Richard Howitt is providing daily updates on the UN Business and Human Rights
Forum 2020. Read highlights from day
one
and
two.
More than fifty years after agreement of the International Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Racial
Discrimination,
the UN Business and Human Rights
Forum
this week saw international business confront whether its response to the Black
Lives Matter
movement in
2020 passes human rights scrutiny.
The tragic killing of dozens of Black people in the United States in the
past year provoked worldwide protest — with major US corporations including
Disney, BlackRock, General Motors, Target, Wells Fargo and
JPMorgan all lining up to condemn racism and reach in to their pockets for
anti-racist causes.
But critics were quick to accuse some in business of making more social media
posts about racism than they have Black
employees.
Companies were making passionate proclamations just as lay-offs forced by the
COVID crisis saw their
Black employees disproportionately affected.
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The irony at this Forum is that so much of the rest of the conversation is about
abuses in company supply chains, often far from the company. However, race
discrimination is also close to home — taking place every day within the
companies themselves. Both major business speakers in this session at the UN
Forum were Black company leaders. What we heard was perhaps most telling on the
urgency to act.
“For the first time this year, I’ve been asked: ‘Given everything going on, how
are you doing?’,” said Gerran
Denning,
Senior Counsel at PepsiCo. “What
should this brand do — not as a human rights lawyer, but as a Black man?”
He asserted that companies like his have to reappraise at every
level.
“It’s about our people — our own recruitment, retention and development. But
it’s equally about enhancing supplier capacity, including building capacity in
emerging markets,” Denning said.
Companies worldwide — not just in the US — can join forces with anti-racist
organisations, target black-owned contractors, and link to schools and colleges
in areas with high Black and minority ethnic populations.
The challenge is that the discrimination that takes place is often subtle and
unconscious.
Most of us would accept the need to actively challenge unconscious bias and
stereotyping. But South African human rights activist Pregs Govender went
further — using the Forum to accuse companies of “gaslighting,” inflicting abuse
by discrediting the Black person’s thoughts, feelings and experience.
This is a training issue for all of us, at the very least. However, a clear
theme of the discussion is that companies must treat this as a systemic problem.
Business can never reach equality in the future, if they haven’t come to terms
with the past.
As Dominique Day, chair of the UN Working Group of Experts on People of
African Descent, explained:
“Companies today have to recognise they have been super-charged through
atrocity — the trade and trafficking of generations of enslaved Africans. We’ve
largely mitigated colonial practices, but the enormous network which allowed it
to thrive is still very much present. Understand that there was a system of
exploitation which leads white supremacy to play out today in our companies, in
our families.”
This is partly answered by companies being willing to honestly admit their own
past
wrongs.
“It should be uncomfortable,” Day says.
“At Microsoft — and it will be true for many American corporations
— this is the first year when domestic discrimination and xenophobia will be
featured in our CSR report,” says Merisa Heu-Weller, the company’s Chief
of Corporate Responsibility, reflecting this new approach of open introspection.
Microsoft has recognised its need to double Black representation in senior
leadership positions. Beyond this, it is seeking to address how its products and
services have been unaffordable for many in the Black community; and address
similarly challenging problems about how its algorithms import the prejudices
of human attitudes into artificial
intelligence.
As Heu-Weller concluded: “This is so personal for so many people in the
company — we’re not going to wait anymore.”
All companies will have specific challenges linked to their own products and
services. Can you list yours?
The legacy of slavery also takes companies into the difficult territory
of arguments about how the global system of trade and investment causes
systemic
inequalities. Corporate proclamations against racism become all the more authentic if
companies acknowledge this system-level challenge.
At least part of the answer comes in action towards creating and implementing
new global governance rules which change the system, of which the UN Guiding
Principles on Business and Human
Rights
can play a prominent role.
Treating people as rights-holders, whose rights are being violated and about
which remediation must take place, changes the mindset at all levels — from the
Board rooms of global companies to millions of workplaces at the local level, throughout the
world.
The concepts of due
diligence,
remediation, policy commitment; the need to identify adverse
impacts,
to mitigate and prevent them; the simple need to provide respect — are all tools
from the Guiding Principles. They do not provide the answer to racism or any
other human rights violation, but they do provide tools to help find the answer.
In addition, race discrimination is far from an historic issue, across the world
— it’s why countries are passing Modern Slavery
Acts.
Discrimination based on race and ethnicity is sadly present everywhere, not just
in the US. The Forum heard a passionate plea from Rohingya activist
Mohamad Roshed — for companies to stop trading with business tied to the
Myanmar military, responsible for attacks and mass displacement of his
people. New research
published at the Forum by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre
finds one-third of physical attacks on human rights defenders are on indigenous
people amongst other community leaders.
As this Forum was coming to a close, the clear and simple message was for
companies to genuinely listen to their employees and stakeholders of color.
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Richard Howitt is a strategic adviser on Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability, Business and Human Rights. He is also a Board member, lecturer at Audencia Business School and host of the Frank Bold ‘Frankly Speaking’ responsible business podcast. Richard was Member of the European Parliament responsible for the EU’s first rules on corporate sustainability reporting and subsequently Chief Executive Officer of the International Integrated Reporting Council.
Published Nov 18, 2020 1pm EST / 10am PST / 6pm GMT / 7pm CET