Corporate Social Responsibility: a Biblical perspective
By Erik Cramb, February 2003
“We live in an age where anti-globalisation protestors wear designer clothes that have been manufactured in developing countries. It exists to produce the goods and services that society needs and desires. It exists to do so with a promised level of quality at a price that is fair. That fair price should allow for reasonable costs, living wages and appropriate profit, from which taxes and dividends are paid and provision for future investment made. It is out of that process that its primary corporate social responsibility is met, as through wages, incomes, investment and taxes the fabric of life is sustained."
The above quote was taken from the Scottish Council for Development & Industry’s (SCDI) response to the Green Paper on promoting a European framework for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). They might well have usefully added that the protestors’ clothes are purchased with plastic and that being locked into credit or locked out from credit is one of the critical dividing issues of our day. The English theologian Peter Selby writes, “As a nation we have thrown away the piggy bank on the mantlepiece and now rely on future income to buy what we want today.” He was not talking, though he might well have been, of PFI or PPP.
My own father, a Clydeside journeyman sheet metal worker, went to his grave never having owed a penny in his life, being of that generation who saved before purchase. I now have a credit card with which I co-exist in, what I hope, is a state of healthy unease. My children, even before they had left university, would find it more important to have their plastic than their comb in their pocket when going out on a date.
There should be, argues the SCDI, codes of conduct for CSR based on internationally agreed standards such as those of the ILO. Having just argued in the previous paragraph that we live in a very different age from even our most recent forebears, I would like to suggest that we might do well to look at one of the oldest sources of codes of conduct available to us, the Bible.
To whet your appetite for ancient wisdom - let me offer you a wee selection from the Book of Proverbs so that you might ask: “Does this ancient wisdom ring true?”
“The Lord hates people who use dishonest scales. He is happy with honest weights.”
“If you have to choose between a good reputation and great wealth, choose a good reputation”
“Don’t take advantage of the poor just because you can.”
“People curse a man who hoards grain, waiting for a higher price, but they praise the one who puts it up for sale.”
“Unused fields could yield plenty of food for the poor, but unjust men keep them from being farmed.”
“Show me a man who does a good job and l will show you a man who is better than most and worthy of the company of kings
“If you are weak in a crisis, you are weak indeed”
“There are people who take cruel advantage of the poor and the needy; that is the way they make their living.”
You don’t have to be a theologian to understand any of these ancient proverbs nor to see their inherent truths are as applicable today to people who have set their footprints on the moon as they were to those for whom they were written who believed in’ a flat earth. Real truth is enduring, living, challenging. But it's difficult!
Perceptively, after having pictured the Armani-clad protestor, SCDI says, “Ascertaining society’s view on a particular social or environmental issue is not always easy, as there can be differences between what consumers (and businesses*) say they want and the way they act in private. Whatever they may say, most consumers still tend to demand low cost products.” Perhaps not unnaturally where most businesses still tend to demand low wage costs. One breeds the other. Jesus reminded those he taught that the measure you use for others is the measure that will return to you. *My addition.
When the system of accelerating fuel tax was put in place as a response to the twin problems of congested roads and green house gasses, there was an irresistible logic. Getting goods and people onto the railways or buses seemed right, but individually each one of us had arguments for remaining in our cars, and when the fuel tax really bit, we almost had a national revolt. The Bible talks about the good that we really want to do that we never quite manage to do.
Most of us are familiar with the saying of Jesus about being able to see the speck in our neighbour's eye, yet be unaware of the plank or log in our own. The capacity to say one thing and do another is as old as humanity. For example, all the documents and responses to documents on corporate social responsibility are big on promoting education and life-long learning and partnerships with schools and all that worthy stuff Yet there is no mention anywhere that by and large company executives will purchase private education for their own children. Is there not a contradiction there that should at least be acknowledged?
As Scottish train drivers strike and cause widespread inconvenience, public opinion has been turning inexorably against them. However, when Glasgow Chamber of Commerce is vociferous in condemning the drivers’ “greed” and say not a word about the obscene package being offered to BP's chief executive Lord John Browne, people know it stinks. We hate spin doctors because we are all well alive to any contradiction but our own -including the churches who for example, damn the Lottery, then take the money ‘to renew the historic steeple’ or whatever justification our ecclesiastical spin doctors can concoct! Religious faith does not often save us from earthly blindness.
Despite all the polls suggesting that the public would pay a penny extra tax for the NHS or for education, all elections in the last 20 years in this country have been conducted as downwards auctions on taxation. There is no mention of taxation in the proposals about corporate social responsibility, an astonishing omission? Well, maybe not! But without responsibility towards taxation would any policy be worth the paper it's written on?
Business is notorious for its resentful attitude towards taxation and often deems it a great achievement to find every available loophole and if possible, no matter how large its profits are, to pay no tax at all. The existence of tax havens like the Cayman Islands pay loud testimony. Somehow in our culture we have never been able to feel good about paying tax, yet big business is often very generous with its money, having,’ for example replaced the churches as the principal patron of the arts. It is by paying tax that business funds not only the services it needs, but those by which the society within which it draws its existence, coheres. Should not business positively preen itself that taxes pay for health care and home helps?
In the ancient Levitical Law there are many ‘offerings’ demanded. These offerings were in fact taxes, but there was an assumption that to make them was a source of pride. Therefore they had to be made well! Bulls and lambs for burnt offerings were to be 'without blemish’. Grain offerings and bread offerings and fellowship offerings all had to be meticulously prepared. Nothing but your best was to be offered to God. The essence of the teaching of Jesus , moral code in which our culture has been nurtured - was to ‘Love the Lord your God and your neighbour as yourself” Therefore the demand is to offer to your neighbour, by extension to your employee, your customer and to your community or society, only your best. Therein lies true peace and satisfaction. To skimp successfully on wages, quality or taxes will inevitably leave you unsatisfied and anxious.
The core business of business
First it exists to produce the goods and services that society needs and desires. It exists to do so with a promised level of quality at a price that is fair. That fair price should allow for reasonable costs, living wages and appropriate profit, from which taxes and dividends are paid and provision for future investment made. It is out of that process that its primary corporate social responsibility is met, as through wages, incomes, investment and taxes the fabric of life is sustained.
That there is a duty of business to the whole of society - a corporate social responsibility -is underlined time and again in Biblical texts about not harvesting your fields right to the corners, that should be left for the poor. That there is a duty of those ‘who have’ towards those ‘who have-not’ is underlined in the relationships of borrowing and lending. The debtor is never to be left without the means of life and dignity. “Do not deprive foreigners and orphans of their rights or take a widow’s garment as security for a loan.” Many households have too little or too variable an income to cope with unforseen circumstances.
There is also a duty to tell the truth!
How many so-called pragmatic business organisations and companies - and one need look no further than Enron, or Marconi or Railtrack - are prone to begin reports with some sort of fairy tale about ‘the present situation’? They are more than prone - in fact it is almost endemic in the business world - to laud the talents and skills of the top bosses and the need for them to be paid sky-high wages. Even when they are running their companies into disaster they are rewarded with pay-offs negotiated when these looming disasters were still hidden from sight.
Confederation of British Industry Director General Digby Jones said on the eve of last year’s CBI conference in Birmingham that it would be ‘a very difficult winter’ for industry. One in three company executives polled by the CBI said a significant number of orders had been cancelled since the terror of September 11th with estimates that profits will be up to 20% lower next year.
Digby Jones, whilst arguing reasonably that specific help should be given to sectors worst hit by the attacks such as aviation, went on to say generally that companies should be given tax credits for training and research. He said he was imploring Chancellor Gordon Brown not to come back to business with more taxes for ‘there was no room to raise business taxes’.
Perhaps Mr. Digby Jones might understand a certain public cynicism as his plea to the Chancellor came in the wake of the pay-off to British Telecom’s ‘resigning’ Chief Executive Sir Peter Bonfield of £1.5 million, and much more if you include pension enhancements and preserved option rights. It would seem Sir Peter, like Lord Simpson and countless others before him are being rewarded handsomely for being a lousy boss. The average rise, according to new research, of chief executives in the FT SE- 100 was 18.3% last year and many individual payments showed little relation to how their companies had performed. St Luke (chapter 12), in what is known as “The Parable of the Rich Fool”, tells the story of the fate of the man obsessed in building bigger and bigger barns.
Much of the myth with which the private sector surrounds itself is about energy, enterprise and the embracing of risk, yet a root cause of the ‘very difficult’ winter that Digby Jones forsees is “the worrying signs of investment being put on hold because of economic uncertainty.” Digby Jones’s own evidence would seem to suggest that, far from being bold, private investment is timid. Far from showing leadership, the private sector shows distinct signs of a whingeing spirit.
Perhaps some of these whingeing spirits should listen to Scottish business leader Donald Turner who wrote in the annual report of the Scottish Council for Development and Industry, “There is a widespread feeling that terrorism and the war against it are being blamed for problems which were already deep-rooted. Economic slowdown and uncertainty are forcing companies to face up to remedial measures, some of which were long overdue. However, downturns also provide opportunities and those with the courage and confidence to be acquisitive and expansive may well benefit when the situation improves.”
The name Jeremiah has passed into our language as a synonym for pessimism, yet one of the most famous stories of the Old Testament conveys the optimism reflected by Donald Turner. In the darkest days of the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, with disaster and captivity looming, Jeremiah buys a field at a fair price to demonstrate his belief in future recovery.
"I bought the field from Hanamel and weighed out the money to him; the price came to seventeen pieces of silver. I signed and sealed the deed, had it witnessed and weighed out the money on scales.”
If the ‘great captains of industry’ truly believe that they are worthy of the rewards they draw down and the respect that they crave, then let them now, in the difficult times, show their worth, show their belief in the future.
To be truly serious about Corporate Social Responsibility, business has
first to be good business. Honest in its dealings; paying bills on time;
embracing taxation; being of big spirit, that is both generous and brave.
It's Biblical. It makes sense.