Over the last several years, human rights abuses and labour standard malpractices by multinational corporations have taken to the spotlight. Notably, a number of factory fires and collapses in export processing zones in Southeast Asia have been advocated for by the media, bringing much needed attention to the global consumer and international community. One example was the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh in 2013 that left over 1,000, majority women, dead. It was reported that just that morning, a number of women complained about the buildings seemingly deteriorating structures and pleaded for someone to look into it. Much to the shock of the international world, human rights abuse mechanisms and functioning trade unions were, and continue to be, nearly inoperable in many of these regions.
The Ruggie Principles were proposed to measure and strengthen the human rights performances of the business sector around the world. The “Protect, Respect, Remedy’ has been used as a framework for business and human rights. Importantly, various studies have been conducted on business malpractices globally to consider whether corporations can be trained to recognize that working with the United Nations is positive.
A large scale comparative study conducted by Toffel (2015) produced positive data that supports Ruggies hypothesis. There are functioning accountability mechanisms to support that corporations can be trained to behave better through corporate social responsibility in respect to global labour standards. They found that suppliers are more likely to adhere to global labour standards when they are embedded in states that participate actively in International Labour Organization treaty regime and have stringent domestic labour law and high levels of press freedom. They also found that suppliers perform better when they serve buyers located in countries where consumers are wealthy and socially conscious. These findings suggest the importance of overlapping state, civil society, and market governance regimes to meaningful transnational regulation (Toffel 2015).
Therefore, Ruggies principles are relevant to the critical conversation over the relationship between multinational corporation accountability and state accountability. MNCs are complex international actors with rent seeking capabilities but exhibit certain elements of corporate social responsibility. To make Ruggies principles more meaningful, conversation on multinational corporations must continually adapt to consider a multiplicity of actors (state, global consumers, media, NGOs, people affected by externalities) and seek to hold each powerful actor accountable for the protection of workers and citizens.
Complimentarily, Keck and Sikkink produced interesting research on Transnational Advocacy networks in International and Regional Politics. Network is an appropriate term to describe the conditions under which increased social responsibility upon MNCs might be achieved. Networks allow us to consider the role of media, churches, trade unions, consumer organizations, intellectuals, NGOs, governments, foundations, local social movements, and a myriad of social and political actors. These international actors have widely divergent policies and goals, but their social priorities may place pressure upon larger and more powerful international and domestic actors to implement CSR.
A significant shift in global thinking would be to consider multinational corporations as sources of governance, in the way that we see states this way. Ruggies principles are in part are asking us to shift our way of thinking. Rather than seeing MNCs and states as separate units, considering the relationship between the two as nuanced, dependent, and equally capable of supporting and respecting the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights. Further, by considering a myriad of actors, appropriate accountability mechanisms for human rights abuses and labour standards will influence the state-MNC relationship towards a more socially responsible unit.
Toffel, M. W., Short, J. L., & Ouellet, M. (2015). Codes in context: How states, markets, and civil society shape adherence to global labor standards. Regulation & Governance,9(3), 205-223. doi:10.1111/rego.12076
Crawford, R. (2019). MNC’s and the Evolution of Global Governance (Lecture). Multinational Corporations & Globalization.