This book has a lot of useful background information on how businesses, non-governmental organizations, and inter-governmental organizations are attempting to deal with the problems of human rights. The interaction of these groups, which is one of my specialties as a business writer, is extremely complex. What is the problem? What should be done? Realistically, what can be done? These are the questions I wrestle with and that I sought to have answered in this book.Unfortunately, I did not find them covered very well and far too many issues receive only a partial treatment. For starters, Schoenberger does not really define the problem with clarity or consistency. At one point, he goes into the universal declaration of human rights and then into a long chapter on China and whether companies should pull out to protest the repressive regime. There is also a long chapter with a vague political history of Burma that goes into far too much detail to make his point that MNCs, in pulling out, had an impact. But China is too big for any one company to affect much, and too important as a potential market as well, so that is not a realistic or even meaningful option in my opinion - a mosquito can't attack an elephant. At another point, it seems to be the working conditions in factories that concern the author. As such, the book kind of flails around from issue to issue without very clear criteria as to what he is looking for and what would be a good outcome.
Then, there is Schoenberger's choice of Levi-Strauss as the anchor for his story. Now that is an interesting company - it really tried to implement practical ethical practices and/or codes throughout its long history - but I wonder if it was the right choice. While Schoenberger used it to illustrate that there may be unreconcilable contradictions between the demands of profit-making and behaving ethically, I am not at all sure that Levi-Strauss is really at the cutting edge of the implementation of global corporate codes. There are other companies, such as adidas-Salomon AG, which are addressing precisely the questions that Schoenberger sees as problems at Levi's: namely, transparency, credibility, and the balance between using human rights as a crude marketing ploy and really trying to have a positive impact. I witnessed how adidas was, in my opinion, successfully dealing with these questions: that company produced reports that were honest about what areas needed improvement and hence were not a simple PR whitewash. That represents real progress and something new, at least to me, and Schoenberger did not seem to have any inkling of these things, which were under development while he was writing this book.
Moreover, Schoenberger did not successfully get inside Levi's in any deep way, so he has written as an outsider who lacks direct and intimate access to the top thinkers there. That means that, in spite of the legitimate distance that reporters need to maintain from their subjects, many of his conclusions are far more speculative than he lets on. For a reporter, he did far too little reporting.
It was very interesting to me to read on things that I myself investigated here. There is a chapter on Sialkot, Pakistan, which I visited to investigate an initiative to eliminate children from soccer ball manufacturing. Well, Schoenberger covers it very very poorly and fails to ask the right questions: for him, child labor is simply bad but it is hard to get rid of. What I saw was that it was an economic necessity to some families for kids to work - and they wanted to - and the introduction of the program, which was a good one and sincerely well intended, had many side affects that were unforeseen, such as eliminating many women from the work force (due to local custom, they had to work in their homes and hence couldn't travel to the regulated centers in outside towns that the initiative established) and the rise of a new black market that paid less well than it had before because middlemen claimed they took on extra risk. Yet Schoenberger reports on none of these ambiguities, preferring to fault the program's design for poor monitoring of the results. That, in my opinion, is bad reporting and it made me suspect everything else he wrote.
The author is quite hard on NGOs, such as the Clean Clothes Campaign and its shoddy methods, and yet seems to be arguing that they are necessary, if weaker, counter-weights to MNCs. This is a difficult area and far more needs to be written about it. As I see it, corporations need to work with them constructively or they risk becoming pawns in a much larger game, as did Nike which is a favorite "whipping boy" of the NGOs. Schoenberger also fails to cover the media's role adequately, as fashions come and go very quickly and corporations can be attacked ruthlessly regarding conditions that they were not responsible for creating, though may have been abetting indirectly.
Futhermore, the author's writing style bothered me. He often employed this kind of over-heated rhetoric - too many adjectives! - that got in the way of the content. This is a matter of taste, of course, but it is not elegant or cooly written.
For me, the usefulness of the book is that it filled a number of gaps in my knowledge and many readers, both generalists and specialists, would benefit from learning about those. But the treatment is flawed and incomplete, in particular regarding what corporations are actively doing to address the problems he raises.
Recommended with caution.
