Excerpt:
Employee sources said that a significant percentage of workers live paycheck to paycheck; they are forced to frequent soup kitchens and charities to feed themselves and their families. The problem has been ongoing since at least fall 2008, when one employee estimated that between 65 and 70 percent of workers used charities to get food. Paul Kerns, general manager for Sodexo at BU, said he could not verify the statistics.

Sodexo partners with Community Hunger Outreach Warehouse (CHOW) to collect food donations on campus.

Excerpt:
The Ben & Jerry’s story is but a small cautionary tale about the still-growing and already far-reaching field of “philanthrocapitalism.” This is the term that author Michael Edwards uses in his new book, Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World, to describe a wide range of activities. It includes Silicon Valley CEOs using “venture philanthropy” to fund new, business-minded nonprofits; stock market traders developing socially weighted investment funds; bankers extending microcredit loans to the poor; and “social entrepreneurs” aiming to simultaneously serve a “double bottom line” of positive public impact and shareholder return.

The activities covered under the umbrella of philanthrocapitalism are diverse enough to offer exceptions to any generalization about the category. But its practitioners would almost uniformly describe themselves as “results-oriented,” implicitly critiquing the ineffectiveness of existing nonprofits and voluntary organizations. Their unifying idea is that business is more efficient and outcome-driven than government and civil society, and that unleashing market forces is the best means of addressing entrenched problems such as poverty, malnutrition, preventable disease, and poor education.

In Edwards’ words, “the basic message of this movement is pretty clear: Traditional ways of solving social problems do not work, so business thinking and market forces should be added to the mix.” During his nine-year tenure as a director at the Ford Foundation, Edwards saw the popularity of this argument skyrocket. He writes, “if I had dollar for every time someone has lectured me on the virtues of business thinking for foundations and nonprofits, I’d be a philanthropist myself.”

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Photo by Limbo Poet

Excerpt:
When the going gets tough, costly good intentions can go out the window. Company spending has been squeezed by the global recession and budgets for corporate social responsibility have suffered disproportionately.

A survey of U.K. businesses by KPMG and Business In The Community found a third of companies cut their corporate social responsibility budgets in 2009. Corporate philanthropy has also been hit, with a study by the Giving USA Foundation revealing that charitable donations by U.S. companies fell by 8% in inflation-adjusted terms in 2008.

Perhaps this is not so great a loss. There is a growing feeling among company executives that marginal initiatives, which can so easily be dispensed, are not enough to alter corporate behavior. In a speech last year, Stephen Green, chairman of U.K. bank HSBC, said: “There has been a tendency to compartmentalize so-called corporate social responsibility activities as an adjunct to the mainstream business activities.” Mr. Green believes in replacing corporate social responsibility with a new focus on “corporate sustainability,” which, rather than being an add-on to a business. “is about the raison d’être of the company itself.”

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Excerpt:
For guidance — and perhaps inspiration — Toyota should do some research on the Johnson & Johnson Tylenol recall of 1982.

That year, seven people in the Chicago area died from taking Tylenol capsules poisoned with potassium cyanide. The case remains unsolved, and no suspects were ever charged.

But Johnson & Johnson (JNJ, Fortune 500) didn’t wait around for the authorities to act. It stopped production of Tylenol and issued a nationwide recall of 31 million bottles already in circulation with a retail value of over $100 million.

The murders stopped, and J&J’s actions led to changes in packaging — those annoying seals on everything from aspirin to milk — as well as federal anti-tampering laws. Through its prompt action, J&J was able to actually enhance the value of the Tylenol brand by making product safety one of its attributes.

Toyota has a much tougher job ahead of it. That’s because the problems in its cars are not the result of a crazed individual but are systemic to the product development process. Fixing the system that allowed the defects to occur will be complex and expensive.

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Photo by respres

Marketplace Money had an interesting piece, with Henry Blodget, CEO of the “Business Insider,” and Megan McArdle, of the “Atlantic” magazine debating the propriety of walking away. You can hear that piece and read the transcript here.

Excerpt from the Arizona Republic article:
Arizona law professor Brent White says the only thing standing between many “underwater” homeowners and a better financial future is a misguided sense that walking away from a loan commitment is morally wrong.

White, an associate professor at University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law, has spent the past few months presenting his argument to other lawyers, real-estate professionals and the national media.

It started with a 50-page discussion paper he published in October, in which White argues that underwater homeowners, those whose unpaid loan balance exceeds the value of their home, are being manipulated into picking up the tab for a real-estate crash that borrowers and lenders created equally.

“I’m all for a society where people must take personal responsibility, but that should also apply to the banks and financial institutions,” he said.

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Excerpt:
As the bodies responsible for teaching so many of the “masters of the universe” who did so much to cause last year’s economic meltdown, it is perhaps not surprising that business schools have spent the past year doing some serious soul-searching about their culpability for the recession.

Go back to the 1980s and 1990s, when many of today’s corporate leaders were studying for their MBAs, and business ethics and sustainability – in other words, issues around corporate governance, social responsibility and long-term decision-making – played ­little part in business school curricula.

Pre-credit crunch, the need for MBAs to be “ethical” as well as show you how to fast-track your career and make a load of cash was not that high on the agenda, concedes Mark Stoddard, accreditation projects manager of the Association of MBAs (Amba).

“Schools have recognised there have been gaps and they have needed to make changes in the way MBAs are taught,” he says. “Three to four years ago you might have got students complaining about having to take ethics courses. You don’t now.”

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Photo by anshu_si

Read the article here.

Excerpt:
Last year, famed British chocolatier Cadbury made waves when it announced that 100% of the cocoa used in its popular Dairy Milk line would be sourced Fair Trade. With the news that Cadbury is being sold to American conglomerate Kraft, the question is: will the new owners will keep these policies intact?

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Photo by adria.richards

Excerpt:
Google launched its Chinese-language search engine, Google.cn, in January 2006. The company said at the time that it did so in the belief that a search engine would help open access to information for Chinese residents. To obtain permission to operate in China, however, the company had agreed to censor search results that the Chinese government deemed objectionable. Google was harshly criticized by civil liberties groups for its concession to Chinese authorities.

The company now appears to be regretting that decision.

“We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech,” Drummond wrote Tuesday about the company’s reversal of its position in China. “The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences.”

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A new report alleging corruption in Morgan Stanley’s China operations has sullied the firm’s aspirations to be a good example of corporate social responsibility.

Reuters has published a damning article that alleges Garth Peterson, a former employee at Morgan Stanley in China, is suspected of violating the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by engaging in bribery with Morgan Stanley’s government and business contacts in China. The article states Morgan Stanley conducted its own internal investigation and already submitted those findings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Peterson was apparently fired in December 2008.

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MICHELE RAMBO: My name is Michele Rambo, and I live in Grand Prairie, Texas.

Rambo signed up at the University of Phoenix in Dallas a few years ago.

RAMBO: I did tell them that I was pregnant and they were like, oh, well that just solves everything, you know, you qualify for a grant, you’re covered. And I’m like, so I don’t have to pay anything? And they told me no.

Classes went well. She got good grades. She was almost finished with her associate degree when a school counselor called about moving her on to a bachelor’s program.

RAMBO: And one of the questions that she asked me completely stopped the whole conversation. She had asked me, so what kind of loan do you have?

Rambo thought she didn’t have a loan. But when she enrolled, she signed what she thought was a form inquiring about federal aid.

Turns out it was an application for loans that’ll cost her $18,000 when she graduates.

RAMBO: It was scary. It still is scary. I’m still scared. I still don’t even know what I’m going to do yet.

So how could this happen?

It turns out the enrollment counselors at the University of Phoenix get paid in part based on how many students they recruit. The university’s negotiating the settlement of a lawsuit that claims employees were pressured to sign people up.

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Rod Kramer thought it was going to be just another dinner at the Stanford Executive Program last summer.

An affable, popular professor at the business school, he had given his usual talks on influence and persuasion in the realms of politics and business.

Then came the wrap-up social event. But the wife of an important corporate executive — “with the help of some wine,” as Kramer recalls — lit into him “for not teaching morality to MBA students.”

That failure, she told him and then told him some more, was the cause of the global financial meltdown. It was an illustration, says Kramer, currently a visiting professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, of how much “disenchantment” there is about MBAs these days.

Indicting business schools and management education has become a blood sport. “If Robespierre were to ascend from hell and seek out today’s guillotine fodder,” wrote Philip Delves Broughton in a widely cited piece in the Sunday Times of London earlier this year, “he might start with a list of those with three incriminating initials beside their name: MBA.”

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The agricultural giant Monsanto may well still be the world’s most hated company. The company that brought the world Agent Orange, the defoliant of choice in the Vietnam War, followed up a decade ago with a strident push to flood the world with genetically modified crops. It alienated millions – and even its friends and rivals among GM supporters blamed Monsanto’s belligerence for putting back the cause by many years. But I’m going to ignore GMs and talk about water. And belligerence.

In part, no doubt, to help salvage its GM-tarnished reputation, Monsanto now makes great play of its efforts to help engineer a second green revolution built around “sustainability”.

Sustainability is a much-abused term and it infiltrates almost every corner of the company’s website. But to be fair they do try and define what the word means for its business. The company promises that its “sustainable yield initiative” will “reduce by one-third per unit produced the aggregate amount of key resources such as land, water and energy, required to grow crops by 2030.”

Many analysts now see water, rather than land, as the key limitation on growing food to feed a future world population of nine billion in the coming decades. So a third more crop for the same amount of water is a valuable goal. The company trumpets especially its work to engineer more water-efficient maize.

Of course, despite the company’s public pledge to “share knowledge and technology” the company’s corporate aim is to make sure that farmers buy Monsanto-patented water-efficient seeds by the trillion.

But you would expect Monsanto to be especially sensitive about how it manages water in its own farming operations, and particularly to show concern for how neighbouring farmers are facing up to water shortages. Wouldn’t you?

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In another sign of the widening divide in the business community over climate change action, Nike announced Wednesday that it would resign its position on the board of the United States Chamber of Commerce.

Nike said, however, that it would maintain its membership in the chamber.

Three large utilities — Pacific Gas & Electric, PNM Resources and Exelon — have announced their resignations from the chamber this month due to concerns about the chamber’s position on climate.

“We fundamentally disagree with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the issue of climate change, and their recent action challenging the E.P.A. is inconsistent with our view that climate change is an issue in need of urgent action,” Nike said in a statement that was posted today on the Web site of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

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Think slavery is over? Think our children are safe? A courageous corporate campaign tells us all to think again.

Growing up during The Body Shop’s heyday, I rarely entered a shopping mall without seeing the cosmetics retailer’s familiar “No Animal Testing” signs. And no youthful spree was complete without bagging one of the mango shampoos or pomegranate body lotions that lined the shop’s walls like shining, aromatic jewels.

Back then, the company was one of few touting ethical consumerism; under the direction of co-founder Anita Roddick, The Body Shop pioneered the idea that businesses can do well by doing good. The concept gained so much traction that angry customers just about stampeded when in 2006 Roddick sold her share of the company to French cosmetic giant L’Oréal, not known for an animal-kindness stance. But Roddick saw the move as a pragmatic one that would take the gospel of socially responsible business to new horizons.

And indeed, two years after her death, the company is taking its advocacy work to a whole new level with the launch of the three-year “Stop Sex Trafficking of Children and Young People” campaign, kicked off eight weeks ago in partnership with the organization ECPAT International (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes). The campaign aims to make sure that children’s rights are secure, and that governments are held accountable for their contributions toward that goal.

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Excerpt:
LOS ANGELES — Four decades after he stunned the nation by leaking the top-secret Pentagon Papers study of the Vietnam War, Daniel Ellsberg walks the halls of the past in his dreams.

In his sleep, he imagines that he still works as a researcher at the Rand Corp., advising Pentagon officials on policy, handling classified documents, studying the science of war.

“Being at Rand was the ideal life for me,” Ellsberg says, almost as an afterthought. “In my dreams, I am doing classified work, trying to solve social problems.”

Over the decades, Ellsberg, 78, hasn’t been welcome at Rand. He committed the most startling breach of security in the company’s history, walking out on Oct. 1, 1969, with the first briefcase full of classified documents destined for public release.

That bold move — and the actions that followed to get them published — are the subject of a new documentary film, “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.”

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The question at the heart of one of the biggest Supreme Court cases this year is simple: What constitutional rights should corporations have? To us, as well as many legal scholars, former justices and, indeed, drafters of the Constitution, the answer is that their rights should be quite limited — far less than those of people.

This Supreme Court, the John Roberts court, seems to be having trouble with that. It has been on a campaign to increase corporations’ legal rights — based on the conviction of some conservative justices that businesses are, at least legally, not much different than people.

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On the issue of corporate personhood, you may also find this article to be of interest: Capital Punishment: For Corporations that Violate the Public Trust.

Excerpt:
SAN FRANCISCO -(Dow Jones)- PG&E Corp. (PCG) said Tuesday it is leaving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over objections to what its top executive called the chamber’s “extreme position on climate change.”

In a letter to the U.S. Chamber published on PG&E’s blog, www next100.com, PG& E Chairman and Chief Executive Peter Darbee wrote that company employees “find it dismaying that the Chamber neglects the indisputable fact that a decisive majority of experts have said the data on global warming are compelling and point to a threat that cannot be ignored.”

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CSR week? You’ve got to be kidding. Read the article here.
Excerpt:

AHMEDABAD: When a management course teaches all the skills and techniques that wannabe managers could need, why should the corporate social responsibility (CSR) be left out? Students’ council of BK School of Business Management believe so and have organized the CSR week that commenced from Friday.

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ARLINGTON, Va., Sept. 9 /PRNewswire/ — Are we, as a nation, becoming more or
less ethical in the workplace? The Ethics Resource Center is working to find out, using its extensive biannual National Business Ethics Survey (NBES) – the only workplace survey of its kind. Results are used widely by leaders in business and government to spot trends and focus resources.

The 2009 survey – ERC’s sixth in a series – is complete and results are scheduled for release in mid-October.

This year’s survey gauges the effects of the recession, the financial crisis and Washington’s response to both on ethics and compliance in the workplace. It also will track trends in ethical conduct and culture. ERC has polled more than 16,600 American employees since 1994.

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Four years ago, executives of Burgerville, a regional restaurant chain, agreed to pay at least 90% of health-care premiums for hourly employees who work at least 20 hours a week. Today, the executives say the unusual move has saved money by cutting turnover, boosting sales and improving productivity.

Burgerville’s experience is notable for the food-service industry, where turnover is high and fewer than half of chains offer health insurance for part-time hourly employees, according to People Report, a research firm. The chains that do offer benefits pay on average 49% of the cost for employees working at least 30 hours a week, People Report says.

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