CorporateResponsibility.Net

BASF has received an award for the best German sustainability report in 2008. The award, which was made at the annual conference of the German government’s Council for Sustainable Development, is bestowed every two years by the German Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW) and future e.V., an environmental initiative founded by a group of small and medium-sized German enterprises. The ranking assesses the transparency, completeness and thus the reliability of the information published by Germany’s 150 largest companies on sustainability issues such as environmental protection and employer responsibility.

Read more (BASF)

It seems that Primark has big problems with regards to their supply chain again. This is the article here:

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Primark was embroiled in a new row over the treatment of sweatshop workers today as shareholders gathered to celebrate record profits at the budget clothing chain.

According to new research by charity War on Want, workers stitching Primark clothes in Bangladesh earn so little that they cannot eat properly, and many end up “malnourished”. In interviews with the charity, they claimed to be working up to 84 hours a week, and were subjected to verbal threats and banned from joining a trade union.

Read the complete article here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/primark-faces-new-claims-that-it-uses-sweatshop-labour-1833843.html

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been around for decades as a concept, known in different forms such as corporate citizenship or sustainable development. It focuses on key economic, social and environmental outcomes generated by a company’s activities and today CSR management should be part of day-to-day business.

One definition of CSR is “Business behaviour that creates the trust and commitment of stakeholders, both now and in the future”. However, there are many others and the consistent theme across them is that businesses now recognise that the success of their business can be both positively and negatively impacted by a much wider range of stakeholders.

CSR is increasingly moving from being perceived as feelgood corporate PR window dressing to being directly linked to core operational performance. Drivers are various but they include legal compliance (particularly for manufacturing and distribution firms) and organisations are also placing increased importance on environmental programmes to generate customer loyalty and brand affinity.

Read the complete article here:

http://www.cio.co.uk/article/3205057/using-corporate-social-responsibility-to-build-business/?intcmp=HPF3

Based on the results of the CSR Hungary Index©, developed in joint cooperation between Budapest-based political analyst and consultancy firm Nézőpont Intézet and the organizing team of the 2009 CSR Hungary Conference, a relative majority (41%) of the companies in Hungary still consider corporate responsibility to be a matter of business ethics and not a source or condition of higher competitiveness  At the same time, some two-thirds of business leaders said corporate responsibility was an important or very important issue for their company.

Results show that the primary reason of a firm’s CSR-activity is to improve its social image: again, 41% of respondents claimed this to be their number one reason for pursuing various CSR activities while only 10% said that such policies were carried out to produce a market advantage. Based on the aggregation of the five sub-indexes, all given different statistical weights, the nationwide CSR Hungary Index © was found to be 62.8 on a 100-point scale.

Read more (in Hungarian)

Source: CSR Europe

Thanks to its climate change denying ways, the US Chamber of Commerce can now count another one of its members as an ex-member.

Speaking today at the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy’s national conference, John W. Rowe — chairman and CEO of Exelon — announced his company would not be renewing its membership in the chamber because of the organisation’s increasingly strident opposition to meaningful action on climate change.

Last week, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) Chairman and CEO Peter Darbee sent a letter to the US Chamber saying his firm would withdraw because of “fundamental differences” over climate change. Shortly thereafter, the Public Service Company of New Mexico announced a similar decision.

Read the complete article here:

http://www.greenbang.com/another-one-bites-the-dust-exelon-leaves-climate-denying-chamber_11892.html

Newsweek, encroaching on territory usually mined by activist groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, has unveiled its innaugural NEWSWEEK Green Rankings, which ranks the 500 biggest U.S. companies based on their “actual environmental performance, policies, and reputation.”

The magazine pointed out that compiling such a list was a challenge “because comparing environmental performance across industries is a bit like analyzing whether Tiger Woods or LeBron James is the world’s greatest athlete—there’s an inevitable apples-and-oranges element.”

Still, it believes it’s system makes sense. To come up with the greenest company, the magazine assigned each a “Green Score” that was then compared to the average score of the collective group. You can find out more about Newsweek’s methodology here. But, in terms of weighting, Impact and Policies were each given 45 percent and Reputation received 10 percent.

Read the complete article here:

http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/2009/09/21/newsweeks-green-rankings-perception-meets-reality/

This is a very interesting and useful article from the Harvard Business School about Corporate Responsibility and that there is no real effect of the recession driving the importance for it down in companies eyes.

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Corporations engaged in recession-driven cost-cutting are trimming or eliminating corporate responsibility initiatives. Though corporate survival is key and consumer skepticism of business CR initiatives at an all-time high, such actions are short-sighted. Now more than ever, businesses need to be saying “yes” rather than “no” to their social responsibilities.There are five key reasons:

1. Critical cross-border global issues require multinational corporations and their CEOs to lead in the search for solutions, recession or not.

2. Recession results in more poverty and exacerbates problems that national governments and NGOs alone cannot solve.

Read the complete article here:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/harvardbusiness?sid=Hd7595c1f54bb9965e2a3bed69a8e9027

A very interesting video from Stanford University Business School on integrating Corporate Responsibility:

A really good blog post from Wayne Visser.

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Why has CSR failed so spectacularly to address the very issues it claims to be most concerned about? This comes down to three factors – the Triple Curse of Modern CSR, if you like:

Curse 1: Incremental CSR

One of the great revolutions of the 1970s was total quality management, conceived by American statistician W. Edwards Deming, perfected by the Japanese and exported around the world as ISO 9001. At the very core of Deming’s TQM model and the ISO standard is continual improvement, a principle that has now become ubiquitous in all management system approaches to performance. No surprise, therefore, that the most popular environmental management standard, ISO 14001, is also build on the same principle.

There is nothing wrong with continuous improvement per se. On the contrary, it has brought safety and reliability to the very products and services that we associate with modern quality of life. But when we use it as the primary approach to tackling our social, environmental and ethical challenges, it fails on two critical counts: speed and scale. The incremental approach of CSR, while replete with evidence of micro-scale, gradual improvements, has completely and utterly failed to make any impact on the massive sustainability crises that we face, many of which are getting worse at a pace that far outstrips any futile CSR-led attempts at amelioration.

Read the complete post here:

http://www.csrinternational.org/?p=3431

Companies who are socially and environmentally responsible can claim a major competitive advantage but they need to communicate their activities to Irish consumers, according to a new survey by Business in the Community Ireland.

The 2009 Survey of Consumer Attitudes in Ireland towards Corporate Responsibility was commissioned by Business in the Community Ireland in conjunction with Ipsos MORI and it is the third such survey in the past decade, with previous versions taking place in 2003 and 2006.

When forming a decision to buy a product or service, 8 out of 10 people in Ireland say that an organisation’s commitment to social and environmental responsibility is important. Yet almost eighty percent (80%) of consumers could not name one company which treat staff well, give good customer service and are mindful of its impact on the environment.

In addition, whilst ninety-two percent (92%) of consumers are taking individual actions to limit their own environment impacts, three out of four people (75%) could not name a company doing the same. Read more (BITCI)

Source: CSR Europe