Abraham Lincoln once said, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
According to a new book titled The World Belongs to Us most of the world’s big businesses have failed that test. The book is authored by Klaus Werner-Lobo, 42, journalist and one of the best-selling business writers in German-speaking countries.
Born in Salzburg, Austria, and dividing his time between Vienna and Brazil, Werner-Lobo spent 20 years researching hundreds of the world’s most influential companies—from Adidas to Yahoo!, Cisco Systems to Bayer, and Siemens to Shell. He traveled around the globe to investigate multinational companies’ business practices, including thye use of child/slave labor, destructive environmental practices, and human rights abuses in developing countries. He has interviewed executives of many of the world’s largest multinational companies. The ethical issues that he discovered are “profound and widespread,” he says.
Rated as one of the leaders of the alternative globalization movement by German magazine Der Spiegel, Werner-Lobo provides a penetrating lens through which the ethic issues beneath glitzy branding and vaunted consumerism are carefully examined and called into question.
The Epoch Times sat down with Werner-Lobo to discuss his new book.
Epoch Times (ET): How did those multinational companies interviewed respond to your questions?
Werner-Lobo (WL): Most companies that I interviewed acknowledged the ethnical problems that I pointed out. They said, “Yes, we did that and will try to improve.” Some did make some change in order to save public image. For example, in one of Nike’s factories in a third-world country, the company introduced a policy that puts a ban on child labor. But the same problem will happen again in other factories and there are many companies like that.
ET: So what is the cause of such phenomena?
WL: Flawed system, where people get more advantages from being unethical than ethical. When businesses are measured by the single criteria of money/profitability, this is bound to happen. Large multinational companies also swayed some international institutions to aid in the money-centric and profit-driven approach. For example, the WTO (World Trade Organization) and IMF (International Monetary Fund) passed laws that allowed large multinational companies to do business with little or no regard to social, environmental, and human rights concerns.
ET: Can you please give an example of such laws?
WL: WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) or MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment)
ET: What is the best cure for such problems—businesses’ interests achieved at the expense of social, environment, and human rights?
WL: Democracy. We have to speak out, inform one another and organize efforts, creating forces to make business practice, and political process transparent and accountable for its social, environmental, and human rights impact. It takes courage—civil courage to do it. As you know, 2 percent of the world’s richest population controls more than 50 percent of the goods; 10 percent of the richest population control more than 85 percent of the goods. The massive amount of money and power held by the small number of people has sway on governments, institutions, and even media. Multinational companies use money to influence them to favor their business practices.
ET: You mentioned money’s sway over media.
WL: Many media are in the hands of the multinational companies. It lacks critical reports on business ethics and social responsibilities. When media is censored, they stop being a democratic tool.
ET: Grassroots efforts could pay off. Last month, Greenpeace ended years of “Kleercut” campaigning against Kimberly-Clark (which makes Kleenex, Scott, and Cottonelle brands). The company agreed to stop obtaining fiber from ancient forests.
WL: Yes, things will change when people act. This is why I wrote the book The World Belongs to Us. The world belongs to everybody—we all have to act upon our civil responsibilities and make the world a better place to live.
Award-winning American journalist Rushworth M. Kidder once said, “What started as an economic recession has become an ethics recession. At times of momentous challenge, there’s a tremendous yearning for straight-up integrity and sound ethics analysis.”
Werner-Lobo’s book discusses current issues in business—from Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme to the AIG factor, from Yahoo’s complicity in Chinese democracy activist Shi Tao’s jail conviction to toys made in Chinese sweatshops. Everyday, ethical issues could cause significant business and economic problems, Werner-Lobo argues.
