U.N. Launches a Program With Big Business
N E W Y O R K, July 28 -- You can say the United Nations has just done it, Nike fashion.
In a partnership deal that is raising eyebrows, U. N. secretary-general Kofi Annan launched a program on Wednesday for corporations, including Nike Inc., to uphold human rights standards in countries where they operate.
Called the “Global Compact,” the program is a meeting of 44 multinational corporations, labor unions, human rights and conservation groups in an effort to stave off the backlash against globalization that grabbed international attention with the disturbances at the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle last year.
‘Remember Davos, Remember Seattle’
The concept was first floated in a January 1999 speech by Annan at the World Economic Forum, a weeklong annual meeting of elite business figures at Davos in the Swiss Alps.
He warned that market expansion and protection of private property was moving far faster than rules on social and environmental rights, thereby triggering a backlash against trade liberalization.
But it was Seattle that spurned him to action.
“The secretary general was concerned that the backlash against globalization had no direction. He was concerned about reactions that were opposed to openness, that were inward-oriented,” said Georg Kell, a senior officer at the executive office of the Secretary General.
Global Compact requires corporations to commit themselves to nine key principles embodied in U.N. treaties or risk a backlash from poor nations left out of globalization. These include ending sweatshop conditions, child labor, discrimination against minorities and developing environmentally friendly technologies. Once a year on a special U.N. Web site, they must publicize how they have succeeded in applying the U.N. principles of good international behavior.
‘Wrong’ Corporations
But skeptics wonder if it’s seemly for the United Nations to do business with big business. Some even call it a deal with the devil. Greenpeace, the international environmental organization, has denounced the plan, saying it could provide “abusive corporations with a prestigious platform from which they can ‘greenwash’ themselves.”
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