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| @ | purchase | 2001 | nike | lifeworth | greenleaf | future considerations |
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Be Reasonable P ublic relations (pr) firms were in the spotlight in the new year, following the ejection of Lord Peter Melchett from the board of Greenpeace International after his move to Burson-Marsteller, the major PR firm. This sparked debates in newspapers and magazines about whether activists could and should work with industry to seek change. In February a Newsweek article entitled 'Pinstripe Protestors' reported that a 'cultural revolution is underway as protesters in pinstripes figure out how to work the capitalist system'. 4 They quoted a Greenpeace director in Germany, Fouad Hamdan, saying that he 'finally realized it's all about money'. Treating this as 'news', these reports ignored the fact that this 'revolution' has been under way for ten years with organisations such as WWF-UK having worked with the timber trade on sustainable forestry initiatives since the early 1990s. 5 For most, the debate has moved on, and now focuses on what can and can't be achieved through working with business, and how collaboration need not and should not preclude conflict or efforts at regulatory reform. 6In a sense, the key issue is not the existence of these collaborations but how they are presented to a wider audience, and whether they are marketed as something more than they are. The issue of responsible marketing and advertising hit the headlines in January. In China, Pabst, the beer company behind the Pabst Blue Ribbon brand, announced the withdrawal of adverts that appeared in Tibet celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 'peaceful liberation of Tibet'. The company had been hit by protests as pictures of the adverts circulated around the Internet. The president and CEO Brian Kovalchuk posted a letter on the company website that confirmed the withdrawal but did not give the apology demanded by some of the campaigners. 7 The Jakarta Post in Indonesia reported 8 that, after a wave of criticism from politicians and educators, the cigarette manufacturer HM Sampoerna pulled a series of its cartoon advertisements, which featured animated characters, including ants, roosters, snails and a dancing squid. The company denied it had targeted children with the promotion, but agreed that the series should be withdrawn to 'prevent misinterpretation' although it added that cartoons were in line with its other adverts, which were 'creative and modern'. It seems that it is quite possible for people around the world to hold different understandings of creativity and modernity. One institution of creative endeavour, the University of Nottingham, UK, decided last year to accept £3.8 million in sponsorship from British American Tobacco (BAT) for the establishment of a corporate citizenship research centre. In response, the team of cancer research scientists at the university elected to move elsewhere and the editor of The British Medical Journal resigned his post at the university. Conversely, in January this year, faculty members at the Harvard School of Public Health, USA, voted not to accept research funding from tobacco manufacturers and their subsidiaries. The vote puts current practice into official policy and is consistent with Harvard University's 13-year-old policy of not holding stock in tobacco companies. The tobacco industry has been under further criticism from the World Health Organisation (WHO), which accused tobacco companies of using 'dirty tricks' to undermine efforts to set up an international treaty aimed at cutting the number of deaths from smoking. WHO estimates 9 that four million people die from smoking-related ailments every year and in March they resumed negotiating a global treaty with measures that could include worldwide legal curbs on tobacco advertising, marketing and subsidies. The tobacco industry is said to favour self-regulation via the adoption of voluntary codes for marketing standards. According to BAT, the voluntary standard would represent a '"raising of the bar" and establish a benchmark for the industry world wide'. 10 In the January/February edition of New Internationalist magazine, Bob Burton and Andy Rowell quoted from a (leaked) memorandum of a Wall Street tobacco analyst at Credit Suisse. 11 The memo said the tobacco industry's development of a voluntary marketing code is 'to improve the tobacco industry's image' and that 'by proactively setting new international standards the multinationals could be trying to counter a number of proposals that the WHO has been working on to curb the amount of cigarettes that are consumed on an international basis'. This case seems to add weight to the argument that companies often adopt voluntary codes when there is the threat of new legislation. This suggests that a company's adoption of voluntary codes should not necessarily be regarded as indicative of corporate citizenship, but that we should consider these in relation to a company's stance on national and international regulation and the range of their lobbying activities. The moves by Harvard and the work of the WHO suggest that tobacco is part of a group of sunset industries where ethical legitimacy has disappeared. No matter how many organic or fairly traded cigarettes they might eventually produce, some may think it easier for a packet of Camels to pass through the eye of a needle than for a tobacco company to be socially responsible. However, this is not a view shared by FTSE4Good. In January this British index of 'ethical' stocks was reported 12 to be set to lift its ban on companies making tobacco, allowing them to join the listing by the end of the year. The index committee suggesting that it would admit tobacco companies if they were improving their records on issues such as public health, the environment and human rights. A spokesperson for FTSE4Good said: 'if you are trying, then you are worth investing in'. But what might constitute 'trying'? The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the UK's Department of Health, Lord Hunt, said that 'the most appropriate social criterion on which to judge BAT's performance would be its success in moving, in partnership with its employees and suppliers, away from tobacco towards less harmful forms of economic activity'. FTSE4good expressed the same attitude towards arms and nuclear firms. Corporate citizenship is now even on the radar screens of some in the defence industry. The United States General Accounting Office released a report on how its military shops, which sell items such as army clothing, could 'better assure that their goods are not made by child or forced labor'. 
And in March, at a development policy forum in the UK, the Secretary for International Development, Clare Short, suggested that an arms industry that acted responsibly would be vital in providing governments such as Thabo Mbeki's in South Africa with the potential to take on peace-keeping roles across Africa. The value of ensuring that military equipment and clothing is not manufactured by child labour would be seen in the lived experience of children who are no longer employed inhumanely. However, can the production of weapons of destruction for profit ever be an activity worthy of association with the aspirational concepts of sustainability, social responsibility or citizenship? 4. www.mallenbaker.net/csr/nl/24.html#Anchor-Pinstripe-63255
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