group framework on developing the value proposition for sustainable behaviors, the group identified three areas where collaboration could help to create a movement around food waste reduction:

• Developing a business case for engaging the broader business and integrating sustainability and marketing efforts to address consumer food waste
• Testing and refining consumer messaging through creative media to drive food waste reduction
• Partnering on local/community-based events to highlight and encourage better practices around food purchasing and use, particularly with children and families

Individual organizations can execute against these tasks, but the real opportunities are in the shared investments, resources, and outcomes that can come through a collaborative effort. BSR will continue to address this complex issue by engaging companies and brands in a proposed collaborative initiative to address the three areas outlined above.

Influencing, and ultimately changing an individual’s perceptions of the value of food and his or her subsequent consumption behaviors is complex and challenging. We hope this important work will shift social norms around food waste in the United States—our vision is that emptier refrigerators and leftover consumption become a badge of social awareness, respect for the environment, and with hope, delicious meals.

If you are interested in joining a collaborative initiative to engage U.S. consumers on food waste, please contact jmarinez@bsr.org. 

Blog | Tuesday July 9, 2019

Mergers Are Coming: How to Manage ESG through the M&A Process

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We are living through a time of tremendous external disruption, technological innovation, and increased political, social, and climate risk. As a result of this ongoing disruption, we are seeing increased mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity as companies seek to buy into the latest innovation, to disrupt the competition—or to prevent being disrupted by the competition.

Already this year, we have witnessed high-profile mergers take place in multiple industries, including media (AT&T and Time Warner), pharmaceuticals (AbbVie and Allergan), and mining (Newmont Mining and Goldcorp).

These mergers can have a huge impact on the state of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) affairs for the companies involved. At a time when employees and customers are calling for companies to take stands on social issues and investors, like BlackRock’s Larry Fink, are stressing the value of “purpose,” a company’s ESG performance is more important than ever.  Companies can and should strive to integrate ESG considerations throughout the M&A process from initial due diligence through implementation after the merger.

As business leaders across industries pursue M&A activity, there will be substantial ESG opportunities and risks for the companies involved: opportunities to create more ambitious and resilient sustainability strategies, accompanied by risks that ESG objectives will be sidelined by overwhelming pressures to create short-term value.

BSR has developed a primer, Managing ESG through a Merger, to help Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs), their teams, and internal allies navigate the M&A process to leverage and enhance ESG-related programs and priorities.

A successful merger requires integration of culture, strategy, and processes—and a company with a resilient sustainability strategy will be better positioned to integrate ESG elements accordingly.

The primer serves as a guide for CSOs and sustainability teams, who may find themselves faced with a range of scenarios:

• Company A bids to acquire Company B, but it is rejected by Company B’s Board due to a lack of commitment to ESG or sustainability. How can Company A avoid this in the future?
• One company has nascent sustainability efforts while the other has a robust sustainability program—how can the merger create an opportunity to elevate the newly formed company up to the higher standards?
• A smaller, sustainability-oriented brand is bought by a larger company—how can the executives ensure that the sustainability commitments, credibility, and progress will continue?
• A larger company intentionally buys a sustainable brand to incubate more sustainable processes or products—how can they replicate those learnings across other parts of the business?
• Two companies with significant investments in ESG merge—how can they combine their efforts, teams, and data in a meaningful way?

A successful merger requires integration of culture, strategy, and processes—and a company with a resilient sustainability strategy will be better positioned to integrate ESG elements accordingly.

It’s important to note that it’s fully expected that the executive management team leading the merger process will prioritize legal and financial issues at play. This still creates an opportunity for CSOs and internal sustainability champions to step in and ensure that ESG considerations are integrated into management’s priorities, particularly during due diligence leading up to the merger. By understanding and acting on the key considerations outlined in our primer, sustainability teams can employ processes that more effectively considers ESG issues, mitigating the reputational and financial risk associated with potential ESG crises and positioning the company to build competitive advantage through better integration of its sustainability strengths.

The new climate for business is one of technological, geopolitical, and climate disruption. It is also one where ESG plays a key role in defining a company’s reputation and culture. As mergers become an increasingly popular business tactic in this climate, business leaders who value sustainability have much to consider. To learn more about how BSR can support your company during the M&A process, please connect with us.

Blog | Monday November 12, 2018

Reflections from the BSR Conference 2018

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Last week, our community of more than 800 sustainability leaders from the private, public, and nonprofit sectors came together in New York City at the BSR Conference 2018 to create a new blueprint for business.

To borrow a question that The Coca-Cola Company’s Beatriz Perez posed to the audience last week, “How do you run a business for the next quarter-century, as opposed to the next quarter?” This was a theme throughout the Conference, as we collectively grappled with how rapidly our operating environment is shifting and how radically different our future will look.  

How do you run a business for the next quarter-century, as opposed to the next quarter?

We tackled some of today’s most difficult but urgent subjects, including racial justice, power imbalances, and sexual harassment in the workplace. Our closing plenary speakers were New York Times investigative reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who, among countless other accomplishments, broke last year’s Harvey Weinstein story, helping ignite the #MeToo movement. They shared their thoughts with us on what comes next, both for the movement and the fight to advance gender equality in the workplace.

Plenaries and breakouts alike addressed the idea that business should engage with governments and increasingly needs to speak out on social and environmental issues: Author Anand Giridharadas urged participants to think about the policies their companies are lobbying for and against in Washington and how these efforts align—or don’t—with their sustainability efforts.

Technology was also top of mind, from John Ruggie’s remarks, where he referenced his work to translate the UNGPs into algorithms, to conversations about the human rights implications of artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the lessons of “techlash.” Participants rolled up their sleeves in futures thinking sessions to imagine the implications of technological advances like these for business.

Not least, results of the U.S. midterm elections made their way into several conversations; most notably the fact that more than 100 women were elected to Congress.

Here are five ways that you can re-live the highlights of the event—or catch the things you missed:

1. Watch plenary session videos: Almost every plenary session is now live on our YouTube channel, from David Schwimmer’s call for men to be a bigger part of the conversation around sexual harassment and power dynamics, to Novartis CEO Vasant Narasimhan’s talk about “bending the curve of life” through improving access to medicine through innovation.
2. Read about our latest initiatives: We launched a lot of new content last week. Check out our new report to help you increase the resilience of your business strategy, Doing Business in 2030: Four Possible Futures, and CoLab, our new incubator and accelerator of private-sector collaboration.
3. See the social media highlights: Follow @BSRnews, @bsrherproject, and BSR staff on Twitter, and see what you missed on the #BSR18 hashtag. You will also find photo highlights on our Instagram accounts, @bsrorg and @herprojectbsr.
4. Find yourself in photos: We’ve uploaded photos from the week onto our Flickr account—head on over to see whether we captured you, or your favorite moment, in our BSR18 album.
5. Share your thoughts: If you were with us in New York, please take a moment to complete the Conference survey (available in the mobile app under “Surveys”). If you weren’t there, you can always tweet at us or email us your perspective.

We are grateful to have had the opportunity to connect with all of you—our global community of change agents and thought leaders who are truly creating a more just and sustainable world through the work you do every day. It is so energizing for us to come together to discuss big issues, explore global challenges, and share stories from the front lines of our work to advance sustainability, and we’re already looking forward to seeing you next year at BSR19 in San Jose, California, November 12-14, 2019.

Blog | Tuesday April 18, 2023

A Human Rights Impact Assessment of Twitch

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From late 2021 to mid-2022, BSR and Twitch undertook a human rights assessment of Twitch, an interactive live streaming service for content spanning gaming, entertainment, sports, music, and more. Today, we are pleased to publish the final report in full.

The goal of the assessment was to identify and prioritize Twitch’s human rights risks and make recommendations for actions to address these risks, including via collaboration with other organizations. BSR and Twitch wish to thank all Twitch employees, rightsholders, and stakeholders who participated in this assessment.

Consistent with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, this assessment is based on risks to people (i.e., risks to rightsholders) rather than risks to the business (i.e., risks to enterprise value creation). This people-oriented approach enables a meaningful human rights program and a sophisticated approach to addressing business risks.

The assessment focuses on human rights most relevant to Twitch service policy, partnerships, and impacts, rather than Twitch’s broader operations and supply chain. This was agreed with Twitch at the outset given the likely greater salience of these human rights impacts and the increasing stakeholder interest in them. Off-service harassment issues are important but were not in scope for this assessment.

BSR would like to emphasize the following three points alongside the assessment:

1. This is an assessment, not an audit. The value of this assessment is to consider human rights risks that may emerge or grow over time as Twitch evolves, such as content and users that extend beyond the gaming community or Twitch becoming more popular in more locations, cultures, and languages. The assessment makes 24 recommendations for how risks may be addressed across content policy, implementation of content policy, product development, system-wide approaches, and tracking and transparency. While understanding how Twitch is used today was hugely important, our primary focus was on preparing Twitch for the future.
2. System-wide approaches are important. Many of Twitch’s human rights risks (such as policy-violating live streamed content being recorded and shared elsewhere) are beyond the ability of Twitch to address alone, and multi-stakeholder efforts offer important opportunities to collaborate with others. Developing moderation tools and approaches that address live streaming risk is one area where Twitch can usefully collaborate with others, including via existing multi-company and multi-stakeholder efforts.
3. Live streaming presents content policy dilemmas that would benefit from further dialogue with stakeholders and experts. Examples include the privacy rights of those incidentally captured in live streaming, the live streaming of major events (such as protests, conflict, and other gatherings) where violating content may exist in the context of otherwise valuable streaming, and content policy enforcement challenges with live streaming, such as the limited reliability of tools for automated detection of potentially violating content. Community moderators play an essential role in identifying potentially violating content on chat and in livestreams, and they will benefit from resources, training, and investment that include human rights priorities, such as on transphobia, gender, and hate speech. 

Taking a human rights-based approach consistent with the UNGPs will help social media companies address the content policy challenges of today and tomorrow. We hope the assessment provides this foundation for Twitch.

Blog | Thursday June 15, 2023

The US Supreme Court Ruling on Affirmative Action: A Business Response

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It is expected that the US Supreme Court may issue a landmark decision that ends the practice of affirmative action this month. The ruling would effectively ban US colleges and universities from considering race as a factor in admissions decisions which, as illustrated by existing state-level bans of the practice, can reshape the demographics and diversity of campuses for generations.

More broadly, as research has shown, the consequences of a national ban on affirmative action are likely to ripple throughout the US economy as decades of efforts to increase social and economic participation by historically excluded populations are upended and schools, businesses, communities, and governments become more racially, and even ideologically, homogeneous.

For business leaders that care about hiring and retaining diverse and exceptional talent, developing and delivering innovative products and services, and attracting a diversified consumer base, the end of affirmative action should be seen as more than another philosophical or policy debate in the so-called “culture wars.” Indeed, business leaders should understand and respond to the end of affirmative action for what it is: a significant and material risk to long-term corporate economic success.

As such, bold and committed action is needed in the months and years ahead to ensure that progress toward a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive economy is not lost, nor business value diminished. Even as we wait to see the final ruling, there are seven key actions businesses can take:

Underscore Your Company’s Long-Term Commitment to Diversity
 

• Reiterate your company’s commitment to building and maintaining a diverse workforce and organization. According to recent public opinion polling, 69 percent of adults agree that a company should respond to issues surrounding race, including supporting schools and communities teaching about the impacts of slavery and racism. Raise awareness of your company’s commitment to operationalizing DEI initiatives, developing products and service offerings that meet the needs of diverse communities, and supporting broader racial equity and social justice efforts.
• Commit to corporate accountability initiatives that focus on racial equity and DEI in the workplace. Business leaders need to be regularly exposed to and equipped with educational resources and practical tools and can seek out opportunities to participate in current and emerging civil society and philanthropically supported efforts. Among others, these might include:
   
  • Pilot new corporate standards tackling inequality from the Corporate Racial Equity Alliance, a partnership between PolicyLink, FSG, and JUST Capital. The standards will provide business leaders with clear goals to strive for, milestones along the path, and metrics to track in order to communicate progress in this work and earn greater trust. Piloting companies will receive individualized support from the Alliance and provide essential input to help shape the standards for the field.
  • Join the Expanding Equity network supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which offers resources, as well as learning and networking opportunities, for business leaders focused on advancing racial equity, diversity, and inclusion (REDI) strategies in their organizations. Several resources are available now, and a robust learning platform with courses on REDI strategy development and related topics will roll out later this year. 
• Assess your company’s hiring data to identify barriers to diverse talent acquisition and surface factors that may support the long-term hiring of diverse workers. This may include collaboration between human resources, communications, and legal teams to review job listings and ensure barriers and biases are eliminated. Companies may also evaluate their onboarding, performance review, and employee benefits policies and practices to understand where there may be opportunities to increase the retention of diverse workers.
   

Demystify Affirmative Action Impacts among Company Stakeholders and Bolster Good-Faith, Fact-Based Public, Policy, and Legal Discourse
 

• Support campaigns by industry groups and peers that inform how colleges and universities utilize affirmative action to enroll a diverse student body and highlight the direct and indirect impacts of the practice on your business. In the coming months, the broader narrative in the public around affirmative action is likely to be fueled by polarizing inaccuracies, misperceptions, and hyperbole. Business leaders should look to leverage their communications, policy, and other media infrastructure to elevate the discussion of affirmative action so that it is based on facts and the real, tangible ways in which the court’s ruling impacts your company and the broader economy. 
• Establish guidelines for your state- and federal-based political giving that minimizes donating to candidates who spread misinformation about affirmative action practices and impacts. As we head into what is likely to be a divisive and controversial election cycle, corporations can play a direct role in minimizing the extent to which bad-faith actors negatively influence public and policy discourse around affirmative action practice and impacts and the long-term benefits of a diverse, inclusive, and equitable economy, more broadly. Whether individually or in alignment with industry peers and other valued stakeholders, business leaders should consider how their political giving can be tailored toward political candidates and leadership that champion good-faith ideas based on fact and the economy’s long-term interest in mind.  
• Leverage philanthropic, community engagement, and corporate responsibility resources to foster the development of student admission approaches and strategies that support and safeguard diverse enrollment in higher education and at trade schools. Here, companies can collaborate with school leadership and educational associations to conduct regular engagement sessions or support research that informs admission officials’ understanding of potential admissions approaches and practices that can further support diverse talent development pipelines.
• Prepare for ongoing state- and federal-level engagement. Companies can ensure that their teams are equipped to monitor and support with amicus briefs to safeguard human resources initiatives, DEI programs, and other corporate diversity efforts at lower-level federal and state courts before they bubble up to the higher courts. Furthermore, given state-level policy already targeting DEI programs with an intent to send a chilling message, companies should expect copycat efforts in future legislative sessions.  

As we saw with the fall of Roe v. Wade last year, the end of affirmative action is likely to encourage partisans and extremists to seek out a myriad of legal, policy, and media levers to create unrest across jurisdictions. The business community cannot afford to watch from the sidelines or be caught off-guard because of a lack of action or infrastructure to reinforce and protect long-term business strategy.

BSR’s Center for Business and Social Justice works with a network of civil society partners and experts in reproductive health to provide tangible guidance to business. All BSR members can contact the Center for specific inquiries.

Blog | Monday June 26, 2017

Three Steps to Tackle Raw Materials Risks—from the Inside Out

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For global companies, different commodities present a risk for serious human rights abuses, such as the worst forms of child labor, conflict, and forced labor, as well as other social issues and environmental degradation.

These risks have led the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to publish the OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas (OECD Due Diligence Guidance), which has been codified into law in the United States and European Union and is being debated in other jurisdictions. While some regulation focuses on the sourcing of minerals from specific locations, the EU law forces companies to look for risks in the raw materials wherever they are sourced globally.

Today, the number of raw materials facing scrutiny is also growing: A forthcoming handbook from the OECD will help companies apply the OECD Due Diligence Guidance to palm, conflict minerals, pulp and paper, diamonds and other gem stones, oil and gas, and other commodities. Cotton and seafood are also gaining attention.

This broader geographic and material scope means more companies across industry sectors will need to take action to reduce social and environmental risks in the procurement of raw materials. To make a real impact—and level the playing field so that there is sufficient capacity to protect human rights—collaboration will be critical.

But rather than starting by joining a collaborative initiative, companies should work from the inside out, identifying and assessing their biggest raw materials risks and then finding the right group to join to maximize impact and mitigate risks.

Step 1: Identify your company’s risk profile.

Collaboration may be necessary to create the conditions for improvement at the site of extraction or harvest, but the best place to start is by looking inward: What is your company’s raw material risk profile?

No company has the resources to comprehensively address every raw material in their products, nor do they have the expertise to effectively engage. Therefore, it is critical to create an internal strategy to focus scarce company resources. That requires an internal assessment process, like a materiality analysis, to identify the most important and impactful commodities and materials.

Step 2: Analyze the supply chain of your target raw materials.

The next step is to look at the supply chain of the raw materials you have identified: Where do the materials come from? What are the risks in that region? Answering these questions will allow you to identify the raw materials and regions that present the most immediate, most severe risks.

In an age of hyper-transparency, companies should assume that stakeholders will be able to map the supply chain and link commodity risks to your company. Proactively understanding where your company has raw material and commodity risks puts it in a position to more efficiently meet stakeholder expectations, minimize risk, and maximize impact.

Step 3: Create a collaboration strategy.

Once you clearly understand your company’s biggest risks, you can invest in the collaborations that will have the most impact. These partnerships might focus on the commodity, or they might focus on issues in that region. Different companies will have different types of severe risks depending on the commodities that are important to them. For example, one company may be sourcing a high-risk commodity from a low-risk region and should instead focus on a medium risk commodity from an area where human rights abuses are known to be more likely.

While many companies are responding in a reactive way to industry standards, legislation, or media and NGO reports, some have been proactive in identifying their risks and joining the most relevant groups that are advancing progress on specific issues. Microsoft, for instance, in reviewing its products, determined that tin not only presented risks not from a conflict minerals perspective, but also can present risks in its extraction in Indonesia. Therefore, they joined with a number of other companies and organizations to form the IDH Indonesian Tin Working Group, which focuses on driving the implementation of a roadmap for responsible tin mining in Indonesia.

The risks in raw materials and commodities can be complex for companies, which is why collaboration is important. But collaboration can’t happen until after companies take those first inward-focused steps to review their products and assess and identify their most relevant risks in sourcing raw materials and commodities.

Blog | Tuesday May 8, 2018

The Future of Work for Women in China: Lessons from HERproject

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For the past 30 years, China has in many ways been known for its manufacturing capabilities, with “Made in China” appearing on products around the globe. The manufacturing industry in China absorbed millions of people from the workforce, attracting them to live far away from their hometowns in exchange for incomes that exceeded what they could earn from farming and agriculture.

However, in the past five to 10 years, the manufacturing environment in China has greatly changed, as has the working population and its needs. This in turn has changed the issues that companies are focusing on in their supply chain sustainability efforts and the specific challenges that women face at work.

On one hand, the factories that have survived surging labor costs are finding it harder and harder to retain workers; on the other, with workers’ increasing awareness of their rights, strikes, labor unrest, and other grievances are more and more frequent in public and visible on social media. The younger generation is very different from their parents, and today, they make up a greater percentage of the workforce. As compared to their parents, these workers attach more importance to the factory environment and their working conditions, including their superiors’ management styles, the presence of a support network in the workplace, and recognition and acknowledgement. In light of these traits, in many cases the outdated management style of senior leaders and the diverse needs of young workers come into serious conflict.

While both young women workers and young men workers share these qualities, women are confronted with greater challenges than their male colleagues. Equal access to opportunity and development at work remain challenging for women to attain. At the factory, the common management perception that male workers are more capable and concentrated can lead to unequal training and promotion opportunities for women workers. In the era of automation, this is especially problematic, as women workers are sometimes considered less capable than men at operating machinery—a skill that will be critical for the future workforce in China.

Workplace programs to enable women workers to reach their potential presents an opportunity to improve quality of work and make factory jobs more attractive. Over the past 10 years, BSR has collaborated with more than 30 international brands to implement HERproject™ in China to improve the health awareness, well-being, and confidence of female workers. This workplace-based program was created 11 years ago to respond to the huge gap in reproductive health knowledge and behavior of vulnerable female workers working in supply chain factories; through these efforts, we have reached more than 180,000 female workers in 160+ factories in China.

While we are thrilled that HERproject has greatly improved the ability of women workers to take charge of their own health and demonstrated business impact, there is more we can do to contribute to stronger workplaces and enhanced worker well-being. Today, workers “vote by foot” by flowing to the better workplaces, and the benefits of an improved workplace can benefit both the workers and factory management. Here are a few recommendations for companies looking to promote gender equality and sustainability in their operations and supply chains in China:

• Strengthen worker agency: HERproject has demonstrated that building up the capacity of female workers through its peer-to-peer model resulted in numerous stories of improved confidence, better communication skills, and strengthened self-esteem. This will be increasingly important in the era of automation, where stronger “soft” skills will likely be expected of workers; it is an important area of focus for women’s empowerment efforts in China and around the globe.
• Apply a gender lens to factory policy: While workplace-based training can directly reach women workers, it is equally important to help factories review their existing policies with a gender lens. Only when women’s empowerment efforts are included in day-to-day operations can their impact be long lasting.
• Address social norms: Social norms and expectations about the work that women and men do could prevent women workers from realizing their potential. Women workers may not get the same promotion and training opportunities as men, and companies can do more to recognize and address the impact of social norms to create lasting change.
• Integrate technology: Almost all factory workers under 30 have smartphones. These workers have more access to the outside world through the internet, but there is still opportunity to better connect this to their welfare. BSR has developed an app for HERproject in China, in which the health curriculum and information of some health access service providers was digitized. Companies can explore this and other technology resources that support worker well-being.

HERproject will continue to explore how to create a brighter future of work for women in China. Please contact us if you’d like to explore opportunities to collaborate on these important issues.

Reports | Thursday July 15, 2021

Human Rights Due Diligence of Products and Services

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Overview

Human rights due diligence (HRDD) of products and services—also known as “downstream HRDD” or “end use HRDD”—has been a requirement of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) since their endorsement by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011. However, its relevance has skyrocketed in the past few years due to the rise of technology products like social media and artificial intelligence.

As the field of supply chain due diligence has matured, the downstream value chain is increasingly becoming a focal point for more traditional sectors like pharmaceuticals and heavy industry. Now more than ever, we can see and feel the human rights impacts of business products and services, which in turn has elevated the need for businesses to take a serious look at how their products and services are designed and developed, who they are sold to, how they are used, and how they may be misused.

What Is Downstream Human Rights Due Diligence?

Downstream human rights due diligence is the assessment and prioritization of human rights impacts that occur as a result of company actions or omissions during the design, development, promotion, deployment, sale, licensing, or use of products or services. It differs from other types of business human rights due diligence because it focuses entirely on the downstream value chain, rather than the upstream supply chain or direct business operations.