Sarah Kaplan writes for the Toronto Star that companies need to act more urgently to pursue social justice.
Australia’s apocalyptic bush fires make the dystopian future of “Mad Max” look tame. The World Economic Forum recently reported that it will take another 100 years to achieve gender equality at the current pace of progress. Garbage patches twice the size of Texas have accumulated in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, wreaking havoc on ocean food chains that reach all of the way to human consumption.
Corporations are implicated in it all. That isn’t company bashing. It’s just a reality.
Pick an issue. When it comes to climate change, we can rightly blame the top energy companies (prominent among them are Canadian companies such as Suncor and Canadian Natural) that are responsible for the majority of industrial emissions. But we can also put the responsibility on car companies for not making more fuel efficient or alternative fuel cars. Or Amazon for congesting roads with polluting vehicles to make same-day deliveries. Or paper companies for their use of virgin tree pulp that removes major carbon sinks by cutting down forests. Or the banks that finance these companies. And the list goes on.
Achieving gender equality is slow because companies simply are not hiring and promoting women into higher paying roles. Pay transparency reports in the U.K. revealed many Canadian companies that operate there — for example, RBC, SNC-Lavalin and BlackBerry — have wage gaps of 30 to more than 90 per cent, mainly due to the lack of women in leadership.
According to Greenpeace, one truckload of plastic enters the ocean every minute. It identified 10 companies — Coca Cola, Pepsi-Co, Nestle and Danone among them — as the largest sources of this plastic pollution. We can hold retailers that sell those products accountable as well.
Many corporations have negative social or environmental consequences that can be considered trade-offs: we get fast delivery, but pollution increases; oil companies employ people and return dividends to shareholders, but the climate warms; organizations avoid changing promotion practices, but qualified underrepresented people do not get advancement opportunities.
While the government clearly has a role in regulating pollution or mandating pay equity, companies can and should step in to lead change.
It is in vogue for companies to file corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports discussing how they are doing on these social impacts.
Canada has a legal framework (stemming from the BCE decision by the Supreme Court) for considering the interests of stakeholders not just shareholders, but Canadian companies have not followed suit.
Action to address these trade-offs has been, on average, incremental at best.
That simply will not do. It’s 2020 and the world is on fire.
One wonders if Canadian business leaders are more interested in being seen as doing the right thing rather than doing the work to make transformational change. They have budgets for splashy events, but what about budgets for transitioning to a low (or no) carbon economy, reshaping how they recruit and promote diverse talent or move to zero waste?
If companies don’t get ahead of these challenges, governments and society will push harder to hold them accountable.
Lawsuits demanding governments make polluting corporations pay for climate change damages are increasing around the world. Many European nations, and recently the State of California, now demand quotas for women on boards. Non-profits in India are launching brand audits of waste to put the spotlight on firms producing single-use plastics. Canadian companies will not be immune to these pressures.
Companies have the opportunity to treat these trade-offs their businesses create as invitations to innovate.
For example, Jet Blue’s recent announcement to purchase carbon offsets to go carbon-neutral for all its flights is a commitment mechanism that will inspire innovation. By bringing the cost of its carbon footprint to its bottom line, it will be forced to demand more fuel-efficient jets and reconfigure its operations.
Salesforce created a Chief Equality Officer position to focus on its diversity and inclusion initiative.
Unilever’s commitment to reduce plastic packaging requires innovations in materials, product design and supply chains and partnerships.
These companies are transforming how they operate to address the climate, inequality and pollution crises. Canadian business leaders need to see these crises through an innovation lens and pursue radically innovative solutions.
There’s no time to waste.
**This is the reprinted text from the Toronto Star. The full text is available online here.
