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Blog | Monday July 1, 2019

Eliminating Violence and Harassment Just Became an Obligation for Businesses Worldwide

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On June 21, 2019, the International Labour Organization (ILO) voted overwhelmingly to adopt a Convention on the Elimination of Violence and Harassment in the World of Work. This represents an important step forward on strengthening protections for all workers around the world against violence and harassment.

Business should see the adoption of the Convention as a signal that:

• It’s time to recognize the stark reality that far too many people—primarily women—continue to experience violence and harassment in the world of work.
• Stakeholder expectations have changed radically for how companies should not only respond to workplace violence and harassment, but also actively work to prevent it from happening in the first place.

For the first time, there is an internationally agreed-upon standard and guidance for addressing violence and harassment in the world of work, setting a high bar for companies and governments on their responsibilities to manage this critical issue. The treaty includes many categories of workers: corporate employees, workers in factories and farms across global supply chains, informal workers, and job seekers. The Convention also looks beyond the walls of the workplace, recognizing there are risks of abuse throughout the “world of work,” e.g., when commuting to and from work.

While the specific applications to businesses will depend on the country and type of business in question, the overall message is clear: More—much more—is expected from businesses when it comes to tackling violence and harassment. Here’s how companies can take action using BSR’s “Act, Enable, Influence” framework:

ACT

Companies can act on this issue by developing programs, policies, services, and products that contribute to ending sexual harassment. A first step for companies is to assess their current efforts on gender-based violence and harassment across their value chains. BSR has developed a tool, in line with the new ILO Convention, to help companies to understand their current gaps in the following three areas:   

• Policies: The Convention identifies workplace policies addressing harassment and violence as part of an employer’s responsibilities. The Recommendations accompanying the Convention include additional guidance on what should be included, such as measures to protect whistleblowers and information on complaints procedures.
• Risk identification and assessment: The Convention requires employers to identify hazards and risks of violence and harassment. One way for businesses to approach this is to ensure that their human rights due diligence fully integrates gender considerations, as outlined in the new report from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Gender Dimensions of the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
• Trainings: The Convention asks employers to provide information and training for workers on violence and harassment and to take specific measures for sectors and roles where “exposure to harassment is more likely.”

BSR’s tool helps companies to conduct a thorough analysis of these and other areas and to assess opportunities to improve their practices.

Companies can enable business partners to tackle harassment and violence by collaborating with them to introduce appropriate measures.

ENABLE

Companies can enable business partners to tackle harassment and violence by collaborating with them to introduce appropriate measures. This is especially critical in supply chains for garments, agriculture, and other light manufacturing, which employ large numbers of vulnerable workers. Increasingly, evidence shows that violence and harassment is widespread in these sectors and across sourcing countries, with women workers particularly vulnerable.

• Many companies are already taking steps to address violence and harassment in supply chains with BSR’s HERrespect program, a leading initiative that connects global brands with their suppliers to implement workplace-based programs. HERrespect takes a comprehensive approach, working with female and male workers and managers to cultivate more cooperative and gender equitable relationships. HERrespect programs also strengthen the ability of workplaces to respond effectively when abuse occurs. Following pilots in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, and Kenya, this tried-and-tested program has confirmed its potential for impact and is ready to scale up. To learn more, please register for a HERrespect webinar on July 17 here (Asia/EMEA) or here (EMEA/U.S.).  
• Companies are also collaborating with peers through networks such as Business Action for Women and HERproject to tackle the complex issues of gender-based violence throughout their operations and to partner on designing and implementing new solutions.
• Business Fights Poverty has created a challenge on: “What role can business play in tackling gender-based violence?” Through this, Business Fights Poverty and partners have gathered resources to help build the business case for action and case studies of good practices. More information will be released on this site throughout the year.

With their brand credibility, marketing expertise, reach, and access to key influencers, companies can be uniquely positioned to shift harmful social or gender norms.

INFLUENCE

Businesses can also use their advocacy efforts and communications strategies to influence the wider community to address harassment and gender-based violence.

• With their brand credibility, marketing expertise, reach, and access to key influencers, companies can be uniquely positioned to shift the harmful social or gender norms that often contribute to the acceptance of violence and harassment against women. The recent advertisement from Gillette is a great example of this strategy: Through a commercial, the company opened an important conversation on toxic masculinity.
• Companies can also work with governments and advocate for strong protections for women workers as public officials work to put in place the various laws and policies mandated through the new ILO Convention.

BSR members looking to strengthen their policies on violence, harassment, and women’s empowerment should connect with our team. In addition, we will be hosting a webinar in the fall to explore the new ILO Convention in more depth with our partners from Business Fights Poverty and CARE—registration is open here.

Blog | Wednesday June 26, 2019

Human Rights Policy Engagement: The Role of Companies

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Companies around the world have embraced the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (the Guiding Principles), which have catalyzed new efforts to ensure respect for human rights across business operations and beyond. However, in recent decades, there has been a global reversal of these human rights achievements, including governments pulling back from longstanding commitments and the closing of space for civil society to operate safely. This presents a new climate for business with new challenges in many parts of the world.

In this environment, it is increasingly important for business not only to maintain its commitments to respect human rights, but also to find new ways to support the work of governments for such efforts.   

Over the past year and a half, BSR has engaged with several companies to explore such opportunities as part of our Business Action Platform for Human Rights. At the conclusion of this effort, we are pleased to share our latest report, Human Rights Policy Engagement: The Role of Companies. In it, we highlight why now, more than ever, it is important for businesses to use their influence to stand up for human rights policies, institutions, and frameworks around the world—their loss or reversal would have negative consequences not just for businesses, but for the communities and societies in which they operate.

The reversals of human rights policies, institutions and frameworks, particularly over the last two years, can be felt around the world. From the rise of right-wing nationalist movements to threats against the United Nations’ human rights bodies, these reversals have undone many of the achievements built through bipartisan support over the last several decades, achievements that have benefited the private sector in many ways. Businesses rely on such policies, institutions, and frameworks in a variety of ways, including access to more stable markets through improved rule of law and more consistent application of international standards. Support for such measures is not only aligned with business priorities, it also helps companies align their values and actions with those of their employees, who are increasingly demanding that their employers reflect their values not just in their business operations, but in the ways in which they engage on policy issues, both domestically and internationally.

As some governments retreat from their duty to protect human rights, and in some cases actively degrade human rights protections, companies can and should fill this void where possible. 

As some governments retreat from their duty to protect human rights, and in some cases actively degrade human rights protections, companies can and should fill this void where possible. Not only is doing so in the interest of a business’s bottom line, it is in line with the human rights and sustainability commitments many companies have made.

For companies looking to engage on these important policy questions, this report lays out in detail the following five steps companies can take in order to gain buy-in internally and externally and also to improve the chances of a successful engagement.

1. Identify the business relevance of the impacted policy
2. Identify the intangible benefits, such as alignment with corporate or employee values
3. Assess a company’s ability to have an impact on the policy issue at hand and focus on identifying where a company has leverage
4. Understand the political context – is this a situation in which the government with which you are engaging is actively opposed to the policy in question?
5. Navigate tradeoffs to understand what internal and external barriers exist and what the impact of failing to engage could be

While there may be some barriers to engagement, they can and should be overcome: Engaging on these topics is essential in order to protect the human rights institutions, policies, and frameworks that have supported businesses.

Companies should recognize that these institutions, policies, and frameworks have helped them establish a foothold in developing nations by creating a more level playing field, strengthening the rule of law, and establishing more business-friendly environments. As companies engage on these topics, they will not only gain important reputational benefits with key stakeholders for defending human rights within their spheres of influence, but they will also help ensure that the institutions, policies, and frameworks that help them do business around the world are defended and maintained, as envisioned by the Guiding Principles.

In a world in which governments are withdrawing from their duty to protect human rights, it is more important than ever for business to step up. Business cannot and should not replace government’s role; neither can it play its role effectively if governments are in retreat. In this context, we hope companies will utilize Human Rights Policy Engagement: The Role of Companies as a resource and a prompt on how to stand up for fundamental human rights policies wherever they may do business.

Reports | Wednesday June 26, 2019

Human Rights Policy Engagement: The Role of Companies

Preview

Companies around the world have embraced the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (the Guiding Principles), which have catalyzed new efforts to ensure respect for human rights across business operations and beyond. However, in recent decades, there has been a global reversal of these human rights achievements, including governments pulling back from longstanding commitments and the closing of space for civil society to operate safely. This presents a new climate for business with new challenges in many parts of the world.

In this environment, it is increasingly important for business not only to maintain its commitments to respect human rights, but also to find new ways to support the work of governments for such efforts.   

Over the past year and a half, BSR has engaged with several companies to explore such opportunities as part of our Business Action Platform for Human Rights. At the conclusion of this effort, we are pleased to share our latest report, Human Rights Policy Engagement: The Role of Companies. In it, we highlight why now, more than ever, it is important for businesses to use their influence to stand up for human rights policies, institutions, and frameworks around the world—their loss or reversal would have negative consequences not just for businesses, but for the communities and societies in which they operate.

Blog | Thursday June 20, 2019

Business and Human Rights Consultation Meeting on Country-Specific Action Plans (Japanese)

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Blog | Wednesday June 19, 2019

Is Stakeholder Engagement the Key to Successful Community Standards?

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Building stakeholder trust has become a core goal for corporate executives. With some of the biggest investors publicly challenging corporations to think beyond short-term financial goals, companies are working to map, anticipate, and respond to concerns across societal interest groups.

This task daunts most companies, not least global social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. These platforms seek to calibrate and reflect societal views, but in the process, they have become powerful actors that dramatically affect the trajectory and impact of popular expression. How they set and implement content policies on issues such as terrorism, hate speech, and political and religious extremism has directly impacted the lives of billions of people in hundreds of countries. Today, there is a consensus that technology platforms should no longer make high-stakes decisions without granting the public structured visibility and input.

Ongoing debates about leadership, governance, and regulation of social media are highly relevant to any stakeholder engagement discussion. The public will not differentiate an organization’s approach to content standards from its view of the organization’s overall behavior. But even a transformation of the regulatory and competitive environment for social media platforms will leave open the question of how best to set and implement content policies in the best interest of society—and what that interest is. There are no easy answers. How, for example, is freedom of expression to be protected without undermining privacy?

BSR has provided independent advice to Facebook on stakeholder engagement relating to its content policies (named “Community Standards”). Our work is based on our five-step methodology and our belief in the importance of proactive stakeholder engagement strategy. It suggests some principles for engagement by social media platforms that could help set direction for more long-term solutions, such as Social Media Councils.

Given the human rights impacts of social media platforms, it is important to prioritize the voices of such vulnerable groups as rights defenders, political dissidents, women, young people, minorities, and indigenous communities.

Why engage?

Engagement is needed to proactively identify areas in which content policies, newsfeed prioritization, and algorithms driving ads need to evolve to meet user expectations, social norms, and international standards—both to identify new issues that haven’t been explored and to revise policies on known issues as they evolve. Further engagement must then balance and resolve diverse perspectives on contentious topics which, given the near-universal reach of social media, could conceivably cover every issue of interest to any stakeholder anywhere in the world. To align with human rights and sustainability frameworks, engagement principles must be transparent, comprehensible, and consistent, even as issues play out in radically disparate ways across different geographic contexts.

Who is a stakeholder?

For most companies, stakeholder mapping involves categorizing stakeholder groups—typically investors, regulators, customers, suppliers, civil society organizations, and relevant communities. For social media platforms, however, the stakeholder landscape poses unprecedented challenges of scale, diversity, and complexity. Consider impact and representation: Beyond contemplating billions of users (itself a task of gigantic scale), social media platforms also need to consider “rightsholders”—employees, contractors, customers, and individuals whose images or words are shared even when they are not platform users. Given the sheer number and diversity of rightsholders, social media platforms need to locate organizations capable of speaking on their behalf. Depending on circumstances, rightsholders might be represented by civil society organizations, activist groups, or policymakers. How credibly any given stakeholder can represent a specific interest or opinion always requires deep analysis.

As a result of stakeholder mapping exercises, platforms will be able to evaluate gaps, seek expertise to fill them, and at least avoid uninformed attempts to balance a spectrum of views.

How should stakeholders be prioritized?

Unconscious biases, external pressures, and commercial incentives can easily foster approaches that fail to reflect the full range of effects on rightsholders. Given the human rights impacts of social media platforms, it is important to prioritize the voices of such vulnerable groups as rights defenders, political dissidents, women, young people, minorities, and indigenous communities.

Stakeholder mapping exercises need to begin with the landscape of contentious issues upon which to engage stakeholders. Terrorism, hate speech, sexual harassment, bullying, and disinformation are obvious examples, but new issues emerge constantly. For each issue, perspectives can be mapped across linguistic, geographical, and social identities, supplementing user data with academic expertise. This enables identification of representative organizations, should they exist. As a result of this mapping exercise, platforms will be able to evaluate gaps, seek expertise to fill them, and at least avoid uninformed attempts to balance a spectrum of views.

What is the best way to gather perspectives?

Social media platforms face strong incentives to transparently disclose their consultation processes—and the stakeholder perspectives they yield—but some vulnerable people and identity groups will prefer anonymity, for good reasons. While candid, one-on-one conversations with stakeholder can build trust, they are narrow in focus, extremely resource-intensive, and invite questions regarding overall balance and focus. Setting up groups according to geography or issue expertise is more efficient and can boost a platform’s analytical capacity, but groups are challenging to analyze and can develop blind spots. Given all this, a mix of approaches and formats is most appropriate.

Social media companies are beginning to experiment with advisory councils that typically comprise stakeholders that have a mature understanding of company policies and processes and can credibly represent interest groups or perspectives. This necessarily limits diversity and inclusivity, inviting allegations of elitism. The payment of honoraria to council members can be viewed as compromising their independence, but lack of compensation raises questions about exploitation of stakeholders and practical constraints on their ability to contribute. Setting standard industry practices and “arms-length” mechanisms would help to address this dilemma.

Facebook has proposed creating an independent oversight board to review the company’s most difficult decisions about content, and it is considering the board’s role with respect to content policy advice, too. This provides an additional channel for input, and Facebook will benefit from explaining how the board affects policy over time.

How should decisions be made and disclosed?

Intent on retaining accountability for their content decisions, social media platforms are unable and unwilling to outsource policy control. A key challenge they face will be to explain how—and why—collecting stakeholder views can and will inform their internal decision-making.

The platforms must also incorporate local political and social nuances without undermining their own global consistency; issues of origination and impact mean that setting national boundaries around content and opinion raises more questions than it solves. On highly contentious issues such as terrorism, hate speech, and incitement to violence, social media platforms need to credibly draw on existing academic expertise and then capture the range of values and opinion without defaulting to the median (or most commercially friendly) option. Human rights frameworks offer an appropriate reference point in that they take scale and severity of impact as a starting point and proceed to consider immediate, cumulative, and longer-term developments in navigating difficult trade-offs. For example, a decision to limit hate speech on a platform may protect vulnerable groups while having a detrimental long-term effect on democratic participation.

For now, the power to determine, promote, and limit content rests with a handful of companies that are both overwhelmingly powerful and keenly exposed to public anger. Rather than focusing on molding friendly legislation or reacting arbitrarily to the latest incident, social media platforms should continue to develop institutional approaches while steeling themselves to invite broader public participation.

Facebook is already posting minutes from its Content Standards Forum. As it works toward broader disclosure, the company should embrace full transparency of its positions and policy determinations and the relevant internal user data that informs them.

BSR’s work with Facebook raises questions, answers, and then more questions. What is clear is that in this rapidly evolving area, cross-industry and multi-stakeholder collaboration should become a priority. The prospect of effective external oversight from society remains nascent and contested. For now, the power to determine, promote, and limit content rests with a handful of companies that are both overwhelmingly powerful and keenly exposed to public anger. Rather than focusing on molding friendly legislation or reacting arbitrarily to the latest incident, social media platforms should continue to develop institutional approaches while steeling themselves to invite broader public participation.

Blog | Tuesday June 18, 2019

Human Rights, Access to Remedy, and Stakeholder Engagement

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The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), released in 2011, provide the first coherent framework for how businesses should manage their human rights risks and impacts. The framework clearly specifies the responsibilities of government and business and outlines clear steps for business with regards to due diligence, oversight, and remedy. The Guiding Principles necessitate detailed engagement by companies with impacted stakeholders—part of a wider shift in the business community from considering risk to understanding societal impact.

In particular, stakeholder engagement is needed for: conducting any credible Human Rights Impact Assessment; seeking Free Prior Informed Consent from communities and other affected stakeholders before establishing mining, infrastructure, and energy operations; and providing remedy for any harmful human rights impacts.  

Indeed, effective remedy requires directly seeking the perspective of stakeholders who have been harmed. This entails, among others, identifying which stakeholders suffered what harm, from which business activities, and what the underlying root causes of the harm were. This also requires ensuring that affected stakeholders’ perspectives are central in the remedy discussions. All of these developments have been incorporated into BSR’s Five-Step Approach to Stakeholder Engagement, which aims to show how companies can initiate and sustain constructive relationships with stakeholders over time, throughout the organization, by engaging early and often—and acting based upon what they hear. In 2011, when the original report was published, our approach was driven by considerations of risk to the company. Now, we have revised our framework to incorporate central human rights concepts of vulnerability and impact.

Evidence suggests that businesses are still struggling to respond to this new environment. In 2018, the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark assessed 101 of the largest publicly traded companies in the world across agricultural products, apparel and extractives industries. The findings of the assessment depict a "deeply concerning" picture, with four in 10 companies "failing" on human rights.

The responsibility is on companies to follow the Guiding Principles in order to do business in a way that respects the human rights of workers, customers, and communities where they operate.

It is clear that there is still a significant gap between companies responding to allegations of harming human rights and actually engaging with the affected rightsholders to ensure that appropriate remedy is provided. The Benchmark found that less than half of the serious allegations of negative human rights impacts reviewed by the Benchmark resulted in meaningful engagement with the alleged affected rightsholders, and only three percent of the reviewed allegations were resolved by providing remedy that was satisfactory to the victims.

Effective remedy itself is comprised of the following five elements:

1. Restitution, which is intended to restore, to the extent possible, whatever has been lost to the victim preceding the harm.
2. Compensation, which is appropriate in cases where damage/harm to the victim can be economically assessed.
3. Rehabilitation, which covers medical or psychological care and social or legal services needed to restore the victim.
4. Satisfaction, which includes measures as a cessation of the violations.
5. Guarantee of non-repetition, which includes actions and measures to prevent further abuses or similar future violations.

Although stakeholder engagement is an underlying theme throughout the UNGPs, 60 percent of companies assessed in the Benchmark were unable to disclose their stakeholder engagement approach, with 38 percent of the companies unable to demonstrate a commitment to, or evidence of, engaging with potentially or actually affected rightsholders.

In addition, there has been a growing number of cases globally where banks are considered to have contributed to human rights abuses through their financing decisions. These include projects involving farmers being forced off their land, the destruction of sacred indigenous sites, and violence against community members. In June 2018, BankTrack and Oxfam Australia called on banks to ensure access to remedy for victims of human rights abuses. The paper “shows that banks have barely begun to implement their responsibilities to develop grievance mechanisms under the UNGPs” and indicates that banks are not doing enough to ensure that stakeholders impacted by bank-financed activities are obtaining proper remedy.

For companies working across geographies, including financing projects that affect local communities, it may be beneficial for companies to establish, through engagement with local stakeholders, a standard response for certain common grievances. Engaging with local stakeholders is essential to ensure that the response is acceptable within the local context and also to satisfy the criteria for effective remedy. 

It is important for companies to consult with local stakeholders to ensure that all affected communities, including vulnerable groups, have access to remedy if a human rights violation occurs. 

In line with this, it is important for companies to consult with local stakeholders to ensure that all affected communities, including vulnerable groups, have access to remedy if a human rights violation occurs. Companies should first map the different vulnerable groups which may exist to understand the specific, distinct barriers that these groups may have in accessing remedy. Vulnerable groups can include people who are marginalized due to life circumstances (poor, uneducated), people who are discriminated against by formal laws, people who are marginalized and in hiding such as LGBTI people or people living with HIV/AIDS, or people who are marginalized due to societal discrimination or bias.

Stakeholder engagement is especially important to ensure the most vulnerable groups are aware of the various remedy options available. In order to ensure that all vulnerable groups have access to and understand the remedy pathways available to them, companies should:

1. Provide information on the company’s grievance mechanism in written, illustrated, and oral formats. 
2. Create open, safe, and confidential stakeholder engagement forums for the ongoing collection of and follow-up on community grievances.
3. Consult local communities to ensure that these accessibility measures suit the needs of vulnerable groups, including those who are illiterate or semi-literate.

The UNGPs have defined for businesses how they can manage human rights impacts and risks. Now, the responsibility is on companies to follow the Guiding Principles in order to do business in a way that respects the human rights of workers, customers, and communities where they operate. Stakeholder engagement is key in all these aspects, but especially in cases of grievance, engaging stakeholders is necessary to ensure the people affected are granted access to remedy.

This article originally appeared on GreenBiz. 

Blog | Thursday June 13, 2019

#DontBanEquality: CEOs Step Up to Say Abortion Bans are Bad for Business

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“We’re in a time of pushback against women’s rights all over the world. But we stand up and we stand strong. We have the power of many and of justice, and we will not go backwards.”

Last week, more than 8,000 women and men from around the globe convened in Vancouver for Women Deliver, the world’s largest international women’s health and rights conference. For those of us in the United States, these words from Women Deliver’s president, Katja Iversen, are especially resonant, as women’s fundamental right to health care faces an unprecedented level of attack.

Over the past few months, nine state legislatures—from Georgia to Ohio—have passed bills to place sharp limits on access to reproductive health care, including abortion services, or to ban abortion almost entirely, as seen in Alabama. In this time of pushback against women’s reproductive rights, the public is standing up and standing strong.

The business community is also taking a stance.

On Monday, CEOs from more than 180 companies, representing over 100,000 workers, united under the banner #DontBanEquality to publish a full-page ad in The New York Times that stated:

“Restricting access to comprehensive reproductive care, including abortion, threatens the health, independence and economic stability of our employees and customers. Simply put, it goes against our values and is bad for business.”

The number of signers has since grown to more than 300, including CEOs of companies ranging from Bloomberg LP and H&M to Ben & Jerry’s and Square. In the statement, they made clear the business case on why restricting women’s access to reproductive care harms their businesses: “It impairs our ability to build diverse and inclusive workforce pipelines, recruit top talent across the states, and protect the well-being of all the people who keep our businesses thriving day in and out.”

Given the deeply polarized debate over this issue in the United States, it may seem safer for companies to stay silent on abortion legislation. Several hundred companies have concluded that they need to speak out to stay consistent on their commitments to gender equality and support for women’s health. In fact, women’s workplace participation has come about, in large part, because of their ability to decide for themselves when to have children.

We believe that the best way to achieve true equality is to have autonomy over our own bodies. Today, we are proud to join 175+ companies in the @nytimes to support reproductive freedom & abortion access. #DontBanEquality pic.twitter.com/EmwqTVtLHt

— The Wing (@the_wing) June 10, 2019

Monday’s letter was not the only move from business on the recent abortion bans. In response to a law signed by the Georgia governor that could ban abortions as early as six weeks, entertainment companies, including Netflix, Disney, and WarnerMedia, threatened to abandon operations in the state. “We have many women working on productions in Georgia, whose rights, along with millions of others, will be severely restricted by this law,” said Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer. The film industry, which contributed US$9.5 billion to Georgia’s economy last year, is not alone in using its economic leverage in an attempt to sway policymakers.

This is the latest example of CEOs and companies taking a stand and leveraging their public platform to advance an issue important to them, their employees, and customers. In recent years, CEO activism has become the norm—with business leaders speaking up on previously controversial topics such as immigration, LGBTQI+ rights, and gun control. However, until recently it seemed that being vocal on women’s rights was off-limits.

At BSR, we are proud to work with member companies of all industries to promote women’s empowerment—in the workplace and beyond. Without access to reproductive health services, including abortion, women’s economic empowerment can only go so far. The business leaders who have joined #DontBanEquality understand this—and we need more leadership to step up and do the same.

Blog | Tuesday June 11, 2019

New Collaborative Initiative to Advance LGBTI Equality Globally

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In the last 20 years, society has made great strides in the promotion and protection of the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex (LGBTI) people around the world. Since the Netherlands became the first country to legalize same-sex marriage in 2001, nearly 30 countries have followed suit, most recently in Taiwan. Significant changes are happening not just legally, but culturally as well—a shift that has been fully embraced by the private sector. Multinational corporations around the world have adopted diversity and inclusion initiatives that promote LGBTI rights in the workplace, and companies have taken an active role in the promotion of inclusivity—from sponsorship of Pride events around the world to promoting LGBTI-inclusive advertising and marketing campaigns.  

While the gains made over the last several decades are plentiful, there remains significant work to be done. 

Responding to this gap, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published the UN Standards of Conduct for Business Tackling Discrimination against LGBTI People (the Standards) in 2017.  These Standards build upon the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and  “offer guidance to companies on how to meet their responsibility to respect everyone’s rights – including, in this case, the rights of LGBTI people,” according to Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, then the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Importantly, the Standards also “take the case for corporate engagement a step further – by pointing to the many opportunities companies have to contribute to positive social change more broadly in the communities where they do business.”

While the Standards provide a powerful framework, operationalizing and implementing the Standards have largely been left up to companies. To address this challenge, BSR is pleased to announce our latest Collaborative Initiative, the Partnership for Global LGBTI Equality (PGLE), a collaboration between the World Economic Forum, OHCHR, and BSR. 

Legal and de facto discrimination against LGBTI people remains rampant through restrictions on marriage, adoption, and even the ability to serve in armed forces in many places, including the United States.

In spite of recent progress, a collaboration like PGLE is as important as ever, as there remain significant challenges and risks around the world to the LGBTI community. As of 2018, homosexual activity remains illegal in 71 countries, primarily in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—in April 2019, Brunei implemented the death penalty for homosexual activity, highlighting how significant the threat is to the human rights of LGBTI people. Even in countries where same-sex activity is not technically illegal, rampant legal and societal discrimination remains pervasive. For example, there are no protections against general LGBTI discrimination in 101 countries around the world, no protections for LGBTI housing discrimination in 112 countries, and 93 with no protections for LGBTI employment discrimination. Legal and de facto discrimination against LGBTI people remains rampant through restrictions on marriage, adoption, and even the ability to serve in armed forces in many places, including the United States.

PGLE’s mission is to accelerate equality and social and economic inclusion for LGBTI people by leveraging the power of business in three key ways:

First, PGLE and our corporate and NGO partners will operationalize the Standards by developing practical guidance, including new tools and methodologies that will help companies assess how well they are doing in complying with the Standards. These tools and methodologies will support companies in improving their overall compliance with the Standards and general human rights commitments.

Next, PGLE will facilitate shared learning by working with our corporate partners to promote the Standards and LGBTI equality and develop a living repository of best practices and case studies to support companies and other stakeholders around the world. We will also partner to integrate discussion of LGBTI issues at World Economic Forum events and other venues in order to spotlight the importance of this crucial topic.

Finally, we will continue to build awareness of the Standards and LGBTI rights in general by recruiting an additional 200 corporate supporters of the UN Standards as well as by expanding membership in PGLE to 100 members by 2020. 

We invite companies from all industries to join PGLE as we begin the journey of developing a powerful collaboration to promote LGBTI equality worldwide. For more information, please reach out to us.

Blog | Monday June 3, 2019

Time’s Up: Women Should Be Front and Center of Corporate Human Rights Due Diligence

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Women are disproportionately vulnerable to negative human rights impacts. Our experience in conducting human rights due diligence and engaging with workers in factories, farms, and communities in a variety of regions has highlighted numerous examples of the ways in which women’s rights are violated. From harassment online in the technology industry to the undermining of reproductive rights, lack of representation and equal pay across supply chains, we’ve found women to be especially vulnerable to human rights violations and struggling to access adequate redress for the issues they face.  

Despite these heightened risks to women across industries and regions, there is no systematic or holistic approach for companies to assess, mitigate, and remedy risk to women, highlighting a major gap that requires the collaboration of many different types of stakeholders. The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (“the Guiding Principles”) make a few passing references to how women and other vulnerable groups may have heightened exposure to human rights impacts. For instance, under the opening General Principles section, the Guiding Principles state:

These Guiding Principles should be implemented in a non-discriminatory manner, with particular attention to the rights and needs of, as well as the challenges faced by, individuals from groups or populations that may be at heightened risk of becoming vulnerable or marginalized, and with due regard to the different risks that may be faced by women and men.

However, they do not go into significant detail on how to account for or integrate such differences into a due diligence program, suggesting that more detailed guidance on how to develop a gender-responsive human rights due diligence process is needed—one that can identify impacts not just for women but also other vulnerable populations, such as LGBTI communities, children, and more. 

The report Gender Dimensions of the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which will be presented to the Human Rights Council on June 26, addresses this gap with one primary objective: putting an end to gender-blind human rights due diligence and access to remedy. It provides guidance to governments and companies on how to put a deliberate focus on women when implementing the Guiding Principles by using a gender framework that posits that gender should be a cross-cutting issue at all stages of due diligence and access to remedy, from gender-sensitive assessments to the implementation of gender-transformative measures and remedies.

Following years of conducting human rights impact assessments (HRIAs) across industries and regions since the publication of the Guiding Principles and identifying the need for a more deliberate focus on gendered issues, BSR welcomes this timely and important guidance.

We look forward to working with our member companies to incorporate these recommendations into our human rights due diligence and access to remedy methodologies by combining the expertise of BSR’s Human Rights and Women’s Empowerment practices. We believe that key changes need to be made to the human rights due diligence and access to remedy processes across the entire field of human rights and business practitioners—such as improving gender awareness at the HQ level of companies, revising impact assessment tools and guidance, and enhancing the capability of all those undertaking human rights due diligence to address gender-specific impacts. This is a reform agenda to which we are absolutely committed.

Key changes need to be made to the human rights due diligence and access to remedy processes across the entire field of human rights and business practitioners.

Here, we highlight four main areas of the report that we consider critical:

• Improving our understanding of gender and human rights by fully considering the intersectional nature of discrimination when conducting gender-sensitive assessments, thereby identifying overlapping vulnerabilities and paying attention to the fact that different groups of women may be impacted differently by corporate activities depending on variables related to societal discrimination, practical discrimination, or hidden discrimination due to stigmas around talking about sexual abuse or violence. This improved understanding also means working towards “substantive gender equality” (providing varying levels of support for different groups to achieve greater fairness of outcomes) instead of formal equality (providing the same levels of support for all groups) and understanding how to shape remediation along these lines.
• Integrating respect for women’s rights across a company’s operations and value chain by committing to gender equality and establishing a related policy that is fully integrated within the various functions of a company, adequately resourcing such commitments, and establishing clear accountability lines. This may include certain changes like requiring and incentivizing suppliers to uphold gender-sensitive standards or building the capacity of specific key internal functions to better understand and monitor specific issues related to gender equality within a company’s own operations and value chain.

Companies need to establish adequate due diligence processes to uncover, prevent, and remediate the adverse existing and potential impacts of new technologies and economy models that are relevant to the “future of work.”

• Enhancing the due diligence process by engaging and consulting with women and women’s organizations as well as gender experts throughout the process to ensure that both short-term, practical needs as well as strategic interests of women are addressed. It also requires companies to focus on severe impacts such as the prevention, mitigation, and remediation of sexual harassment and gender-based violence. The report puts the onus on companies to ensure that remedies offered, especially in the context of sexual and gender violence, are sensitive to “women’s experiences and expectations and never exclude access to judicial or non-judicial mechanisms.” It also flags the importance of establishing trust in operational level grievance mechanisms and making sure these are gender-balanced in their composition.
• Addressing systemic issues, such as the lack of gender-disaggregated data to assess the effectiveness and progress of companies’ interventions, and designing more effective, evidence-based measures and remedies that work for women. Putting a dent in systemic issues also requires companies to find ways to overcome discriminatory laws where they exist and to abide by international standards whilst advocating governments to change discriminatory legal frameworks. Thereby, the report recognizes the role of companies in influencing the legal landscape and broader cultural norms which are so often the hardest obstacles to overcome.

More generally, the report acknowledges the need for companies to establish adequate due diligence processes to uncover, prevent, and remediate the adverse existing and potential impacts of new technologies and economy models that are relevant to the “future of work” and calls for more sector specific guidance to support companies. Responding to this need, BSR is convening a private sector pre-conference event at Women Deliver 2019 to launch a new report this month, which explores how automation and the flourishing of artificial intelligence may help or hinder progress toward gender equality in the workplace. It also offers recommendations to companies on how to respond to these significant new disruptive trends so that future labor market dynamics do not negatively impact women and instead empower them to realize their full potential.

This report reinforces BSR’s position that places gender equality at the heart of its initiatives, programs, and tools: through our collaborative platform, Business Action for Women, and our guidance on how to mainstream gender equality considerations within corporate strategies, supplier codes of conduct and social auditing, we have been advocating for businesses to put a deliberate focus on women across their entire value chain. In October, we will be launching the Gender Data and Impact Framework, a set of KPIs that will support companies and their suppliers in conducting adequate gender responsive due diligence focused on evaluating the true impact of business operations on women workers in supply chains.  

We look forward to sharing more insights on this crucial topic with our members during our Human Rights Working Group meetings.

Blog | Monday May 27, 2019

Exploring Employee Activism: Why This Stakeholder Group Can No Longer Be Ignored

Preview

Over the past few years, household-name companies have experienced employee petitions, strikes, and walkouts over a range of issues, including strategic investments and partnerships, sexual harassment, immigration, and pay and benefits for contract workers.

For companies accustomed to thinking about stakeholder engagement as an external-facing exercise, the strength and speed of staff unrest has come as a stunning development. In April, BSR updated its popular 2011 report, “Five-Step Approach to Stakeholder Engagement,” to reflect developments in the sustainability and human rights fields over the past eight years. One of the most significant trends that BSR is tracking is the emergence of employees as a newly empowered and vocal stakeholder group with an unprecedented ability to impact a company’s strategy and reputation.

Much of the analysis of employee activism has viewed it exclusively as a phenomenon driven by workers in the technology sector. Technology workers are often (though not always) highly skilled, and questions of technological advancement are inherently inseparable from those of political and social identity. The utopian culture that prevails in Silicon Valley also makes corporate values a matter of profound importance to tech employees.

It would nonetheless be a big mistake for companies in other industries to overlook the potential for employee activism within their own staff. Strikes and protests have affected consumer products giants like Nike and McDonald’s, as well as companies with gig economy business models such as Uber Technologies.

Companies in all sectors need to start regarding employees as their most significant interest group.

Transparency alters the balance of power

By some measures, corporate power seems to be at an all-time high in the United States. Although the labor market is tight, the regulatory environment is becoming more permissive, recent taxation changes have been advantageous, and employee leverage seems to face long-term threats from automation and gig economy jobs. However, these tendencies have been no match for the ongoing transparency transformation.

Since WikiLeaks and the Panama Papers leak demonstrated how powerful spills of confidential information into the public domain can be, employees have embraced a whistleblowing model in which disclosing concerns to the public seems far more effective than a call to the internal ethics hotline.

Companies in all sectors need to start regarding employees as their most significant interest group.

Confidential emails are frequently making their way into the hands of investigative journalists, as are internal employee petitions. Shareholders questioning companies’ environment, social, and corporate governance (ESG) performance and pressing for improvements know that insider data can be a powerful weapon.

Non-disclosure agreements and other legal mechanisms have proved insufficient to repress these tactics, meaning that companies can no longer reliably maintain control of their reputations via public relations and marketing efforts. Companies are being compelled to behave as if any aspect of internal decision-making might become public knowledge at any time.

This is about values, not just employee self-interest

Employee engagement surveys tend to focus on pay, benefits, and working conditions. But today’s employees are focused on more than self-interest—they are speaking out on questions that relate to company values and investment decisions, and they are calling out hypocrisy when and where they see it.

With this trend accelerating as younger workers are hired, smart companies realize that motivating employees around core values can bring a powerful competitive advantage.

Jim Massey, global vice president of sustainability at AstraZeneca, told me that he sees a pressing need for greater inclusion: “The societal challenges we are facing today are unprecedented, and we need new groups of people to solve them. This means developing employee engagement from the ground up and crowdsourcing solutions to core questions about values and behavior. We can’t take a top-down approach to strategy or values anymore.”

Stakeholder networks are becoming more significant

BSR’s approach to stakeholder engagement emphasizes the need for systems thinking, which means that companies should consider how disparate stakeholder groups might influence each other, not just how they might directly impact management.

Indeed, employee activism can inspire other stakeholders to act: When more than 7,700 Amazon employees signed a petition calling for the company to adopt a more ambitious approach regarding climate change, the drive gained plenty of publicity. The petition was supported by Glass Lewis and ISS, the two biggest proxy advisors to institutional investors. Even though the resolution was voted down, employee activism is increasingly likely to generate civil society campaigns and trigger shareholder activism — companies have little choice but to respond.

Today’s employees are empowered to dissolve traditional boundaries—both physical and knowledge-based—between companies and the societies in which they operate. Management should respond with a robust, strategic approach to stakeholder engagement, placing their own employees squarely at the center of the effort.