A lot has happened since 2005, when the late John Ruggie was appointed as the UN Special Representative on human rights and transnational corporations. Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) have continued to grow, despite concerns about their limited accomplishments. NGOs have developed a variety of score cards to rank the human rights and sustainability practices of leading brands and retailers. ESG (environmental, social and governance) ratings have moved into the mainstream of the investment world, spurring debates about whether they are meaningful and ‘material’ to corporate returns. Recently, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights – which Ruggie helped to forge – have inspired an EU draft directive on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence, moving towards mandatory rather than voluntary standards.
In Incorporating Rights, Erika George makes a hopeful argument about how these types of initiatives – particularly the voluntary ones – can gradually lead to greater respect for the human rights of workers in labour-intensive industries, communities in extractive zones, and individuals subject to high-tech surveillance. While occasionally acknowledging limitations, she argues that MSIs, score cards and demand from responsible investors and consumers have combined to make attention to human rights essentially obligatory rather than voluntary for large corporations. This is especially significant, she argues, because international law offers few meaningful paths for corporations to be held accountable to human rights norms, especially as courts have narrowed the scope of extra-territorial claims. In essence, George carries on Ruggie’s legacy in making the case that norms for international business are changing and that this is no small accomplishment.
Empirically, George traces the discourse of corporate social responsibility in several large food/beverage, apparel/footwear, oil/gas and information technology companies (e.g., Coca-Cola, Adidas, ExxonMobil and Microsoft). Looking over time, she shows that human rights were increasingly incorporated into policies and reports as the companies faced controversies (roughly 2005 to 2017 in most cases). Beyond this, George draws on her observations of various meetings (e.g., UN Annual Forum on Business and Human Rights) and interviews with developers of MSIs and score cards to paint a multi-faceted portrait of the expectations that large companies face to respect human rights throughout their global operations and supply chains. In each chapter, she examines a different piece of the puzzle – such as business and human rights norms, MSIs, score cards, shareholder and consumer pressures – highlighting the evolution and expansion of expectations. Her analysis ends prior to the development of the EU mandatory due diligence directive – and earlier laws, such as the French Corporate Duty of Vigilance law, are not in her purview – but these developments would seemingly bolster her overall point: global human rights have become institutionalized as part of the ‘social license to operate’ for large transnational corporations.
George’s hopeful argument deserves serious consideration. Even for those like me, who have found enormous gaps between discursive commitments to human rights and concrete practices on the ground, it is hard to deny that demands for companies to respect human rights are emanating from an expanding circle of stakeholders and shareholders. In addition, George makes a convincing case that human rights are now more explicitly recognized in corporate responsibility and sustainability discourses, rather than being implicit in discussions of labour, fairness or accountability. Moreover, George does the field a great favour in examining human rights concerns across several different industries. This gives the book an impressive scope that runs from social media-fuelled violence and digital surveillance to labour rights of manufacturing and agricultural workers to rights to water and land claimed by communities in various parts of the world.
On the other hand, George overlooks a growing body of evidence about what these types of voluntary commitments produce on the ground. Most of this evidence makes it much harder to accept her argument that ‘things are headed in the right direction’ (p. 305), such that ‘industry inaction will no longer be an option where rights abuses are alleged’ (p. 9). For instance, scholars of labour standards and private governance have found that leading apparel, footwear and electronics companies routinely overlook non-compliance when placing orders with factories,Footnote 1 and that their pricing and delivery demands make it incredibly difficult for suppliers to improve conditions.Footnote 2 Codes of conduct have become obligatory for suppliers to reputation-sensitive brands and retailers, but these lead firms retain a great deal of autonomy in deciding whether and how to enforce their codes and how far to extend their commitments. Even the more positive findings in this literature tend to be highly qualified, indicating that improvements are limited to particular national settings, managerial structures, and supply chain positions.Footnote 3
Moreover, many of the improvements that have been documented pertain to working conditions, while the rights of workers and marginalized communities more often remain problematic. Numerous case studies, for instance, have documented brands’ failure to respect workers’ freedom of association rights or to remedy violations in meaningful ways. (This is partly why sociologist Gay SeidmanFootnote 4 decried the ‘labor rights as human rights’ agenda more than 15 years ago.) Likewise, research on extractive industries frequently reveals a mix of concessions and repression as well-known and highly profitable oil, gas and mining companies move into new territory.Footnote 5 When companies do engage in remediation, they often set up systems for managing grievances that are several steps removed from the original injustices.
This is not to say that the shifts in norms and discourses that George emphasizes are meaningless. Indeed, there may be progress occurring even amidst evidence of recurrent violations – or even collective leaning stemming from these failures. But a hopeful argument about the power of norms would be more convincing if it grappled with the existing evidence to identify the most promising pathways, mechanisms and conditions for concrete reform. Tellingly, one of George’s examples of human rights norms being translated into concrete improvements is the Fair Food Program, which emerged from a bottom-up and ‘worker-driven’ conception of corporate responsibility, in stark contrast to the MSIs profiled elsewhere in George’s book (such as the Fair Labor Association, Global Network Initiative, and Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights). Put differently, this example suggests that corporate accountability may be increasing in spite of MSIs, not because of them.
Perhaps it is due to disciplinary divides that George pays little attention to the empirical evidence about the outcomes of private governance, as well as social scientific literatures on the contradictions of conscientious consumption and responsible investment. As a legal scholar, George approaches the topic with a keen eye for the content of expanding norms and the limits of international law. Indeed, her chapter on how international law variously acknowledges and denies corporate personhood (with implications for legal accountability) deserves careful attention from social scientists, who often have a starry-eyed view of law as solving the problems of voluntarism. In addition, she does incorporate socio-legal research on rankings and indicators as modes of global governance, usefully connecting the book to broader debates about information, quantification and commensuration.
Still, it is a problem for the study of business and human rights if it is disconnected from the scholarship on labour standards, private governance, global production networks, and market-driven change more broadly. With environmental impacts increasingly being intertwined with human rights norms, there is an even larger swath of research to consider. George’s book is impressive in its scope and commendable in its hope, but it is also a testament to the need for greater cross-fertilization of research findings.
As we enter an era in which voluntary standards will be bolstered by mandatory due diligence regulations, it is worth remembering both the broad norm changes that led to this point – which Incorporating Rights wonderfully highlights – and the significant challenges of improving corporate respect for rights on the ground.
