“We need to shift away from this reliance on voluntary initiatives—period—and actually start to demand that our governments do what they’re supposed to do, which is to regulate—at the local, national and international levels—corporations,” says Amelia Evans, Executive Director of MSI Integrity, on Radio FM4’s You’re at Home, Baby! with Christian Cummins.
Listen to the full interview broadcast here.
by Christie Miedema, Campaign and outreach coordinator, Clean Clothes Campaign
When the COVID19 pandemic hit, garment brands and retailers around the world cancelled their orders. What was to them a logical risk and cost reducing measure, meant destitution for millions of garment workers around the world. Public outcry over corporate behavior led a range of brands to quickly mend their ways. However, the question remains why public outcry was even needed. Brands have spent years promoting programs they claim guarantee protection for their workers. So why couldn’t they rely on those?
In the 1970s and 1980s garment brands started to outsource production abroad. This was a step that seemed to have only advantages: lower prices, lax labor regulation, less risk. Reduced to a mere client of garment factories elsewhere in the world, garment brands and retailers could wash their hands of any responsibility for workers – or so they thought.
Following a series of exposés in the 1990s documenting horrific conditions in sweatshops, brands took action to curate codes of conduct and imposed them on supplier factories. This progressed to the emergence of a social auditing industry to oversee suppliers’ compliance, as well as social compliance initiatives to synchronize and oversee these codes, often in the form of voluntary, multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs). This all prompts the question: given the tools brands have created to regulate working conditions in the garment industry, why are workers being left to suffer during the pandemic?
The answer lies within the mechanism of these voluntary MSIs. Behind the façade of battling exploitation, MSIs have become little more than a fig leaf for fashion; a tool enabling brands to dictate the rules, while shielding the industry against responsibility and criticism, rather than protecting the workers.
MSIs, which come in different shades of brand-friendliness and ambition, have certainly played a role in normalizing ideas of supply chain responsibility, as well as facilitating discussions between brands, unions, NGOs and other stakeholders. However, as a recent report on supply chain transparency published by the Transparency Pledge Coalition has shown, many MSIs are no longer taking the lead in moving the more unwilling brands towards stronger politics, but are instead surpassed left and right by members who voluntarily go beyond what the MSIs prescribe. Only one MSI was willing to take the challenge of the Transparency Pledge coalition to actually take the lead and make transparency a membership requirement. Another recent report shows that a “soft measure” such as due diligence reporting, remains wanting. And although MSIs’ complaint mechanisms still remain useful avenues for workers and labor rights activists to appeal to if a member brand is unresponsive to resolve a case of labor rights violations, which continues to be tried again and again, the same limitations apply: the outcome is not binding.
It is seven years after the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, whose factories were audited without noticing the death traps they posed; and eight years after the Ali Enterprises fire, certified as SA8000 compliant only weeks before over 250 workers got trapped behind closed exits and barred windows. By now, it must be clear to all that we have to leave the era of voluntary self-monitoring behind us. In April, Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders announced the EU will be working towards mandatory due diligence legislation. Other countries, such as France and the Netherlands, already have legislation in place that holds companies to account for their supply chains. With these legislative initiatives, governments are showing businesses that the respect of human rights can no longer be a question of voluntary corporate social responsibility but is an obligation when doing business.
Even though legislation is the crucial next step, it would be too easy for brands and retailers to just wait for that. We have known for years that binding works and that there are ways to introduce it into how stakeholders change the industry together. Weeks after the Rana Plaza collapse, unions and brands signed a binding agreement to make factories in Bangladesh safe. The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh has made factories safer for over 2 million workers and provides workers a credible and transparent avenue to access remedy, which has prevented workers from having to enter unsafe factories and protects them against retaliation if they report safety violations. The program works, because member brands and retailers put their signature under a binding contract with extensive enforcement procedures that have eventually led to court cases against non-compliant brands. This has kept other brands in line and led to very real results for workers. The current Accord agreement is valid until June 2021, which makes it of extreme importance that a new, this time more international, binding agreement is negotiated that could roll out similar safety programs in other countries where unions have shown interest, such as Pakistan.
The Accord is not a mere anomaly in an industry still dominated by voluntary cooperation. Indonesia has had a binding protocol on freedom of association signed by sportswear brands, suppliers and unions since 2011. Last year in Lesotho, brands and unions signed a binding agreement to address gender based violence together. Last month, labor rights organizations presented model clauses for arbitration, to facilitate the creation of more binding agreements. We need regulation on government and international levels, but brands, retailers, and unions do not have to wait for that.
A paradigm shift from brands and retailers is needed, to recognize that lip service is not enough. Too often brands still give in to the reflex to hide behind an auditor, an MSI or even a binding agreement. When we wrote to brands asking them to speak up for higher wages in Bangladesh, many of them responded that they signed the Bangladesh Accord, apparently believing that by signing one agreement they were off the hook on other issues as well. It is paramount to realize that no initiative is a “get out of jail free” card. They cannot be shields against criticism or real responsibility. We have to rethink what MSI’s actually contribute to workers’ rights. Stakeholder cooperation to improve labor rights can be meaningful only if the agreement is concrete, the implementation is transparent, and the commitments are binding. If we truly want to leave the lawlessness of early globalization behind us, concrete binding regulations and agreements making due diligence mandatory are the way forward. The time to act is now.
This is the first 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 the introduction to the series by Amelia Evans and Tyler Giannini now on our blog.
“This exciting new study underscores the unprecedented effectiveness of the the Fair Food Program, and the urgency of the need to expand the broader WSR model to millions of workers in industries across the globe. The evidence is clear, yet far too many corporations remain slow to recognize the model’s unique efficacy, and continue to partner with, and invest in, the dozens of demonstrably ineffective MSI programs in agriculture, apparel, and other key industries,” writes the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
Read the full post about our latest report, Not Fit-For-Purpose, here.
by Tyler Giannini and Amelia Evans
Ten years ago, our clinic was asked to figure out a way to evaluate whether multi-stakeholder initiatives—or MSIs for short—were helping to advance human rights or whether in fact they were doing precisely the opposite.
MSIs are voluntary governance efforts that bring together corporations, civil society, academics, and in some cases governments and rights holders themselves to (privately) govern thorny human rights issues, and by 2010, they had proliferated in the business and human rights field.
The allure was (and still is) obvious. If we bring the right players together, they can learn from each other and solve a given problem by setting up a democratic institution that can prevent future abuses and sanction violators, and governments will not have to pass hard laws and unnecessary regulations. The potential flaws were (and remain) just as obvious—the power imbalances amongst the players are acute and asking industry to voluntarily give up power and self-regulate is a fool’s errand that puts the fox in charge of the chicken coop.
Thus, we set out to look at which way the institutions had gone—had they filled their promise or had the inherent flaws gotten the better of them? Little to no systematic work on the question had been done at the time, and what started as a one-semester project turned into a non-profit—MSI Integrity—and a decade of work.
Today, MSI integrity is publishing its new report, entitled ”Not Fit for Purpose,” which compiles its experience and insights over the last decade. The report explores cross-cutting trends and lessons learned about MSIs, as a field, from a human rights perspective. MSI Integrity’s assessment is clear: “While MSIs can be important and necessary venues for learning, dialogue, and trust-building between corporations and other stakeholders—which can sometimes lead to positive rights outcomes—they should not be relied upon for the protection of human rights. They are simply not fit for this purpose.”
To coincide with the report’s release and to commemorate ten years of engagement, our Clinic and MSI Integrity are partnering to launch a blog series to critically examine the role and value of MSIs in business and human rights. This series is set up so that contributors will be in dialogue with one another on a central question: do we need to rethink the role of MSIs? For us, underpinning this question is a more fundamental one: are MSIs working for rights holders? Some contributors will examine the landscape in which MSIs operate, while others will offer critical reflections or consider ways forward for these institutions–or for alternative ones (which you are invited to explore further during our live-illustrated discussion exploring worker-driven governance arrangements on July 30).
To kick-off this series, we pose three critical considerations that we suspect might recur (as they have in the past) when contributors ask whether MSIs are working for rights holders and if their role and place in human rights needs to be considered.
First, where and how is power situated within MSIs? Alongside the question how power is situated, comes the question of who controls that power and, with it, the institution. In the context of business and human rights, on one side of the spectrum, there are arrangements where industry controls the entire process, such as an industry association; and then there are community-controlled governance regimes, such as worker-controlled bodies. MSIs were supposed to be somewhere in the middle of the spectrum both in terms of who controlled the institution and in terms of who benefited. Ten years ago, the questions of power and where on the spectrum did MSIs actually lie were front and center in debates—and that remains the case today.
Second, MSIs raise a host of questions around notions of accountability and democratic governance. When you first engage with the term “MSIs,” it may connote promises of inclusion, equality, representative governance, and the rule of law. Indeed, the governance arrangement has the tenor of a social contract in democratic societies (though here between private actors rather than between the state and its citizens.) For example, when we think of the rule of law, democratic principles like “no one is above the law” come to mind. That translates here to be the norm that “no corporation is above the law.” Have MSIs upheld such norms? Do MSIs need to be held to such norms?
Finally, there are questions about what value MSIs provide and how that is provided. In other words, who are they good for and who benefits most from these institutions? Are they tools of accountability and compliance, or are they more limited in the value add–to encouraging better practices, fostering learning, and giving stakeholders opportunities to convene and build relationships that would not otherwise develop? Depending on what value they bring, what does that mean for the promise of tackling human rights issues created by businesses?
After 10 years, to us it has become alarmingly clear that MSIs are not working for rights holders. The power in MSIs lies predominantly with corporate actors, not with rights holders. Thus, while the name “multi-stakeholder” persists, in reality these institutions work best not for multiple stakeholders, but for one stakeholder: the corporation. In this way, MSIs should be thought of as corporate associations with some representation of other actors, rather than as institutions that change the power dynamics in favor of protecting rights holders. In other words, the fox has gained the upper hand in managing the chicken coop.
(Tyler will have more to say on that in a blog later on in the series when he gives his take on how the fox gained the upper hand).
Tyler Giannini is the board treasurer and co-founder of MSI Integrity. He is a Clinical Professor of Law and directs the Human Rights Program and International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School.
Amelia Evans is the executive director and co-founder of MSI Integrity. She is an international human rights lawyer and an Open Society Fellow on Economic Inequality.
“The Institute for Multi-Stakeholder Initiative Integrity (MSI Integrity) […] released a report concluding that global efforts by some of the world’s largest multinational corporations, governments, and civil society organizations have failed in their goal of protecting against human rights abuses by corporations,” writes the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre.
See the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre’s full write-up of our new report, Not Fit-For-Purpose, here.
“The study of 40 global voluntary initiatives, including emblematic on-pack labelling schemes such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and Fairtrade International, identifies multiple failures in what it refers to as a ‘grand experiment’ in corporate accountability,” writes Oliver Balch in The Guardian.
Read The Guardian‘s full coverage of MSI Integrity’s new report, Not Fit-For-Purpose, here.
For the past three decades, the corporate accountability and business and human rights communities have been in a process of experimentation, searching for interventions that protect people and the environment from corporate abuse. From treaties and due diligence, to naming-and-shaming and direct engagement, the efforts underway span far and wide.
MSI Integrity’s recent report examines one such experiment—international standard-setting multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs)—and provides a cautionary tale to guide present and future processes. MSIs emerged in the 1990s as an exciting proposition: civil society organizations would work alongside businesses to design novel systems of multi-stakeholder governance that aimed to protect rights holders from corporate abuse. Yet, after a decade of research and analysis, MSI Integrity has concluded that this experiment has failed in its goal of effectively protecting rights, and in its place, human rights initiatives and businesses with worker/community-centered governance and ownership models must become the norm to root out abuse.
This discussion will unpack the lessons from the failed MSI experiment and explore alternative business and human rights intervention models developed by rights holders and workers themselves. What makes them different and what considerations are prioritized? What are the impediments and obstacles for these initiatives, and how might they scale and grow? How can we promote more people-powered solutions to challenging corporate power?
On July 30, 10–11am ET, join the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and MSI Integrity for a discussion with workers and their allies from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a worker-based human rights organization, as well as two members of the wider solidarity/new economy movement: Obran, an industrial conglomerate of worker-owned cooperatives, and Equal Exchange, a Fairtade worker co-op. The discussion will be facilitated by Krizna Gomez, Director of Programs at JustLabs, and live-illustrated by Sita Magnuson, Experience Designer & Educator at dpict.
Speakers will include:
– Joseph Cureton, Chief Coordinating Officer at Obran Cooperative
– Dr. Surya Deva, Member, UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights
– Amelia Evans, Executive Director, MSI Integrity
– Daniel Fireside, Capital Coordinator, Equal Exchange
– Tyler Giannini, Co-Director and Clinical Professor, International Human Rights Clinic and Human Rights Program, Harvard Law School
– Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a key leader from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers
Register for the event here.
Report by MSI Integrity finds prominent corporate oversight initiatives fail to effectively detect and remedy abuses; calls for more regulation of corporations.
Berkeley, California, July 16, 2020 — The Institute for Multi-Stakeholder Initiative Integrity (MSI Integrity), a nonprofit incubated at Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, today released a report concluding that global efforts by some of the world’s largest multinational corporations, governments, and civil society organizations have failed in their goal of establishing effective mechanisms to protect against human rights abuses by corporations.
The report, Not Fit-for-Purpose: The Grand Experiment of Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives in Corporate Accountability, Human Rights and Global Governance, examines 40 multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) that collectively have more than 10,000 corporate members, including 13 of the 20 largest companies in the world by revenue (see “MSI” definition here).
MSIs emerged in the 1990s as a promising experimental response to exposés about corporate abuse. In the absence of rigorous government regulation of transnational corporations, civil society organizations began stepping into this regulatory void by collaborating with industry representatives to jointly create voluntary codes of conduct and oversight mechanisms. By the 2000s, MSIs had become a “gold standard” in voluntary regulation, and had established standards for almost every major global industry.
Reflecting on a decade of research and analysis in the field, the report concludes that this grand experiment has failed. Voluntary regulation, even when it involves civil society organizations, is insufficient for detecting corporate human rights abuses, holding corporations to account for harm, or providing access to remedy. While MSIs can play important roles in building trust and generating dialogue, they are not a substitute for public regulation. Effective government regulation and enforcement is needed to supplement voluntary initiatives at local, national, and international levels.
The specific failures of initiatives to detect abuses or uphold rights—e.g., tea having been certified by Fairtrade International and Rainforest Alliance despite workers being paid as little as US $0.14 a day, or cocoa being certified by UTZ that was found to come from farms contributing to deforestation or using child labor—are often reported as due to flaws in individual initiatives. However, the analysis by MSI Integrity demonstrates through six key cross-cutting insights that these are symptoms of wider structural issues present across MSIs.
“The synthesis of research and analysis in this report is critically important,” said Ambassador (ret.) Luis C.deBaca, Senior Fellow at Yale University, “It provides insight into a global governance framework of voluntary regulation that has been in many cases blindly accepted, and will trigger a serious conversation that is long overdue.”
Some of the key insights in the report include: (1) many MSIs set weak or narrow standards that overlook the root causes of abuses; (2) MSIs employ inadequate mechanisms to detect abuses and uphold their standards; and (3) MSIs do not offer access to effective remedy.
Almost a third of the 40 MSIs examined in the study did not have any grievance mechanisms for workers or communities to directly report abuses or resolve complaints. Of those that did, nearly all failed to meet the internationally recognized criteria for effective access to remedy established by the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, such as being transparent, accessible and equitable.
The report identifies several lessons to be learned for future human rights interventions. These include that rights holders—the workers, communities, and individuals affected by a business— need to be at the center of the solutions that aim to improve their lives and livelihoods, rather than the top-down approaches used by MSIs. The report finds that fewer than 1 in 5 initiatives include rights holders in their governance, and only 5 of the 20 oldest MSIs have conducted any direct measurement of their impacts on rights holders within the last five years.
“As long as company decisions continue to be made by managers or board members who are divorced from experiences on the ground, and who are legally obligated to prioritize the interests and profits of shareholders, businesses will continue to run the unacceptable risk of making decisions that harm people and the planet,” said Amelia Evans, the Executive Director of MSI Integrity, “It is time to reimagine the corporate structure, and to demand business models that center workers and communities in their ownership and governance.”
The report draws on a decade of research, learning, and insights that MSI Integrity has obtained since it began researching in 2010. This includes interviews with hundreds of stakeholders in the Global South and Global North, and analyzing more than 1,500 pages of MSI procedures and policies.
According to Philip Alston, Chair of NYU’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, “MSIs are just one example of how the private sector has increasingly become responsible for activities traditionally performed by government. However, businesses are not motivated, managed, empowered, or incentivized to perform many of the essential public functions that are being systematically outsourced to them. This trend represents an abdication of responsibility by governments and international organizations.”
The report and related materials are available from www.msi-integrity.org/not-fit-for-purpose
Interview Requests: Mollie Fullington
mollconkfull@gmail.com / +1 (917) 414-1639
MSI Integrity condemns the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, David McAtee, Manuel Ellis, Sean Monterrosa, and the ongoing police militarism, white racial violence, and structural racism in the United States. We stand in solidarity with protestors taking to the streets to fight for racial justice, at a time when COVID-19’s disproportionally lethal impact on Black communities has further exposed entrenched racial inequality.
As people who are working to ensure the private sector respects and protects human rights and the environment—to ensure that corporations are held accountable for any human rights abuses they commit, and provide remediation for any harm caused—we feel it is important to shine a light on the role of the private sector in structural racism and police violence. The public-private partnerships that have militarized the police; the role of technology companies in enabling data sharing and surveillance by state security forces; corporate media’s obscuring of Black suffering; the discrimination and inequity that persist within boardrooms and wage rates; the predatory housing practices that deepen systemic inequality in Black communities; and the unpaid prison labor that benefits corporations while negatively impacting Black people who are disproportionately represented in prison populations. These are just a few ways that corporate conduct perpetuates racial injustices. We must hold accountable those corporations that continue these harmful practices, many of which are issuing statements of support that fail to acknowledge and address their own roles in abuse.
Law enforcement accountability is a start, but it is not enough. Deep structural inequity necessitates deep structural transformation across societal, legal, economic, and political structures. As an organization, we are soon to begin focusing on a radical reimagining of the corporation, the building block of the economy, in order to achieve transformational change. The nation’s most recent uprisings in response to police violence remind us of the importance of centering racial justice in this work.
How exactly will we do that? We do not know. That requires further learning, listening, analysis, and reflection. We need to work in solidarity and across movements. We need to listen to and employ more Black voices. We need to ask why so few corporations have been held accountable for their role in perpetuating structural racism, and how the corporate accountability or business and human rights community can change that. We will not have answers immediately, but we are committed to developing them. As a starting point, we are adjusting our schedules to enable staff and summer fellows the time to analyze the deep-rooted connections between corporate conduct and racial injustice, as well as to participate in protests or engage in relevant actions.
This is a crucial moment to drive action. The business and human rights community must stand in solidarity with movements for racial justice and find ways to tackle this issue, while centering the perspectives and experiences of those who are most affected.
Last month, MSI Integrity, the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School, and Miller & Chevalier hosted the panel discussion, “MSIs Then and Now: What’s at Stake?” (video link).
The discussion was held at SAIS in Washington, D.C. and brought together MSI stakeholders, academics, and business and human rights experts to reflect on the role MSIs have played in the field of business and human rights over the past 20 years. The event also introduced the MSI Evaluation Tool, a comprehensive framework for analyzing MSI design developed by MSI Integrity and the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School.
Following introductions from Nina Gardner from Johns Hopkins SAIS and Ben Collins from MSI Integrity, Arvind Ganesan from Human Rights Watch moderated a panel of five experts: Brian Finnegan from AFL-CIO, Bennett Freeman from the Global Network Initiative and Global Witness, Virginia Haufler from the University of Maryland, Amol Mehra from the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable, and Meg Roggensack from Georgetown Law School. We highly recommend watching the video of the panel discussion (1:26) and have included some of the comments and reflections from the discussion below.
The discussion began with reflections on the emergence of individual MSIs and the MSI field as a whole, including:
Some panelists shared critical reflections on the design, effectiveness, and governance of MSIs such as:
The discussion also included the following perspectives that MSIs are playing a key role in addressing governance gaps:
Looking ahead, panelists shared perspectives on where the MSI field could go, including:
MSI Integrity is grateful for our panelists, sponsors, and hosts, without whom the event would not have been possible. We look forward to exploring some of the themes addressed by panelists through future discussions, debates, and workshops later in 2018 and in coming years. We also invite feedback and questions on the MSI Evaluation Tool from MSIs, their stakeholders, and others interested in learning more about its potential uses or with feedback on how it could be further improved. To submit comments or reflections on this panel discussion or the MSI Evaluation Tool, please contact us at info@msi-integrity.org.
