Month: October 2019

This article is part of ourEconomy's 'Preparing for the next crisis' series.

If there is one way the next economic crisis won’t be the same as the last, it will have to do with the state of our planet. In 2008, the Copenhagen Accord hadn’t been signed, let alone the Paris Agreement – or millions of schoolchildren missing Friday lessons to protest the terrifying future they will inherit.

Now, economic transformation is widely viewed as a prerequisite for halting ecological breakdown. Because of this, the next crisis is often presented by those who long for change as a golden opportunity, envisaged with massive investment in energy systems, transport, and clean industrial technology.

To be sure, these changes cannot come quickly enough. Yet they are not the only piece of the economic, nor ecological, puzzle. The ruling elites of wealthy countries have a poor record in undertaking ambitious public spending. Instead, they look to ordinary citizens – recast over decades as ‘consumers’ – to carry the load.

Household consumption on aggregate represents the largest chunk of economic activity in most countries. Though often characterised as ‘motor’ or ‘engine’ of growth, as things stand a liferaft would be a better metaphor. During recessions, household spending can remain relatively flat compared to investment and therefore GDP more broadly. In the US, consumption, though battered by the storm of the 2008 crisis, supported employment in the face of declining business prospects.

Our economic dependency on consumerism is linked to changes afoot at the global level, both secular and cyclical. On the one hand, the gradual march of (privatised) digital technology and financialisation have undermined and disrupted investment in the real economy as a source of stable prosperity. Listlesss productivity in some G7 nations and a massive reduction in state spending under austerity regimes have placed much of the burden on households.

In Britain, this sterling effort from the 'good old British consumer' comes at a cost. Households have been taking on net debt – in other words, running down their wealth – since 2016. Financial pundits present debt-led increases in household spending as a natural source of GDP growth despite only having assumed such a prominent role following the 1980s’ neoliberal turn.

On the other hand, present conditions have also sharpened our reliance on the household consumer. This is by no means limited to the relatively financialised Anglophone economies. Germany’s mighty manufacturing sector, beset by difficulties from Brexit to global trade disputes, is behind recent gloom in the economic figures. Major infrastructure projects, if badly conceived, can lock in an unhealthy incentive to keep the population spending – see the hapless development of Berlin’s Brandenburg airport, dependent on retail for up to half of its profits. Meanwhile, the UK’s sickly retail sector, pressed on one side by trade uncertainty, strains under ever-larger piles of corporate debt.

All of this has disastrous ecological consequences. In 2009, in the wake of the global recession, Friends of the Earth Europe reported people in rich countries consume up to 10 times more natural resources than those in the poorest countries. As development raises standards of living for vast numbers of people living in the Global South, especially in China and India, keeping material consumption and carbon emissions from spiralling upwards will require a change of gear in resource efficiency and, simply put, more frugal behaviour by Western consumers.

Last year an important paper in Nature found that ‘physical needs (that is, nutrition, sanitation, access to energy and elimination of poverty below the US$1.90 line) could likely be met for 7 billion people at a level of resource use that does not significantly transgress planetary boundaries’. Meeting ‘more qualitative goals (that is, life satisfaction, healthy life expectancy, secondary education, democratic quality, social support and equality)’ for people in all countries will require major changes in ‘provisioning systems’ – that is, an overhaul of economic institutions. In other words, unnecessary material goods valued by Western shoppers put at risk the attainment of even more fundamental social and human rights for the majority of the world’s population.

So the policy response to a fresh crisis must be viewed through an ecological lens. With interest rates still at rock-bottom and quantitative easing alive and kicking, the flow of easy money creates a powerful incentive to urge an anxious public to ‘keep calm and carry on spending’. The planet cannot afford such timidity, nor complacency over a spontaneous rise in so-called conscious consumerism.

Instead, as well as supply-side measures clustered under a Green New Deal or Green Industrial Revolution, the crisis toolkit must consider consumer demand. Policy can make a consumption surge conditional on sustainability with policies like fiscal incentives for retail companies to apply rigorous, sustainable standards. Electric vehicles already enjoy support from governments in many countries – notwithstanding some rowbacks. These schemes can be designed to contribute to the fiscal ‘automatic stabilisers’ that push back against a recession: for instance, by channeling money from penalties for emissions-intensive vehicles into subsidies for EVs.

Alongside a shake-up of the energy mix, governments must promote the circular economy. Investment can target projects aimed at reducing household and supply chain waste. Right-to-repair schemes being pioneered by civil society deserve tax incentives or other market-shaping assistance from the state. And across all industries, we must move away from early obsolescence of consumer goods. A report prepared for the European Commission in 2012 recommended a host of policies to target these issues, such as grants for industry to initiatives to improve product lifetime or reduced VAT for more efficient and durable products.

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Thinkers pioneering a new economics are joining the dots between the demands of sound economic management during a downturn, social justice, and the ecological crisis. Vocal criticism of a decade of austerity laid the groundwork. Now progressives, eager to raise living standards, must watch their messaging to promote sustainable consumption. Those sounding the alarm about resource use are right that rich nations must not continue to overspend their ecological budget.

When the next crisis arrives, parties arguing for a green transformation will have to prove they understand that.

In response to widespread economic injustices and a burning planet, the march for a new economy gathers momentum. Central to these efforts should be a ‘mission-oriented’ approach to procurement in central government, as outlined by new Demos research this week.

Procurement is the government’s largest expenditure, amounting to almost £300 billion a year – around 13% of the UK’s GDP. That’s an enormous amount: nearly three times what we spend on the NHS in England. Procurement is therefore a uniquely powerful tool for progressive policy makers to wield.

Useful fundamentals already exist for progressives to build upon. Through ‘social value’ criteria, the government can try to maximise the social, environmental and economic impact of procurement.

Social value has already been used to deliver positive economic change at a local level. Organisations such as CLES have long worked with local authorities to ensure procurement better addresses local needs and delivers more for local people. The most well-known example of this is probably the work of Preston City Council and their pioneering approach to community wealth building.

However, whilst progress has been made in local government there is also an opportunity to go much further at the national level. Our research finds progress at this level has often been hampered due to a failure to align social value priorities in central government.

To tackle this we need cross-government social value objectives to foster a ‘mission-oriented’ approach to procurement. This would seek to use procurement across government to tackle a number of national challenges, complementing the mission-oriented approach to innovation and industrial strategy developed by Mariana Mazzucato.

These challenges could include tackling Britain’s endemic low pay problem. Commissioners could require suppliers must offer to pay their workers the Real Living Wage. When we know almost two thirds of FTSE-100 companies are not accredited by the Living Wage Foundation, the effects of this change could be felt widely across the economy.

Procurement could also be used to help tackle climate change. Strict new environmental minimum standards could be introduced, dramatically ‘levelling up’ the playing field. If a number of big government suppliers sought to improve their environmental practices we could see a ‘snowball’ effect emerging, as corporates seek to keep up with their competitors in being seen to do good on climate change.

Procurement is already being used to tackle climate change in Europe. Potential government suppliers in the Netherlands are required to meet certain environmental standards, including measuring and publishing data on their carbon dioxide performance. Organisations are then awarded certificates relating to how sustainable their business is; higher ratings increase a firm’s chance of winning government contracts.

A new approach to procurement could also drive better tax behaviour from big companies. Our research found that nearly three quarters (73.5%) of the government’s biggest suppliers have operations in tax havens. New standards should allow government departments to include a bidder’s effective tax rate – the amount of tax they pay to the exchequer – when considering who to award bids to.

These are just three examples – low pay, climate change and tax avoidance – of challenges that could be addressed by a progressive approach to procurement policy. But there are other reasons for procurement’s appeal as an agent of change.

This spending power represents an opportunity for the government to nurture best practice in the market, raising economic standards without relying on state-administered redistribution. This is highly desirable: for too long progressives have been reliant upon redistribution as a means of delivering change, when this has often been ineffective at addressing structural inequalities.

Furthermore, any government seeking to introduce, for example, new, higher environmental standards would likely face significant levels of opposition to these changes. Introducing these standards, however, through minimum procurement standards would likely be easier to achieve, quickly buying real economic change for a government seeking results. What’s more, by demonstrating these standards do not lead to economic rack and ruin, opposition to their wider adoption would likely be reduced.

Government procurement can and should be so much more than the purchasing of goods or services. Anyone interested in building a fairer, greener economy must put a new procurement regime at the heart of their plans.

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Mohammed Imran, a Pakistani migrant who had been in a Saudi prison for the past eight years, was executed last month.

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Imran had travelled to Saudi Arabia to start a new job and was arrested on arrival at the airport for drug-related charges, a crime that is punished by death in the country. Imran was then taken to a fairly crowded, sand-colored facility after being put on trial on Arabic – a language he did not speak – and without access to an attorney. Imran spent the rest of his days in the facility.

He was just one of the close to 3,400 Pakistani jailed in Saudi Arabia – making Pakistanis the largest number of expatriates in Saudi prisons, according to figures by Pakistan’s foreign ministry,

Saudi Arabia has also executed more Pakistanis than any other foreign nationals – more than 70 citizens of Pakistan have been executed since October 2014 while hundreds, including an 80 year old woman, are currently on a death sentence.

However, in February of this year, Prince Mohammed Bin Salman ordered, during his visit to Pakistan, the immediate release of 2,107 Pakistanis incarcerated in Saudi jails .

And although the minister for overseas Pakistanis made a public announcement in August that 1,350 Pakistani prisoners had been repatriated, no details about these prisoners nor the timeline of their arrival was shared.

“Despite being a close ally, KSA executes more Pakistanis than any other nationality. Not only has it not returned the promised 2,107 prisoners to Pakistan but it has also started to execute them. The Pakistani government must pursue and expedite the release of these people and ensure their safe return” says Sarah Belal, executive director, of Justice Project Pakistan in a statement to the press, Justice Project Pakistan is a nonprofit human rights law firm that provides pro bono legal advice and investigative services to the most vulnerable of Pakistani prisoners, at home and abroad.

More than a million Pakistanis live in Saudi Arabia, according to Global Media Insight, and make up the kingdom’s third largest expatriate community. And for those, like Imran, who have have been arrested, the Saudi criminal justice system seldom offers a fair trial.

Saudi Arabia currently has one of the highest execution rates in the world – and the majority executed are foreigners on drug-related charges. Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the country’s de facto ruler, stated in an interview with Time Magazine that the country’s justice system’s approach to executions might eventually see progressive changes, the death penalty will continue to exist for some crimes but will be removed for others.

While most countries whose citizens make up a significant portion of the expatriate population have thorough consular protection policies and prison transfer agreements with Saudi Arabia, several reports by Justice Project Pakistan show the lack of efforts by Pakistani authorities to protect its migrant workers in Saudi Arabian jails.

The Philippine government, for example, regularly intervenes on behalf of its overseas workers. According to a 2011 government inquiry on behalf of the Committee on Overseas Workers’ Affairs, there was “no doubt” that the country’s diplomatic staff actively monitored developments in death-row cases involving Philippine citizens in Gulf countries.

And in 2014, Sri Lanka signed a labor deal with Saudi Arabia seeking to protect the rights of 500,000 of its citizens working there. The move was made after a Sri Lankan maid was beheaded in the kingdom. At the moment, the Sri Lankan embassy has a 24-hour hotline where distressed workers can call for help.

A 2018 report titled ‘Caught in the Web’, by Justice Project Pakistan and Human Rights Watch stressed the importance and effectiveness of consular protection policies and prison transfer agreements in efforts to protect migrant rights.

‘Caught in the Web’ explored 19 different cases that highlighted the many ways that Pakistani authorities in the kingdom has been failing their citizens in prisons.

In an interview with openDemocracy, Ahmad Khan (name changed), the brother of a detained Pakistani prisoner in Saudi Arabia recalls that he did not find out about the arrest of his brother till three weeks had passed.

“He was visiting on holiday and then flew back to Jeddah. We didn’t hear from him after he landed and when we tried to contact the airline, the airports, and even the consulate, it was a waste,” he states. “Finally, my brother managed to call from a phone that someone in prison let him use. If he hadn’t been able to do that, there would have been no way to know what happened to him.”

Khan’s brother was arrested in 2014, also, for drug-related charges and is on death row. According to his Khan, his brother has not been provided a lawyer nor received any assistance from the Pakistani consulate.

Saudi Arabia does not provide public defender services or state support to those who cannot afford private lawyers. In the 19 cases researched in “Caught in the Web” , only one defendant had access to a lawyer.

Last year, during a panel discussion at the launch of the report, Pakistani Senator Sehar Kamran, called for the establishment of a community welfare fund to provide legal help to detained Pakistanis and reform in the “sheer indifference” displayed by the Pakistani embassy and consulate in Saudi Arabia.

A spokesperson for the Pakistani consulate in Jeddah, in an interview with openDemocracy, has denied any shortcomings in its system and states that all Pakistanis arrested in Saudi Arabia are provided the assistance they need.

Voters in both Argentina and Uruguay will go to the polls for national elections this Sunday, where they will face unprecedented numbers of religious, conservative or openly ‘anti-gender’ candidates.

An investigation from openDemocracy and Economía Feminista, a gender-focused data journalism platform in Argentina, has reviewed the positions of hundreds of candidates in both countries, on issues including legal abortion, sex education and LGBTIQ rights.

We found that at least 160 out of the 646 candidates in Argentina can be classed as conservatives, along with at least 87 included on 998 electoral lists in Uruguay. According to the results of primary votes, polls and their positions on these lists, the candidates stand to win up to 51 seats in Argentina’s congress as well as up to 21 in Uruguay.

Argentina’s currently-governing Together for Change (Juntos por el Cambio) party, and the electoral frontrunner Front for Everyone (Frente de Todos), have put forward numerous conservative candidates alongside more progressive politicians. Meanwhile, almost 40% of this year’s 108 governor candidates oppose legal abortion.

These are significant shifts from previous elections in both countries. Never before has abortion been such a high-profile campaign issue, while new and explicitly ‘anti-gender’ parties have also emerged.

In Uruguay, an anti-gender party called Cabildo Abierto (Open Town Hall) has put forward 43 candidates. It is led by former army chief Guido Manini Ríos who’s publicly rejected ‘gender ideology’ as a “foreign script” that’s designed to “divide us into tribes fighting each other”.

‘Gender ideology’, a term first introduced by the Vatican in the 1990s, has become a key focus of conservative movements which say sexual rights threaten ‘traditional families’. This weekend, the power of such claims to reach large numbers of people will be put to the test.

Uruguay: vying for one-sixth of Parliament

In Uruguay, our investigation identified 43 conservative candidates from the new self-declared ‘anti-gender’ party, Cabildo Abierto, along with 44 other religious and conservative politicians, primarily from the National Party, the main challenger to the incumbent, moderate-left Broad Front.

Primary votes, polls and their positions in electoral lists suggest that these candidates could win up to 16% (21 out of 130) of parliamentary seats. The lower chamber would have nine religious legislators (four evangelicals and five conservative Catholics), half of whom are running for re-election. Cabildo Abierto is set to win 10% of the vote, another nine seats in the lower chamber and three in the Senate.

The leader of this seven-month-old party, Guido Manini Ríos, was removed from his position as an army chief in March, after rejecting the convictions of military officers who had been found guilty of human rights violations during the 1973-1985 dictatorship. He’s also stated that job offers must go first to Uruguayan workers, not immigrants, and has attracted some followers with apparent neo-nazi inclinations.

This would entail a marked political shift for Uruguay, a country with a recent record of progressive laws on issues including legal abortion, same-sex marriage, gender identity rights and comprehensive protection for trans people. What can explain this potential change?

Mariana Mota, a former judge and the current director of the National Institution of Human Rights, told openDemocracy: “This advancement on protecting rights did not keep in step with social change,” and this explains how “part of society disagrees with it”.

These candidates, she added, “attract the conservative Uruguayan with a traditional-role family coupled with military ideology, a concept of western Christian family that provided the social base to dictatorship”.

Conservatives everywhere in Argentina

From Argentina’s governing centre-right coalition Together for Change, six out of 14 candidates for senate seats, and 42 out of 130 candidates for parliament’s lower chamber, oppose sexual and reproductive rights.

Meanwhile four of the 16 senate candidates from the contender and electoral frontrunner coalition, Front for Everyone, oppose these rights along with 16 of its 130 candidates for the lower chamber.

Overall, primary votes and voter surveys suggest that conservative candidates could win up to 51 of the total 154 seats being contested.

Across the political spectrum almost every party has conservative nominees in this election, with only one – the Workers’ Left Front, which is set to grab just 2.5% of the vote – supports legal and free abortion.

Buenos Aires province, with 12.2 million voters – and more than a third of the country’s entire electorate – is a key example of how progressive candidates are also teaming up with conservatives.

There, the Front for Everyone’s governor candidate and likely winner Axel Kicillof supports legal abortion while his running-mate for vice-governor, Verónica Magario, opposes abortion, included an evangelical pastor in her cabinet (she is currently mayor of the La Matanza district) and officially declared a day of evangelical churches.

Other progressive Front for Everyone candidates, including Matías Lammens (running for mayor of Buenos Aires city), and senator Anabel Fernández Sagasti, are on electoral lists alongside ultra-conservatives like the governor of Tucumán province, Juan Manzur, who declared his district ‘pro-life’ and defended forcing an 11-year-old girl who had been raped to undergo a cesarean-section instead of having an abortion.

Manzur, whose province is known for political leaders opposing legislative advances in human rights, is a close ally of frontrunner presidential candidate Alberto Fernández, and could be a cabinet member, despite Fernández saying that he supports legal abortion.

The incumbent governor of Buenos Aires province, María Eugenia Vidal, who’s defending her post on Sunday, opposes legalising abortion. She overturned a 2016 resolution signed by her health minister to comply with a federal protocol for the assistance of non-punishable terminations (in cases of rape, or when the woman’s health or life is at risk).

Vidal, a leading political figure in Argentina, showed her support for anti-abortion activists this month, wearing their pale blue scarf on her wrist. Previously, abortion was not an electoral issue in the country but last year’s landmark Congressional debate on these rights changed this.

Protestors wearing ‘green scarves’ mounted historic demonstrations to support a legal abortion bill (which passed in the lower chamber but was defeated in the senate), and ignited an unexpected, anti-feminist backlash from opponents who donned pale blue scarves instead.

Last year, former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the main opposition leader and Fernández’s running mate, said her movement “could not afford” a split between green and pale blue scarves.

Incumbent president Mauricio Macri, who’s running for a second term, isn’t free of contradictions either. He enabled the congressional debate last year on legalising abortion but recently declared his support to “save both lives” (a key anti-choice slogan) on the current campaign trail.

If primary results are confirmed on Sunday, a new abortion bill could get razor-thin 114-109 support in parliament’s lower chamber, with 34 seats undecided or unknown. However, in the senate, these results suggest that 37 pale blue seats will beat 33 greens, with just 2 undecided.

‘The family, the countryside and the military’

As in Uruguay, Argentina has a new conservative party called Frente Nos, which has 34 candidates opposing sexual and reproductive rights, according to our analysis. They won 2.6% of the vote in the primaries.

This party’s presidential candidate, Juan José Gómez Centurión, is another conservative with a military background. The retired military officer fought in the Falklands/Malvinas war and took part in the 1980s ‘carapintada’ revolts. He said he would veto a 2012 gender identity law while campaigning for “the family, the countryside and the military”.

His running-mate, Cynthia Hotton, is a former diplomat and legislator who founded her own political party, called Values for my Country, which is now part of the Frente Nos (effectively an umbrella coalition for candidates connected to the “save both lives” anti-abortion campaign).

Hotton, a neo-pentecostal politician, is also an organiser of local ‘prayer breakfasts’ held in Argentina for more than 20 years, according to a 2008 diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks. She is a fan of Donald Trump and is frequently invited to the original National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC organised by The Fellowship Foundation, the secretive group explored in the Netflix documentary series ‘The Family’.

Other politicians in the Frente Nos include Amalia Granata – a TV celebrity who embraced anti-abortion advocacy, and this year won a seat in Santa Fe’s provincial legislature with 15% of the vote – as well as evangelical pastor Patricia Silva de Cattaneo, a newcomer to electoral politics who now stands to win a seat in congress, if polls are correct.

Numerous evangelical pastors have publicly endorsed the Frente Nos including Hugo Márquez, part of the ultra-conservative lobby at the Organization of American States (OAS) and a member of the Ibero-American Congress for Life and Family.

Márquez explained his pragmatic approach to elections in a meeting last year with other pastors in Punta del Este, Uruguay: “We are not part of Together for Change nor of Peronism, we do not support parties but values… We are with ourselves. They used us and we are using them. We are going to get our people in parliamentary seats with any party.”

At Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council, researcher Sol Prieto accredited rising evangelical influence in politics to humanitarian work these groups do with poor families. But, apart from their public opposition to abortion, Prieto told openDemocracy that these candidates are “not playing a unified game in the electoral field”.

“Their expansion needs to be understood,” she continued, in a context where “politicians seek support from religious groups to develop public policies and reach places that are beyond the state’s capacity”. Meanwhile, alongside evangelicals, there is also a “network of ‘pro-life’ mainly local parties… coordinated by a mostly Catholic structure”.

In Uruguay, Baptist legislator Gerardo Amarilla, who is running for reelection, is currently the chair of the Ibero-American Union of Christian Legislators, along with three other parliamentarians from his country.

They were also among the more than 600 Latin American legislators who signed a 2017 declaration against alleged efforts of the OAS system to “advance and impose” what it called “ideological policies… that threaten life, family and religion.” This declaration was also promoted by the US Christian right legal army Alliance Defending Freedom.

Amarilla and his colleague Álvaro Dastugue have further been invited to National Prayer Breakfasts in Washington DC. In Uruguay, Amarilla launched the program Parliament and Faith and local prayer breakfasts, and Dastugue contributed this year to a failed referendum campaign against legal protections for trans people which he called ‘disgusting’.

These groups, said Lucy Garrido, campaign coordinator of the civil society group Marcosur Feminist Articulation, are an “extreme expression of patriarchy. They seek an impossible return to passed times. Luckily they express into the democratic system, and we have to respect that, but they have people in denial on gender violence.”

Garrido described a “fight for cultural hegemony” in the region but insisted: “I have no doubts that gender equality will prevail. People want to live better, and countries with strong economies and development are also stronger in human and gender rights. They [conservative groups] are just reacting to the victories the rest of us are winning.”

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This article is part of an editorial partnership with The Fund for Global Human Rights.

In late August, the global trend toward authoritarianism struck another blow. This time it fell in Guatemala, as the outgoing president, Jimmy Morales, officially destroyed the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) – a body established to build rule of law, end impunity for heinous crimes and combat corruption. The CICIG’s successes proved too much for Morales to bear: he himself, along with his son, were under investigation. He revoked its mandate, threatened to free those found guilty as a result of CICIG investigations and targeted the human rights organisations that helped create it.

The rising tide of hostility to human rights, often spearheaded by authoritarian governments, has swept across the globe in recent years, with devastating consequences on rights and freedoms, and the people who defend them. The international consensus that governments must uphold human rights norms is under fire in unprecedented ways. Rules are changing; governments that had long been champions of human rights are abandoning them; key international institutions that were supposed to improve respect for those rights are being undermined.

Human rights defenders are rethinking their tactics and strategies. As they do so, they must begin forging new alliances with others who can influence human rights conditions, including large companies run for profit.

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This can be an uncomfortable shift. Human rights advocates, myself included, are accustomed to calling out the bad practices of profit-oriented business, especially in mining and oil-drilling. Those bad practices continue – as does the need for watchdogs to keep companies accountable for their actions – but they do not capture the full range of corporate behaviour or rule out the possibility of effective partnerships with corporate leaders that value human rights, be it for moral or business reasons. Given what’s at stake, and the power and reach that corporations bring to the table, it’s terrain worth exploring.

Many corporate leaders are starting to acknowledge that environmental, social and governance issues are important to their business interests. This August, for example, the US-based Business Roundtable, which represents the chief executives of 192 large companies, issued a statement disavowing the principle that a company exists solely to increase dividends for its shareholders. Instead, the Business Roundtable asserted that companies should seek to balance the needs of shareholders with those of customers, employees, suppliers and local communities. From that point of view, promoting respect for human rights and the rule of law can serve a company’s business interests as well as its professed ethical values. And while corporations are likely to respond first to the business case, some are also embracing the ‘values’ case for changing corporate behaviour.

Shared interests

The outsize influence of big companies, especially multinationals, means that they can be more powerful than governments in determining how and whether people enjoy their human rights. From a strategic and tactical standpoint, it makes sense to figure out where our interests align and how to bring these influential entities to a shared sense of what change is needed and how to secure it.

Aware of their potential influence, some companies have already done things to make society better. In one recent example over 180 CEOs in the US signed an open letter opposing state efforts to restrict reproductive rights. The CEOs said that restrictions on access to abortion threaten the economic stability of employees and customers, and make it harder to recruit a talented and diverse workforce. Leading advocates for women’s health and rights welcomed these new allies to their cause and encouraged the entire business community to join the campaign to stop a rollback on women’s rights.

The business case for supporting rights goes beyond benefiting employees and customers. Some companies are taking controversial positions on social issues – Nike’s support for US athletes boycotting the national anthem is but one example – to create buzz and deepen consumer loyalty with a new generation that has made clear its commitment to concerns such as environmental sustainability or social justice.

Changing a whole industry

While consumer activism and attention to their bottom line are often what spur companies to take action, stop bad behaviour or develop more ethically produced products and services, there are corporate leaders who care about more than making money. Whatever the motivation, a collaborative approach with rights groups can help build on it by ensuring companies are guided in the right direction and move beyond rhetoric into action.

Take, for example, a recent collaboration between well-known apparel companies in the US, a Taiwanese supplier, local labour unions and human rights groups to combat gender-based violence and harassment in Lesotho apparel factories. A two-year investigation by the US-based Worker Rights Consortium revealed pervasive sexual harassment and abuse of female workers at five factories in Lesotho owned by Taiwanese company Nien Hsing. The US brands – including Levi Strauss, Wrangler, and The Children’s Place – responded to the allegations by signing enforceable agreements with labour and women’s rights groups that create an independent oversight body with the power to investigate claims of abuse and to enforce disciplinary action where appropriate.

Under the agreements the brands will do business with the supplier only if it accepts these worker-led programmes. Significantly, the Worker Rights Consortium guided the brands to do this rather than terminate their supplier contracts, which would have had further detrimental impacts on the factory workers.

This kind of collaborative problem-solving will change conditions of work for the 10,000 workers in these five factories, but it could also make things better across the garment industry in Lesotho and beyond. Kontoor, the company that owns Wrangler, has suppliers in as many as twenty countries, and plans to take the lessons from Lesotho to implement changes in its supply chain worldwide.

In this case, activists were critical both to exposing human rights abuses and to crafting solutions. This is possible today in ways it wasn’t twenty years ago thanks to the growth and development of local human rights groups and movements. Now, bringing local advocates like these into the equation ensures that those best placed to see the abuses taking place on the ground are also helping to develop locally relevant solutions. In the case of Lesotho, having local rights groups involved means that the government as well as the companies will be held to account for ensuring that national labour laws and international standards are upheld.

Beyond naming and shaming

A collaborative approach can complement the more adversarial ‘naming and shaming’ approach familiar to many human rights groups. We can capitalise on the power, influence and – where it exists – goodwill of companies by working with them, when possible; companies can rely on the local knowledge, data and experience of human rights groups to avoid or prevent inflicting harm on the communities affected by their work, and help them instead support these communities in ways that improve lives.

In another example of such collaboration, The Fund for Global Human Rights is partnering with Apple to support human rights groups working in mining-affected communities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The DRC is the world’s primary source of cobalt, an essential ingredient for the batteries that power Apple devices, as well as other highly sought-after consumer products like electronic cars. The cobalt mining sector in the DRC is notorious for corruption, violence and human rights violations such as child labour.

For the Fund, working with Apple to address these issues is an opportunity to do two important things. First, it enables us to bring more resources to groups building support for labour rights, the rule of law and women’s rights in regions affected by mining. This helps to strengthen civil society and, as in Lesotho, enables communities to hold their governments accountable for enforcing labour and other human rights protections. And second, we can work with one of the best-known and most influential corporations in the world to promote respect for human rights throughout its supply chains – an approach we hope other companies will follow.

For its part, Apple sees the value in working together to create local conditions that support ‘cleaner’ supply chains. In its own words: "Apple believes that empowering independent voices at the mine-site level is critical to identifying and assessing risks in the supply chain.”

As a consequence of this collaboration, the Fund has supported local groups that have significantly improved lives in communities affected by mining. These activists have built the capacity of their communities to negotiate effectively with mining companies and public authorities, helping to protect the land and water they rely on. They have exposed the irresponsible exploitation of natural resources and held local authorities and companies accountable for it, as well as for abuses of fundamental human rights. And they have promoted the rights of female mining workers while also documenting and seeking accountability for cases of sexual assault and gender-based violence in their communities.

These examples from the DRC and Lesotho reveal that, despite the increasingly hostile political landscape for human rights, change is afoot at the local level, where activism has grown stronger and more sophisticated. This creates a new arena for collaboration, where such work has significant, sustainable impact and could counter government attempts to silence dissent.

Human rights advocates have long sought to influence corporations, from trying to stop their abusive practices to enlisting their support. As the political landscape is changing, generalisations about human rights groups on the one hand and corporations on the other no longer hold. We all have a stake in creating societies that respect rights and norms, and should be finding ways to work together.