Salt & Light: Passionate About Human Dignity

By the late 1990s, the globalization of the economy was an accomplished fact and critics were increasingly strident. The meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in November 1999 was perhaps a turning point in activist mobilization against corporate power and international trade. A broad coalition of various community groups, trade unions, environmentalists and assorted activists staged dramatic protests and captured headlines throughout the world. What was becoming clear to many thoughtful people was that there was a need to gain consensus on new forms of global governance. As business became increasingly multinational, the regulatory authority of the nation state was eroded. National laws were generally not effective in dealing with multinational companies with operations in dozens of countries.

Activists had learned in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s and 90s that often the best way to facilitate global governance for social justice was for civil society to bring moral pressure directly on business, rather than going through national governments. This approach certainly was effective in the Nike case, where consumer boycotts facilitated a change in company policies. Proactive businesses, too, were taking on the character of political actors by partnering with NGOs, formulating rules of conduct and assuming new responsibilities.

For example, some companies took action in protecting workers’ rights, participating in the fight over HIV/AIDS, and advancing education in poor areas. The problem was, however, that there was not a critical mass of “enlightened” companies, so the emerging ethical norms were not yet commonly accepted. For every “Nike” that came to believe that there was an ethical norm requiring a company to monitor its subcontractors to avoid sweatshops, there were dozens of companies unaware of or unconcerned about their responsibilities in the area of human rights, as well as the social and environmental issues in developing countries.

The Proposal of the United Nations

Suddenly, an answer appeared on the scene as to how we would gain a consensus on the moral norms that would guide the global economy. On Jan. 31, 1999, the then-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, gave an address to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, that outlined the challenge and the promise of what has become known as the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC). His basic insight was that national economies have always assumed certain norms or moral values, some codified in law, but many that are not. Further, now that we have moved to a global economy, we must find a way to embed moral norms in the globalized situation.

The problems today are global in scope and many developing countries are reluctant to regulate business with costly new rules for fear of losing investment to nations with less stringent regulations. Often the race to the bottom is a fact of life in developing countries. The problem for Annan was how to move toward overcoming these problems and realize the vision of giving a human face to the global economy.