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Why Every Corporation needs a code of conduct...

... and why it should be based on Int’l Human Rights Principles – A Case Study from West Virginia.

This week, I watched a third of the people in my state go without water.

water

I had friends who came up to Morgantown to take showers and pack their cars with water to return to others who were less fortunate.

I heard stories, personal stories, from colleagues who came here from the southern part of the state where they report – “everything has shut down.”

I am reminded by a friend to commiserate with restaurants (and particularly servers in those restaurants) because not working for them means not eating – a particularly severe blow when drinking is already difficult.

And this week, I also read the discussion posts from the first week of the business ethics class that I teach. The students’ assignment was to discuss different theories of ethics and offer their opinion as to which one is used by our government and which one (should) guide business. The point of the exercise wasn’t necessarily to get students to pick a theory but rather to understand that there will always be hard choices that they will have to make in business. By knowing what your values are ahead of time, the choice will (hopefully) be clearer even if a hard decision has to be made. One of my students keyed in on this immediately. Quoting his reading assignment he then added his own insight:

” ’...a particular action can be evaluated differently, depending on the system under which it is examined.’ I don’t believe there is a wrong answer but rather in an ideal world, a combination of [ethical] theories would likely be best.”

The point, in other words, isn’t to worry so much about getting to the right theory. Rather, it’s to prioritize your theory and then make sure that your corporate values – the values that you profess to hold (internally and externally) are being followed time after time, but particularly in a crisis.

That seemed to be lacking in Charleston these last few days.

An article in the Washington Post talks about the corporate executive of Freedom Industries (the company that owned the equipment responsible for the chemical spill) who took questions while “complaining of a long day, repeatedly swigg[ing] from a bottle of water and [trying] to cut short questions of reporters.” I don’t know if Freedom Industries has a corporate code of conduct. I tried checking on their website and could not find one. According to Business Week, they are only two weeks old – having just merged from other companies on December 31, 2013. This leads me to think that they do not. I would like to hope that a corporate code of conduct – one that embodied business and human rights principles, one that incorporates business and human rights risk matrixes – would have taught the company president to act better in a crisis. Better yet, I would hope that having a corporate code of conduct that embraces human rights principles would have pointed to the 1 million cash reserve that the business purportedly had set aside to deal with repair issues and using a “human rights due diligence assessment” (as outlined in the Guiding Principles) – would have concluded that safety threats were a top priority and needed to be addressed. Right away. Before a leak happened.

Unfortunately, it seems evident that none of those things happen.

Instead, I have friends down in Charleston – in the southern part of my state – who went without water.

So here’s a special note to corporate executives: If you ever want to know what a business and human rights agenda can do, think about Charleston WV and get a corporate code of conduct.

Otherwise, the costs can be devastating.

Image taken from http://saltandlighttv.org/blog/general/water-water-everywhere-but-not-a-drop-to-drink

(Which also has a great blog on the devastating effects that going without water has internationally).

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