Business and human rights (BHR) is “both a multidisciplinary (and sometimes interdisciplinary) academic field drawing from, inter alia, business ethics, law, and the social sciences, and a social, economic and political justice movement involving governments and inter-governmental institutions, as well as indigenous peoples, non-governmental organizations, and other civil society actors” (Santoro, 2015: 151). This edited volume reflects the diverse actors, perspectives, purposes, and methodologies in the BHR field. Although intended as a textbook, the book well serves academics and practitioners as an introduction to the BHR field. Baumann-Pauly and Nolan deserve ample credit for editing an extremely well-organized book that maximizes the benefits of a multi-author volume drawing on the expertise of a diverse array of prominent academics and practitioners while minimizing the inevitable repetition, lack of focus, and repetition that plagues the edited volume format. They have given us the best of both worlds—specialists with deep knowledge of a particular issue as well as the organization, logical flow, and the satisfying completeness of a first-rate authored book.
The adoption in 2011 by the United Nations’ (UN) Human Rights Council of the “Protect, Respect, Remedy” Framework and Guiding Principles (hereafter the Guiding Principles) has been a galvanizing event in the BHR field. One of the book’s chapters is devoted to the Guiding Principles and other recent regulatory developments. An indication, by no means the only one, of the authoritative nature of this volume is the contribution in this chapter by John Ruggie, the UN’s Special Representative for Business and Human Rights from 2005 to 2011 and the driving force behand the Guiding Principles. One small hiccup in this chapter is the presence of two informative but repetitive essays on the prospect of a binding business and human rights treaty. Following the UN’s adoption of voluntary Guiding Principles, legal scholars have found no end of fascination with the many prerequisites, institutional requirements, and enforceability (among other issues too numerous to catalog here) of a binding treaty. Lawyers have focused with understandable professional consternation on the “Guiding” aspect of the Guiding Principles. Business ethicists, outnumbered by lawyers but with no less passionate intensity, have focused their attention on the “Principles” part of the Guiding Principles. It would have been useful had Baumann-Pauly and Nolan seen fit to include an essay by a business ethicist assessing whether the Guiding Principles incorporate the right principles from a moral and ethical point of view or whether the articulation of the Guiding Principles can and should be improved upon.
Baumann-Pauly and Nolan organize another chapter around industry sectors. This is one of the strongest chapters because of its admirable breadth and depth. It covers decades-old BHR issues involving worker rights as well as newly emerging technologies where BHR issues have become salient. The introductory essay on multi-stakeholder initiatives provides a useful heuristic context for the descriptions of industry-specific initiatives that follow. This chapter contains essays by Auret Van Heerden on the Fair Labor Association’s work on global supply chains and former Yahoo executive Michael Samway on the Global Network Initiative, an industry association formed by such Silicon Valley powerhouses as Apple, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Seattle-based Microsoft. There are equally authoritative and informative essays on the agricultural, extractive, and private-security industries. All of the essays in this chapter contain a balanced mix of on-the-ground facts with discussions of broad ethical questions.
Another one of the book’s stronger chapters covers accountability for human rights violations and remedies for such violations. Anthony Ewing offers a masterful overview of the various financial and non-financial mandatory human rights reporting currently required of companies. There are also very useful essays on how courts both within and outside the United States have been used (with varying degrees of success) to hold multinational corporations responsible for human rights violations. Law professors contemplating using this text will no doubt want more detailed doctrinal analyses, but for non-lawyers the highly readable essays by William S. Dodge and Christine Kaufmann contain just the right amount of detail to explain the role of law and lawyers in protecting human rights against corporate abuses. One notable omission from the remedy section is an essay introducing the increasing interest in community-based grievance mechanisms that engage with indigenous groups affected by human rights violations (Kaufman & McDonnell, 2016).
The book’s chapter on the implementation challenges facing the Guiding Principles looks at the BHR field from inside business. Academics and NGOs tend to engage with companies as monolithic entities when the truth is that the implementation of BHR requires leadership and the building of internal and external coalitions. The essays by Ben Heineman, Christine Bader, and John Morrison, in particular, sum up the many challenges of and a few successful strategies for moving the BHR needle within companies. Other chapters concern outside actors who can play a potential role, including civil society organizations, consumers, and investors. Particularly notable here is an essay addressing the much-neglected topic of the responsibility consumers have to incorporate human rights into their purchasing decisions. Guido Palazzo, Felicitas Morhart, and Judith Schrempf-Stirling offer a number of novel and thoughtful suggestions for how corporations can activate and channel greater consumer consciousness.
The comprehensive and authoritative qualities of Baumann-Pauly and Nolan’s edited volume make it highly suitable for anyone wishing to teach a course on BHR or incorporate BHR into a broader course on business ethics. (Another indispensable resource for anyone contemplating adding BHR to a syllabus is the online Teaching Business and Human Rights Forum (TeachBHR.org), a collaborative effort among some 234 members in 139 institutions in 32 countries.
Sprinkled throughout the book are various “snapshot” case studies. It is a matter of individual style and objectives as to whether these cases are sufficiently detailed to sustain a meaningful discussion. The two cases that are extensively discussed in the book’s opening section are seminal—the 1984 Union Carbide chemical spill in Bhopal, India and the 2013 Rana Plaza fire which took the lives of over 1100 Bangladeshi workers—however, by themselves, they do not capture all of the many subtle business, cultural, and ethical issues which make BHR such an important and captivating field. One notable exception is Joanne Bauer’s nuanced account of the Coalition of the Immokalee Workers and the Campaign for Fair Food. The Coalition represents an emerging trend of worker-led activism. For some, the variety and ease of use of the “snapshot” cases will be sufficient. Others will want to supplement the book with more detailed cases.
