Strategic CSR - Olympics

Written in the run-up to London’s recent Olympics, the article in the url below awards gold, silver, and bronze medals to those corporate sponsors who are accused of most “greenwashing the Olympics” (http://www.greenwashgold.org/):

“Rio Tinto, the global mining company, has been named as early front-runner for the Greenwash Gold award for the worst Olympic sponsor, with BP, the oil and gas multinational, in second place and Dow Chemical third.”

The activists have a pretty good case that the organizers are compromising the Olympic values and ideals by taking so much money from these firms:

• Rio Tinto is providing the metals to be used in the Olympic medals from its mines in Utah, even though local residents have complained about the pollution these mines produce.
• BP has been named a “Sustainability Partner” to the Games, in spite of its questionable environmental track record.
• Dow Chemical is still being hounded to acknowledge formally full responsibility for Union Carbide’s role in causing the Bhopal tragedy (Dow merged with Union Carbide in 1999).

What I found surprising was the lengths the local organizers went to in order to accommodate their sponsors:

“Olympic sponsors will avoid paying up to $942 million in tax as venues will be treated like offshore havens during the Games … . A report by Ethical Consumer claimed that under new tax rules ushered in as part of “Team Great Britain’s” winning Olympic bid, corporate partners like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Visa were given a temporary exemption from corporation tax as “non-resident” companies from March 30 to November 8. The new rules also reportedly mean foreign employees working for the companies do not have to pay income tax in the UK.”

See also http://www.mirror.co.uk/money/city-news/olympic-corporate-partners-can-avoid-943011 and http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/commentanalysis/corporatewatch/thegreatolympictaxswindle.aspx

Have a good weekend.

David

Bill Werther & David Chandler

Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility: Stakeholders in a Global Environment (2e)

© Sage Publications, 2011

http://www.sagepub.com/strategiccsr2e/

Instructor Teaching Site: http://www.sagepub.com/strategiccsr/

The library of CSR Newsletters are archived at: http://strategiccsr-sage.blogspot.com/

Greenwashing the Olympics

By Daniel Nelson

July 4, 2012

CorpWatch Blog

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15748

Strategic CSR - Union Carbide

The article in the url below describes how the gas leak that occurred in Bhopal, India almost 25 years ago has still not been cleared up. As a result, the disaster continues to generate negative headlines for Union Carbide (and Dow Chemicals, which bought Union Carbide in 2001) on the front page of the NYT (Issues: Human Rights, p234):

“Hundreds of tons of waste still languish inside a tin-roofed warehouse in a corner of the old grounds of the Union Carbide pesticide factory here, nearly a quarter-century after a poison gas leak killed thousands and turned this ancient city into a notorious symbol of industrial disaster.”

Putting aside any arguments of moral responsibility, it is amazing that a firm like Dow does not just pay what it takes to make this problem go away (Chapter 1: A Rational Argument for CSR, p17):

“The toxic remains have yet to be carted away. No one has examined to what extent, over more than two decades, they have seeped into the soil and water … Nor has anyone bothered to address the concerns of those who have drunk that water and tended kitchen gardens on this soil and who now present a wide range of ailments, including cleft palates and mental retardation, among their children as evidence of a second generation of Bhopal victims.”

Over the summer, the Supreme Court delivered a decision on the 1989 Exxon Valdez case. Both that case and the Bhopal disaster reflect poorly (to say the least) on the strategic decisions taken by the executives of both companies. At least, however, Exxon has accepted some degree of responsibility for its role in the Valdez oil spill.

Take care
Dave

Bill Werther & David Chandler
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility
© Sage Publications, 2006
http://www.sagepub.com/Werther

Decades Later, Toxic Sludge Torments Bhopal
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
1858 words
7 July 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
1
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/world/asia/07bhopal.html

Strategic CSR - 100 Best Corporate Citizens List

The press release in the url below presents some interesting insights into the latest CRO Magazine (previously Business Ethics Magazine) list of “100 Best Corporate Citizens” (http://www.thecro.com/node/615), which has been published annually since 2000 (Issues: Auditing CSR, p94):

“The list's methodology for 2008 includes two significant updates. First, CRO changed rating agencies, switching from KLD Analytics to IW Financial. In contrast with KLD's interview-and-questionnaire-based method, IW Financial bases rankings solely on publicly-available data and uses its set of patented technologies to do the analysis. Second, the 2008 100 Best Corporate Citizens rankings are limited to the Russell 1000 …. In previous years, the rankings also included the Domini 400 companies, which include many mid-cap and small-cap firms, and resulted in a perceived bias in favor of the lower-cap enterprises.”

Another change in publishers, combined with the change in source data, appear to have moved the 100 Best list in a very positive direction, even though the churn makes it hard to compare across years and some controversial picks remain:

“Unchanged is the controversy surrounding the list, which inevitably accompanies any attempt to rank corporate social responsibility. Questions have already arisen about the inclusion of Monsanto (over child labor in India), Coca-Cola (over ground-water depletion), and Dow (over its Union Carbide legacy in Bhopal.)”

The CRO press release announcing the release of the list can be accessed at: http://www.csrwire.com/News/11126.html

Take care
Dave

Bill Werther & David Chandler
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility
© Sage Publications, 2006
http://www.sagepub.com/Werther


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