MSI Integrity is Hiring a Research Director and Development & Outreach Coordinator

We’re hiring!

Positions have opened up for our new Development and Outreach Coordinator and Research Director roles. Both of these will be central to our new effort to move Beyond Corporations. See the position overviews below and visit our employment page for more information.

Research Director (Full-Time, Remote)

We are looking for a brilliant, personable and dedicated Research Director to join our small but growing team. The Director will play a central role in both collaboratively shaping our organizational transition and organizational focus, and also in designing and supervising our new research program. This position requires deep strategic thinking, excellent team management and external coordination skills, and a proven track-record of managing complex projects.

The Director will develop MSI Integrity’s strategic research priorities in collaboration with wider staff and input from those in the solidarity economy, economic justice and corporate accountability fields. To begin, the research program will likely focus on identifying key knowledge gaps about alternative business structures and worker- and community- ownership and governance, in particular: a) assessing and understanding their economic, human rights and environmental impacts on workers, affected communities, supply chain actors and beyond; b) examining how to grow and scale solidarity economy models in order to displace corporate power, such as considering technical aspects of the design and operation of models operating in complex or scaled settings; c) researching and devising strategies for overcoming existing barriers for these models or to promote their growth (e.g. access to capital; legislative and policy proposals). Over time, the role may expand to convening and coordinating active researchers in the field—such as academics and law clinics—as well as conducting, commissioning or coordinating research internally or externally to fill outstanding knowledge gaps.

The Director will be responsible for growing and supervising a small research team, and coordinating with other actors, to achieve MSI Integrity’s research aims. The role may also include playing a key role in conceptualizing and hiring staff for a distinct education program that seeks to promote more education and understanding of alternative business structures within key constituencies, with a particular focus on reaching professionals, such as lawyers and entrepreneurs.

In addition, the Director will help collaboratively shape MSI Integrity’s own governance and internal processes to reflect cooperative, democratically accountable decision-making. This transformation will be framed by MSI Integrity’s ongoing commitment to understanding and addressing the structural forces of classism, racism, misogyny, transphobia, ableism, colonialism, and other intersecting systems that shape and have been shaped by corporate structures.

Development and Outreach Coordinator (Full/Part-Time, Remote)

We are looking for a brilliant, personable and dedicated Development and Outreach Coordinator: someone who can persuade donors, and also the wider public, that workers should have the right to profit from their own labor and to a fair and democratic workplace. The Coordinator will oversee all fundraising and revenue-generating activities for the organization. The Coordinator will also play a key role in generating public communication materials and contributing to broader outreach strategies. Depending on the successful candidate’s interest, experience and desired career trajectory, the Coordinator could potentially also contribute to MSI Integrity’s research or advocacy campaigns.

In addition to development and outreach responsibilities, the Coordinator will also help collaboratively shape MSI Integrity’s own governance and internal processes to reflect cooperative, democratically accountable decision-making. This transformation will be framed by MSI Integrity’s ongoing commitment to understanding and addressing the structural forces of classism, racism, misogyny, transphobia, ableism, colonialism, and other intersecting systems that shape and have been shaped by corporate structures.

Our COVID-19 Policies: Striving for a New Normal in the Workplace

Seven months have passed since the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. Ten months since the novel coronavirus was first discovered. In less than one year, the world has lost so much: millions of businesses, millions of jobs, and most catastrophically, nearly one million people—an undercount. Yet, given the unpredictable nature of the virus, and the predictable incompetence of some of our global governors, this is just the beginning.

Numbers underestimate the seismic havoc this pandemic has wreaked, and will continue to wreak, on people and our planet, which were already stricken with economic, social, and environmental insecurity. In particular, such devastation, caused and exacerbated by a lineage of systemic inequalities, has unveiled the organizational cruelty of where people spend most of their time: their workplaces.

In the United States, we have seen corporations fail to provide their employees adequate PPE; deny frontline workers paid sick days; lay off millions of families to protect dividends; and reject basic safety precautions. It’s no wonder that a strike wave of both unionized and non-unionized workers has erupted across the country, from Amazon warehouse sick-outs to a dockworker strike in solidarity with the ongoing anti-racist uprisings.

The list of abuses by corporations related to coronavirus goes on, but the list of labor and human rights violations by corporations before and beyond the virus goes on longer. That COVID-19 has ravaged Black and Latinx communities disproportionately is not a consequence of innate biological or cultural vulnerabilities, but of disproportionate poverty among Blacks and Latinx people, directly resultant of the private sector’s racist practices in housing, criminal justice, health care, and yes, employment. Before the pandemic, employers paid Black people three-quarters what they paid white people, and during the pandemic, they are furloughing and firing Black people at higher rates than whites.

This is why, at the very least, it is incumbent on corporations, organizations, and other employers to adopt COVID-19 policies that equitably support and compensate their workers during the pandemic and into perpetuity. The pandemic has indeed exacerbated worker vulnerabilities, but it also has exposed the existing lack of rights and protections for workers. Responses, therefore, mustn’t be a return to “normal,” but the establishment of more democratic and equitable working conditions. Our transition towards a cooperatively-run workplace and our experimentation with a reduced work week (explained below) are examples of our team’s dedication to that contention.

Although MSI Integrity is a small non-profit with limited resources, we are not exempt from commitments to keep our staff physically and mentally healthy, equitably compensated, and empowered as decision makers of their own workplace. In March 2020, MSI Integrity’s staff and board established a set of COVID-19 policies and updated them in April to reflect a changing economic and social climate. In August 2020, our team revisited those policies again and decided to share them below to encourage other business and human rights organizations to adopt and maintain similar ones, as well as to invite dialogue about how we can build more equitable and just workplaces together as a community.

Among the policies are:

Unlimited paid sick leave related to COVID-19

Self-care and care of others during this pandemic, which we understand may extend for years, is not only a personal undertaking, but a service to society. To strip our staff of income during such a medical emergency would be cruel and against our value of solidarity. If any of our staff cannot work because they get sick, or must take care of someone close to them, they will be compensated. Period.

Reduced work hours (32 hrs/week)

All staff will remain at current salary levels but are not expected to work more than 80% full-time equivalent. We recognize the additional stresses and burdens of the pandemic, including to our families and communities, as well as the need and importance of rest to mental and physical health. However, we also recognize the burdens and stresses of the 40-hour work week in general as archaic in the 21st century. Put simply, workers deserve more leisure time in the absence of a pandemic, which is why MSI Integrity is using this COVID policy as an experiment to eventually adopt a reduced working week as a conventional workplace practice. That said, we understand this policy may not be possible on a given day and/or staff may wish to use their discretion to voluntarily exceed this, but the organization’s project planning is based on 80% FTE workloads.

Flexible hours and remote work

Since the pandemic began, MSI Integrity has effectively been operating as a remote organization and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Because of the nature of our desk-based work and the unpredictability of the pandemic, it is unnecessary and unethical to put our staff at risk of virus transmission by working in-person. Additionally, because staff may need to respond to family or other matters during regular working hours, or to undertake out-of-the house tasks when social distancing is most possible, members of our team are welcome to choose their working hours on a day-by-day basis, so long as these choices do not conflict with the needs of other staff, our partners or projects.

Time for research and reflection

Remote work during the pandemic requires a considerable amount of reactivity and responsiveness, as well as time on video calls. But the transformative work we are striving for requires time for transformative thinking, research and reflection. One day each week, collectively chosen by staff, is reserved solely for research and reflection, meaning no meetings or calls are scheduled on that day. “Research and reflection” is an intentionally broad category, encompassing whatever is relevant, needed, or desired by individual staff on that particular day.

Monthly home-office stipend

In March 2020, all staff were given a one-time stipend of $300 to be used at each person’s discretion. In August, staff decided an indefinite $50 monthly home-office stipend was more appropriate, given the pandemic has extended longer than was initially expected. We want all staff to be able to obtain necessary work supplies and to create ergonomic work-stations to work comfortably and productively at home. The stipend also functions to supplement the increased cost of utilities from working at home. Remote work must not entail financial burden, particularly during this already burdensome time. We also encourage staff to use the funds for mutual aid or other community-oriented programs or initiatives if they so wish. This policy will be revisited by staff every 90 days to consider individual and collective needs.

Workplace democracy

This point is less a COVID-19 policy than a commitment to transforming MSI Integrity’s workplace governance and internal processes to reflect cooperative, democratically accountable decision-making. As an organization in transition that promotes worker/community-owned and governed enterprise (see Beyond Corporations), we believe that our workplace must embody the values we espouse. COVID-19 has laid bare the necessity of workplace democracy and ownership to build safe, equitable, and thriving economic and political organizations/enterprises. Workers and communities must be in charge of and chiefly benefit from the decisions that affect their lives the most. The exact details of this workplace reorientation will be hashed out collaboratively among staff in the coming months and thereafter to respond to individual and collective needs, changes, and beliefs. We seek transparency and will make such decisions public as they develop and change.

Moving forward

A serious hole in our COVID-19 policies and those beyond the pandemic is explicit anti-racism. Shortly after George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police and the nationwide uprisings for racial justice that followed, MSI Integrity established a working group to examine how we can root out white supremacist thinking and practices both within the organization and in our external output. But we are still at the beginning stages of this effort and recognize our need to do more. In the next revision of our COVID-19 policies, as well as in the broader restructuring of our workplace, we aim to take into account the racial injustices at the heart of this crisis and our country’s institutions generally. Furthermore, we strive for policies and workplace practices that undo all identity-based oppressions, and understand that this is an ongoing process that requires transformative action.

We hope that sharing these policies will encourage organizations in the field to follow suit or improve upon them and challenge us to do better. We also hope that employees will feel empowered to demand such policies in their jobs that respect their lives, their workplace value, and human dignity. Please reach out to us if you have questions, criticisms, or recommendations.

In solidarity,
MSI Integrity staff

MSI Integrity’s Amelia Evans and Malene Alleyne Co-Author “Exit to Community” Zine

The tech community Zebras Unite and the University of Colorado Boulder’s Media Enterprise Design Lab (MED Lab) launched a digital and physical zine yesterday that was co-authored by MSI Integrity’s Executive Director, Amelia Evans, and former Research Coordinator, Malene Alleyne. The zine, entitled “Exit to Community: A Community Primer,” is a guide to the Exit to Community (E2C) strategy, whereby a tech startup transitions to a community/worker-owned and governed model, rather than getting acquired by a competitor or going public in an IPO.

E2C zine“We hope to study and examine different E2C examples to provide rich case studies that prove that democratic ownership and control is not a pipe dream, but a reality for a range of business models. Critically, we also hope to shape and influence the DNA of E2C legal models and values to provide positive human rights outcomes for workers and communities,” writes Alleyne and Evans in the zine.

Other authors of the zine include Nathan Schneider of MED Lab, Camille Canon of Purpose, a non-profit dedicated to promoting and researching steward-ownership, Yichen Feng of Lumos Capital, and Mara Zepeda, the Managing Director of Zebras Unite. You can download the digital zine or request a free physical copy here.

Lexology: Ethical Certifications: can we really trust them?

“The MSI Integrity report makes clear that ethical certification schemes alone are not instruments of human rights protection. They are not effective in ensuring accountability for corporate abuse. They do, however, continue to have a role as part of a more complex picture. Thus, whilst certification schemes will no doubt continue, it is necessary to supplement these with other measures. Public regulation together with private MSIs is required to help strengthen the standards with which companies must abide,” writes Leigh Day for Lexology.

Read the full article covering MSI Integrity’s new report, Not Fit-For-Purpose, here.

Rethinking MSIs: Are Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives Mere Lip Service for Local Communities?

by Jaff Bamenjo, Coordinator of RELUFA/Cameroon

Multi-stakeholder Initiatives (MSIs) emerged in the 1990s as frameworks for engagement between governments, the private sector and civil society organizations (CSOs) to address human rights issues in business. There are currently several sector-specific MSIs around the world originally conceived to address problems, ranging from labor abuse to corruption, in agriculture, extractive industries, forests, the environment and beyond. After more than two decades, however, local communities are now questioning whether MSIs have proved relevant and effective in addressing these problems.

As a civil society actor who works closely with communities affected by resource extraction in Cameroon, I have closely followed the implementation of two MSIs: the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) for close to a decade. The KPCS and EITI were both created in the early 2000s and received with a lot of enthusiasm by some CSOs as tools to promote transparency and accountability in the extractive sector and prevent diamond-fueled conflicts, respectively. Though almost twenty years later, it is quite telling how these MSIs are oblivious to the concerns of the local communities that were the intended beneficiaries of their creation.

The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme: Sidelining civil society and not addressing key issues

Formed in 2003 by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, the KPCS is a joint government, industry and civil society initiative aimed at eliminating the trade in conflict diamonds. The KPCS was created in response to public outcry at the end of the 1990s over diamond-fueled conflicts in certain African countries. Today, the KPCS takes credit for eliminating about 98.8% of conflict diamonds in the world.

The commonly used definition of conflict diamonds, however, is incredibly narrow: “rough diamonds used by rebel groups or their allies fighting to overthrow a legitimate government.” While it can be argued that, apart from in the Central African Republic, there are no rebel movements currently using diamonds to fund wars to overthrow legitimate governments, human rights violations and massacres have reportedly continued in diamond mines around the world. And in turn, they disproportionately impact local communities near the mines.

Per the narrow definition of conflict diamonds, KPCS pays little attention to such human rights violations. Instead, they classify them as outside their scope. But such neglect by the KPCS to include other forms of abuse committed by the military or private security agents is incomprehensible to those most affected. In the Marange diamond fields of Zimbabwe, some CSOs have reported security agents for private mining companies unleashing dogs on and shooting defenseless local artisanal miners. Yet diamonds sourced from these fields are certified and allowed to enter the international market.

REFLUFA Miners
Artisanal miners in the East Region of Cameroon (Photo: RELUFA, 2016).

CSOs have been consistent over the past years in urging the Kimberley Process to extend the scope of the definition of conflict diamonds to include human rights abuses, torture, inhumane and degrading treatment, etc. But this has never been accepted by its participating governments, even though there are recurrent reform cycles within the KPCS during which such important decisions can be made. This refusal of governments to reform undermines the relevance of stakeholders in the claimed “tripartite” foundation of the KPCS. Its other two pillars, civil society and industry, are sidelined, since decisions are made only through consensus by participating governments. CSOs and industry are simply observers.

The international gatherings of several government, industry and civil society representatives for the KPCS resemble an elitist club of government friends, engaging in diplomatic games that carefully avoid important reforms to address the relevant concerns of diamond-mining communities. The current set-up and functioning of the KPCS makes change very unlikely because critical voices from civil society and diamond-mining communities are not included in decision-making.

The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative: Sidelining local communities

The EITI seeks to promote transparency and accountability in the oil, gas and mining sector through company disclosure of their payments to governments and government disclosure of the revenue generated from the exploitation of extractive resources. A multi-stakeholder group oversees the implementation of its global standards. The EITI so far has the merit of introducing discussions about oil, gas and mining revenues in the public domain in most African countries where revenue from extractive resources were earlier treated as a state secret. CSOs have equally acquired more knowledge in conducting advocacy and participating in discussions around the extractive industry value chain.

However, one handicap of the EITI in many countries is the fact that its implementation is centralized in the national capital. Most of the participating stakeholders are based in the capital city, sidelining local communities where the exploitation of the extractives resources occur and whose lives are directly impacted. Many communities directly impacted by resource extraction are not even aware of the existence of the EITI, and hence, its inclusiveness and consideration of community needs should be questioned. In Cameroon, for instance, the Ndian Division generates almost 99% of oil revenues in the country. But apart from the local Mayor of its chief town being invited to participate in EITI meetings in the capital, the population of this area has little knowledge of the EITI and its role.

Although the merits of the EITI in promoting oil revenue disclosure in Cameroon should be acknowledged, there is no evidence to suggest that EITI has meaningfully benefited local communities and their social and economic development. Instead, in civil society circles it is understood that many countries adhere to the EITI merely for image-cleansing; they participate in an international transparency initiative without necessarily making it a tool to promote transparency at the local level and for the general good.

Moving beyond lip service

Both the KPCS and EITI are both operating and perceived as elite actors with too little anchorage in local communities affected by resource extraction—despite the fact that these communities are their intended beneficiaries. It is therefore clear that these multi-stakeholder initiatives are mostly relevant as discussion platforms, paying mere lip service to local communities.

Government and industry are seen as allies within these initiatives while CSOs struggle to raise the legitimate concerns of the local communities. Unfortunately, the unequal power relations wielded by governments and industry make reforms within these MSIs very unlikely. Instead, too much time and energy are spent navigating procedural issues that have little impact.

Although MSIs cannot be counted upon to protect community interests, there is still a need to rethink and render them more inclusive of local communities since they provide a platform for these communities to obtain useful information for the defense of their rights.


This is the fourth contribution in a joint blog series by the International Human Rights Clinic and MSI Integrity. The series will critically examine the role and value of MSIs in business and human rights; it coincides with a new report, Not Fit-For-Purpose, which compiles experience and insights over the last decade and explores cross-cutting trends and lessons learned about MSIs, as a field, from a human rights perspective. Read other blogs in the series here.

Rethinking MSIs: Where Is the Debate About Democracy and Multi-stakeholder Governance?

by Harris Gleckman

Multi-stakeholder standard-setting organizations, or multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs), are part of a wider political push to introduce multi-stakeholderism as a legitimate component in global governance. However, they are not sufficiently democratic or accountable to external constituencies to warrant their status or standing as global governance tools.

Understanding the different types of MSIs: standard-setting, policy-setting and project-delivery

There are actually two distinct forms of MSI. One sub-class focuses primarily on enhancing social, environmental, and community goals through setting global market standards, and secondarily, on balancing these concerns with its management of conflicts between firms and sectors in a given “socially responsible” global market. The other sub-class of MSI reverses these priorities. In the case of internet governance, for example, the primary focus of the standard-setting activity is managing inter-corporate and inter-sub-sector battles, while the secondary focus is responding to calls for social access, enhanced privacy, and discounted pricing for marginal communities.

Beyond standard-setting MSIs, there are two other forms of multi-stakeholder global governance arrangements: (1) multi-stakeholder bodies that develop global policy directions; and (2) multi-stakeholder consortia which implement specific geographically and time-limited projects.

On the policy front, for example, one can look at the World Economic Forum with its effort to set global policy via their Global Future Councils, or their “offer” to take leadership of work areas traditionally occupied by the United Nations like food security and biodiversity, and their new strategic partnership agreement with the Office of the UN Secretary-General. These policy-oriented multi-stakeholder arrangements convene, usually under the leadership of a corporate body, a combination of market-oriented government figures, friendly civil society organizations, academic specialists, and corporate executives eager to develop a public policy consensus within a global market system.

Public private partnerships are an example of project-delivery multi-stakeholderism. They bring together separate categories of actors but, rather than setting standards, they seek to deliver a specific public good or service while effectively gaining a degree of governance over a specific population.

These three types of multi-stakeholder arrangements—standard-setting, policy-setting, and project-delivery—reflect the diversity of forms of multi-stakeholderism in practice and in theory. They represent a drive to shift global governance away from multilateralism and one-country-one-vote toward a multi-stakeholder form of global governance.

The (un)democratic character of multi-stakeholderism

In my view, the state of democracy in the MSI world needs to be evaluated on at least four grounds: (1) its internal rules to manage the imbalance of power between the different types of MSI board members; (2) an assessment of the legitimacy of MSIs’ impact on the wider world; (3) the effectiveness of its anti-conflict of interest policies; and (4) their claims to legitimacy through democratic language. This blog looks at the last evaluation criteria.

The advocates of multi-stakeholderism have described MSI undertakings as good examples of “inclusive governance,” “participatory governance,” and “stakeholder governance.” The choice of these expressions says a lot, unintentionally, about their perceptions of democracy.

“Stakeholder governance” depends first and foremost on an agreed, unambiguous definition of “stakeholder” or an agreed, unambiguous procedure to select said stakeholders. But as I have argued in other writings, there is no clarity about the definition of “stakeholder” or the procedure to designate stakeholders. Each multi-stakeholder group defines the term “stakeholder” in its own way. For example, a given MSI could “count” a female Moroccan miner as a worker, a representative of Africa, a feminist, a Black person, a representative of mothers, a representative of developing countries, or one of the innumerable possible combinations of these categories. If “stakeholder governance” is legitimately going to govern a specific sector, then in the selection process of the decision-makers in a multi-stakeholder group, it needs to be demonstrably clear how all relevant stakeholders are designated and that no key “stakeholder” is excluded. Further, it must be clear that an MSI has not weighted the balance of one type of stakeholder, particularly those with significant political or economic power, over other types of stakeholders—that “stakeholder governance” credibility is not afforded to MSIs that group mining owners, mining brokers, and mining refiners with the female Moroccan miner, despite clear power differentials. The democracy claim for stakeholder governance is fundamentally undermined by the political flexibility of the key “stakeholder” term.

“Inclusive governance” rests on the language of inclusiveness, which started out as a critical term. Its objective was to seat members of politically weaker communities, such as those from marginalized communities, alongside all those whose presence has traditionally been at the table: members of the elite, corporate executives, academic experts, white people, males, etc. Over time these powerful actors began to feel the heat of those who were pressing to be included in major decisions that affect their lives. Rather than face public denunciations about operating exclusive organizations, the powerful began saying that they too wanted to be “included” in the decision-making groups and organizations. The linguistic beauty of this move is that it was not possible to say anyone was “excluded,” but the power imbalance would remain intact. This sleight of hand manages to keep the more powerful traditional forces in charge while appearing to be more open to marginalized communities.

“Participatory governance” is another rather brilliant linguistic device that attempts to legitimize the selection of actors in an MSI. One can “participate” in a million ways. In traditional democracy, one can participate by joining political parties, by volunteering to distribute leaflets, by writing a letter to the editor, or by attending a public hearing. Note that none of these forms of participation have any necessary connection to power or real world decisions. In the case of multi-stakeholder governance, the same is true. Some MSIs have a “participatory” system of advisory bodies to a central decision-making committee, a “participatory” online public comment process, or a “participatory” system for non-voting formal statements to a plenary. Even in MSIs where politically marginal social movements are “represented” in the decision-making body of an MSI, the voluntary nature of MSI compliance means that they are not “participating” in governing their global economic sector.

Additionally, internal power depends on having the time to participate, the financial ability to participate, and the technical knowledge to participate meaningfully. Each of these three factors are unequally held by different potential MSI participants. If there were to be an equitable internal power balance within any “participatory,” “inclusive,” and “stakeholder” governance system, some external, non-self-interested actor would have to underwrite the time, expenses, and technical resources for all the non-corporate and non-externally funded participants—a reality that has not even been considered by any current MSI: whether standard-setting, policy-setting, or project-delivery.

Examining the use of language of democracy and of inclusion is just one ground on which to challenge multi-stakeholderism in global governance. Indeed, we might see multi-stakeholderism as a linguistic cloak for those who actually desire to institutionalize a corporate position in setting global policies and standards while keeping the profit-focused corporate structure in place. A serious reflection is needed to assess this shift and push for truly democratic global governance.


Harris Gleckman is Senior Fellow at the Center for Governance and Sustainability, UMass-Boston and Director of Benchmark Environmental Consulting. He is the former Chief of the NY Office of UNCTAD and Chief of the Environmental Unit of the Centre on Transnational Corporations. His latest book: Multistakeholder Governance and Democracy: A Global Challenge was published by Routledge in 2018. He is also the author of the Wikipedia page on multi-stakeholder governance, now translated into four other languages.

This is the third contribution in a joint blog series by the International Human Rights Clinic and MSI Integrity. The series will critically examine the role and value of MSIs in business and human rights; it coincides with a new report, Not Fit-For-Purpose, which compiles experience and insights over the last decade and explores cross-cutting trends and lessons learned about MSIs, as a field, from a human rights perspective. Read other blogs in the series here.

PRESS RELEASE: COVID-19 PANDEMIC EXPOSES FAILURES OF TRADITIONAL CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY WHILE WORKER-DRIVEN ALTERNATIVES PAVE WAY FORWARD

Contact: Teddy Ostrow
teddy@msi-integrity.org
+1 (718) 594-5873

MSI Integrity publishes study based on a decade of research with searing critique of traditional corporate social responsibility model; presents cautionary tale for corporate-led responses to pandemic

Berkeley, California, August 11, 2020 — As COVID-19 disrupts global supply chains and spreads among essential workers in the US and overseas, the Harvard-incubated Institute for Multi-Stakeholder Initiative Integrity (MSI Integrity) published a major new report, which outlines failures by the world’s leading voluntary corporate social responsibility schemes to protect human rights in their suppliers’ operations. It presents important lessons for why government oversight of labor conditions in supply chains and worker- and community-centered pandemic recovery responses are needed.

“The MSI Integrity report provides an unprecedented—and extremely timely—measure of a failed paradigm for protecting workers’ human rights,” said Gerardo Reyes of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). “The cost of that paradigm, known as the Corporate Social Responsibility model, is found in the thousands of workers’ lives lost to factory fires, countless employers guilty of forced labor or sexual assault, and rampant hazardous working conditions,” continued Reyes. “The pandemic only underscores the urgency of the report’s conclusions, exposing the crowded, unsafe working conditions that have left workers defenseless against the coronavirus, and that have existed for decades while the corporations that buy the food and clothing the workers produce have turned a blind eye.”

The 235-page report, Not Fit-for-Purpose: The Grand Experiment of Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives in Corporate Accountability, Human Rights and Global Governance, reflects on a decade of research into 40 multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs): voluntary partnerships between companies/brands and different stakeholders, such as civil society organizations, to jointly establish industry codes of conduct against which corporate members are generally audited for compliance. Many of these highly influential initiatives were created in the 1990s in direct response to major industry-wide labor abuses in supply chains, like sweatshop labor conditions in clothing factories used by Nike and Gap, or the use of child and forced labor in the cocoa and coffee sourced by Nestle and Hershey. Examples of MSIs include Fairtrade International and the Fair Labor Association.

The report concludes that this grand experiment in outsourcing the responsibility of human rights and labor protections from governments to corporations has failed. Many well-documented cases illustrate how these initiatives fall short of protecting workers: Just three weeks before the 2012 garment factory fire in Pakistan that killed nearly 300 workers, Social Accountability International certified the facility as safe; in 2019, tea sourced from Sri Lankan plantations that paid workers as little as US $0.14 a day was certified as slavery-free by Fairtrade International and Rainforest Alliance; and child labor continues today in certified cocoa farms.

Yet, even with the increasingly dangerous working conditions under COVID-19, these voluntary initiatives continue to be a primary source of “protection” for many of the world’s workers. More than 10,000 companies participate in these MSIs, including 13 of the world’s 20 largest companies by revenue. The report details systemic flaws in these voluntary initiatives, such as lack of effective measures for workers to report violations or seek remedies for abuse.

The findings are particularly relevant as discussions unfold globally around whether companies should be held liable for failing to protect workers from COVID-19 transmission in the workplace, or more pressure should be put onto the voluntary rights-protection measures corporations adopt. The grave consequences of voluntary pandemic responses have already been revealed in exposés of industry efforts to strip poultry workers of protections and assaults on unions and highly viral conditions in garment factories.

“Governments have been experimenting with outsourcing their human rights obligations to corporations for the last three decades. The failure of this experiment has left communities around the world vulnerable to continuing abuse by businesses. Workers in supply chains cannot rely on voluntary measures to keep them safe or protected,” said Amelia Evans, the Executive Director of MSI Integrity. “If we want to ‘build back better,’ then companies need to be legally responsible for the conditions of workers throughout their global supply chains.”

MSI Integrity calls for more effective government regulation and enforcement. It also points to the Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) approach, which is employed by the Bangladesh Accord for Building and Fire Safety and the CIW-founded Fair Food Program (FFP), for overcoming two central limitations of MSIs: their inability to legally enforce their standards and their entrenchment of corporate interests by failing to center rights holders in their operations and governance. Unlike MSIs, WSR initiatives have been created by workers themselves, with worker-centered rights education, monitoring systems and protected complaint mechanisms. WSR programs routinely reinforce these mechanisms with mandatory economic consequences for violations, making brands and companies more accountable for the abuses that occur in their supply chains.

“The Fair Food Program was launched in 2011 by the CIW on the basis of almost a dozen binding legal agreements with major retail food brands,” said Judge Laura Safer Espinoza, Executive Director of the Fair Food Standards Council and a former New York State Supreme Court judge. “Those agreements require the buyers to suspend purchases from non-complying farms, providing meaningful market consequences for violations of workers’ rights,” continued Judge Safer Espinoza. “The mechanisms of the Fair Food Program are essential to establishing real human rights protections in corporate supply chains, and we are working today on harnessing those same structures to establish—and enforce—additional health and safety protections on participating farms to blunt the impact of COVID-19.”

Since the beginning of the pandemic, many of the existing FFP mechanisms have been leveraged to address COVID-related issues, including the worker complaint hotline, audits, and the worker-to-worker education system, which has helped push crucial public health information to isolated farms. Efforts are currently underway to establish, ahead of the coming fall harvest season, new requirements under the program’s Fair Food Code of Conduct. The new requirements will be treated as new mandatory standards under the program and enforced on all participating farms.

The report and related materials are available from www.msi-integrity.org/not-fit-for-purpose

A press FAQ for the report is available from: www.msi-integrity.org/not-fit-for-purpose-press-kit-faq/

Interview Requests:

Teddy Ostrow, MSI Integrity
teddy@msi-integrity.org / +1 (718) 594-5873

Yaissy Solis, Coalition of Immokalee Workers
yaissy@allianceforfairfood.org / (239) 692-1482

Rethinking MSIs: Regulating Responsible Business Conduct

By Manon Wolfkamp, David Ollivier de Leth and Mariëtte van Huijstee

Between 2014 and 2019, Dutch businesses in garments and textile, banking, forestry, gold, food products, insurance, pension funds, metals, floriculture, and natural stones all entered into government-induced agreements to encourage responsible business practice. Over five years, eleven such agreements were completed. These multi-stakeholder, voluntary, sector level Responsible Business Conduct (RBC) agreements have been cornerstones of the Dutch government’s method to incentivize companies to respect human rights and the environment for years, and can be regarded as government-induced multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs). Inviting companies and business associations in high human rights risk sectors to enter into negotiations with civil society organizations (CSOs) and the government, RBC agreements aim to encourage companies to develop their own policies for promoting responsible business conduct. But are they effective?

The present Dutch governments’ coalition agreement agreed to evaluate this policy, which was executed by KIT Institute over the past few months and published in July 2020. The long-awaited evaluation shows that the Dutch policy promoting responsible business conduct by means of RBC agreements is insufficient.

The evaluation draws critical conclusions: only 1.6 percent of the companies active in high-risk sectors participate directly in the agreements. In addition, some sectors, such as the oil and gas sector, refuse to enter into any agreement at all. In other sectors, the share of companies reached is moderate (such as clothing and textiles and natural stone) to low (horticulture, metal). Substantial progress in the implementation of due diligence by participating companies was observed in only two out of 11 evaluated agreements (namely in clothing and textile and banking).

It is also noteworthy that various agreements lack independent monitoring (for example, food and wood), which creates a risk of greenwashing. Furthermore, there is no clear minimum standard that the agreements must meet. Commitments of companies in two RBC agreements are actually not in line with the international normative framework (wood and vegetable proteins). The evaluation also shows that the role of the Dutch government is inadequate. Especially during the negotiation phase, the business sector is in the lead: only the private sector can initiate negotiations, and critical CSOs can be replaced by more cooperative organisations in order to reach an agreement. The government can fix this imbalance by taking on a greater role itself during the negotiations, for example by not financing agreements that do not meet a set minimum standard.

The evaluation is positive about the role of the covenants as a means to connect companies to NGOs and trade unions, to facilitate exchanges and to develop a harmonized approach to due diligence.

When it comes to realising positive effects or reducing negative impacts on adversely affected rights holders in the targeted sectors, the KIT evaluation concludes: “Across the RBC agreements, progress on due diligence is largely too limited to identify concrete impacts”( p.8) and “Overall, we have not observed a reduction in negative impacts in global value chains as a result of the RBC agreements” (p.9). Furthermore, the research reports unresolved differences in expectations between companies and CSOs on the extent to which RBC agreements should function as platforms to hold companies to account.

All in all, the outcomes of the KIT evaluation show great similarity with the outcomes of MSI Integrity’s meta-analysis of MSI’s titled Not Fit-For-Purpose published in July, as is exemplified by this picture taken from the report: What are appropriate roles for MSIs?

Looking ahead, the KIT evaluation recommends the Dutch government to consider introducing legislation that requires compliance with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) guidelines. This would address several issues that emerge from the evaluation: legislation gives companies a much stronger incentive to comply with the international normative framework than is currently the case, and it sets a clear standard that applies to all companies.

Legislation also ensures that the “free rider” problem is addressed, so that companies that are committed to compliance with international norms have no competitive disadvantage compared to companies that do not.

Legislation and a renewed MSI policy could reinforce each other in a smart mix of measures to incentivise responsible business conduct. Thanks to such legislation, the RBC agreements might become an attractive instrument for many more companies and sectors who want to implement due diligence obligations.

Legislation also provides a clear standard, which might improve the quality of the agreements. The Netherlands can take a leading position in Europe by renewing its RBC policy to complement the introduction of mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence legislation with an improved MSI policy.

The Not Fit-for-Purpose report and the KIT evaluation clearly highlight that a company’s participation in an MSI should not be considered a seal of compliance with the international normative framework. MSIs can help companies learn about their risks and responsibilities in dialogue with CSOs and rights holders, increase their leverage by collaborating in a sector and create synergy and scale effects. However, given the clear limitations of MSIs in protecting human rights, they should not be considered a sufficient means of discharging due diligence obligations.

If the purpose is to get all companies to conduct business responsibly, what is needed is the enforceable obligation for companies to conduct human rights and environmental due diligence in line with the normative framework. Such due diligence is not only focussed on identifying risks and preventing them from materializing, but also includes addressing harms that have occurred, including remedying harms companies have caused or contributed to (see step 6 of the OECD due diligence guidance). Enforcement of such an obligation by authorities should happen at the individual company level, making participation in MSIs a potential means but not an ‘ends’ for companies to comply with their obligation to conduct business responsibly.


This is the second in a joint blog series by the International Human Rights Clinic and MSI Integrity. The series will critically examine the role and value of MSIs in business and human rights; it coincides with a new report, Not Fit-For-Purpose, which compiles experience and insights over the last decade and explores cross-cutting trends and lessons learned about MSIs, as a field, from a human rights perspective. Read other blogs in the series here.

Zebras Unite: Pivot to People: It’s Time to Build the New Economy

“This month, researchers at MSI Integrity released “Not-Fit-For-Purpose,” their final report about these practices, and the culmination of a decade of analysis. The verdict? This experiment failed. Behind the external public relations campaign, power consolidated, and rights holders became disenfranchised. Not only did these efforts fail to address the root causes of abuse, but they cloaked and compounded them. The key takeaway: just because more people are invited to a company’s table doesn’t mean their voices are heeded, or their interests promoted. We are navigating a nearly identical bargain in big tech: a surge of voluntary, preemptive, symbolic gestures,” writes Zebras Unite.

Read Zebras Unite’s full “Pivot to People” proposal, which cited our latest report Not Fit-For-Purpose, here.