In collaboration with the Corporate Responsibility Coalition, Save the Children UK conducted a research on Corporate Social Responsibility and why it is actually not working with the companies.
The report is prepared by Deborah Doane from The Corporate Responsibility Coalition and Alison Holder from Save the Children UK.
They looked into 3 voluntary codes. First one is the International Marketing Code for Breastmilk Substitutes, the second one is the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and the last one is the Ethical Trading Initiative.
In their report they state that, all three of these codes are violated by many company leaders even if they have said to be caring and hold policies to support the aims of these codes. They also found a catch-22 situation, where the market drivers contradict the principles of voluntary codes. They also put that there are no sanctions for the violations of the codes in the schemes of governments there governments are unable to support the codes and the codes cannot be implemented and enforced.
In short, government involvement is needed regarding corporate social responsibility as well as companies.
Since companies have priorities(government regulations are among them) they tend to think about their benefits before contributing to the society voluntarily. However, if there would be government rules regulating these actions companies could become more socially responsible.
In their report, they also come up with some recommendations on initiating CSR activities.
1. Voluntary activities should be seen as a way of encouraging dialogue. There has to be accompanying government policies.
2. Company leaders should include CSR in their lobbying activities.
3. There has to be penalties for the companies who signed up to voluntary codes of conduct but who do not meet their stated goals.
4. There should be national laws that are promoted by governments, such as labour laws or transparency laws in order to establish the codes of conduct.
5. Justice to the victims of corporate abuse should be provided.
6. Governments and companies should support and implement international measures that can encourage codes of conduct. This could be at the UN Human Rights Norms for Business and at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Guidelines on Multinational Enterprise.
See the full report at:http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/sites/default/files/docs/Why_CSR_is_failing_children_1.pdf
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