Part 3: The WHO’s War on Ethics and CSR
Part 3: The WHO’s War on Ethics and CSR
How Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Became the Root of all Evil
When a company or organization uses its power for social or charitable ends, most of us expect some PR or positive communications and understand, as with foundations and philanthropies, that there may be other motives behind their social acts of kindness. Most of us are not outraged by corporate actions that go beyond the pure business sphere. Most of us though do not work for the WHO and share their narrow, biased outrage toward corporate social responsibility.
The recent WHO report, entitled “Commercial determinants of noncommunicable diseases in the WHO European Region”, is a full-blown assault on industry. The first part of this Firebreak analysis looked at how the WHO’s definition of a health-harming industry, that they plan to exclude all engagement from, was so wide as to include almost all industries. Part 2 looked at how such a biased denormalization of a major stakeholder group would be unworkable and dangerous for public health policy.
There is a virulent hatred of corporations exuding from every line of this report. The WHO reserves its highest level of outrage for discussions on industry corporate social responsibility campaigns. The authors cannot fathom that people who work for industry could possibly do things that are simply good or beneficial to humanity. The activist crowd that has been behind the commercial determinants of health (CDoH) movement believe that industry representatives cannot be humane (let alone equally human). With predictable outrage emanating out of every case study, this UN agency embarrassingly reveals itself as a biased, bitter organization that holds a shallow, cynical view of humanity.
As someone who had worked for 17 years in what the WHO defines (widely) as a health-harming industry (chemicals/pharmaceuticals), I find their little tirades against companies as not only insulting, but also frightening: that people granted a certain degree of power and influence in the fight to protect global public health can be so aggressively activist, misinformed and detached from reality. The WHO’s belief that they can bully the business leaders providing public health solutions, innovations and life-saving products into isolation reveals an arrogant stupidity at the very core of this global organization.
Defining Corporate Social Responsibility to Fit the WHO’s Politics
The WHO uses a strange multitude of definitions of CSR (relating it to philanthropy and charity work) but finally decides to focus on “public health definitions, which point to the negative health consequences of CSR, and which describe the importance of countering them”.
In other words, whenever a company tries to protect nature, defend human rights or work to alleviate poverty, the WHO and their band of health activists, will have to work to counter them, silence them and let the world know these corporate actions have evil intentions. The definition continues:
… in the case of industries whose products and practices are health-harming or environmentally destructive, their engagement in CSR is not simply philanthropic or altruistic but plays several important strategic roles. These include defending the industry against criticism; deflecting attention from the harm caused by their practices and products; presenting the industry as part of the solution and not the problem; and, ultimately, preventing policy-makers from regulating their practices.
So the purpose of CSR, according to the WHO, is to merely deflect public attention away from all of the harm these companies are doing. They imply here that the public and policymakers are pathetically ignorant for buying into the corporate bullshit. But is this an accurate description of CSR?
I was involved in promoting CSR projects within my company (with about 47,000 employees then) and I do not recognize this WHO depiction at all. Corporate Social Responsibility, first and foremost, is an internal tool. If disasters or tragedies were happening around the world, our employees felt less helpless if they saw how we could help make a difference. Often we had skilled teams, technologies and funds in the affected countries and helping out was, simply put, the right thing to do. Our involvement was presented to our colleagues as good news stories in a world of tragic events.
We also engaged with and listened to activist groups to try to learn from them and seek common ground. Being in a perpetual state of conflict and acrimony, the kind the WHO is spreading with the language they chose in their report, was helping no one. Integral to CSR was stakeholder dialogue and learning from each other. The only thing the architects of the commercial determinants of health campaign choose to see is that companies must be paying off these NGOs who engage to sideline them from standing up and fighting for public health. It seems the WHO does not think highly of the integrity-challenged activist community who can be so easily bought by the dark side.
There is a reason why NGOs like the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) engage with industry groups in the mining, chemicals, fossil fuels and cement sectors. They recognize that working together to reduce harmful emissions is more productive than permanent conflict and gridlock. You can be pragmatic and effective or you can be ideological zealots who only achieve outrage. I suppose that means that WWF is also on the WHO’s little HHI blacklist.
Reputation management through engagement with charities is very common when an industry seeks to gain a so-called health halo by being associated with reputable and trusted organizations. … The term (pink washing) was initially defined by the United States-based activist organization Breast Cancer Action as “a company or organization that claims to care about breast cancer by promoting a pink ribbon product, but at the same time produces, manufactures and/or sells products containing chemicals that are linked to the disease”
The WHO is no doubt aware that there are thousands of chemicals that may or may not be linked to breast cancer as well as other factors, both inherited and lifestyle related. Still they cunningly make the association between chemicals and cancer while hiding behind a reference to some non-profit.
Their ignorance though comes through in spades. Pink ribbon fundraisers are often associated with charity running events from the London Marathon to the Race for the Cure to the Relay for Life where companies and local offices form teams to raise money for research and patient support. The millions of people from health-harming industries running and donating on behalf of their companies are not doing so to ease some guilt at having poisoned the planet and caused widespread cancers but rather because they are working together for a good cause. That the authors of this WHO report think people only do good to make themselves look good (for some “health halo”) says more about their own sociopathic lack of compassion.
At a higher level, CSR reflects the need for moral leadership at the executive level. Often corporate CEOs have to stand up to their boards and top shareholders to do what is right, to take tough decisions which may harm profits and to speak on behalf of others who cannot. When one looks at the caliber of the last few leadership teams at the WHO, it is no surprise that they cannot understand this concept.
WHO’s Condemnation of Doing Good
Here are some examples (there are so many) of the WHO’s onslaught against industry’s efforts to serve society, give back and ease suffering and injustice. What industry actors consider as doing the right thing and going beyond profits, the WHO considers as unacceptable CSR manipulation:
The WHO took offense to how industries “promote the civil liberties of LGBTQ+ communities for marketing and public relations purposes”. Should someone tell this UN organization that many of the CEOs and top board management come from these LGBTQ+ communities. And let’s not forget that one of the first actions by the present WHO Director-General Ghebreyesus was to nominate Robert Mugabe, a known homophobe, as a WHO goodwill ambassador.
Standing proud: Ghebreyesus with his friend, Robert Mugabe The alcohol industry-led campaigns to “Drink Responsibly” and “Drink Free Days” in the UK were poo-pooed by the WHO as scams “to build partnerships with trusted actors”. They seem to indicate that industry is incapable of being responsible.
The WHO condemned Philip Morris for donating ventilators to hospitals in Greece at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (when hospitals could not meet the demand and lives were being needlessly lost). It seems the problem was that some employee felt so good about this terrible action that he tweeted about it. (It should be noted that during this time of the global health crisis, the WHO was spinning in circles and incapable of providing the public with clear guidance on such simple things like mask use.) It was the corporate sector that stepped up, adapted their production lines and saved lives. Distilleries were producing hand sanitizers, factories designging cheap ventilators and companies were donating what they could (while the WHO demonstrated incompetence).
The WHO condemned companies for using crises to promote their brands and logo. “Logically, when a business intervenes in an emergency and uses brand logos on donations or informs the public about the intervention, CSR is in action.” Funny thing is that I often see WHO, UNDP, UNHCR and Unicef logos on tents and vehicles. So it is OK for UN agencies to promote their activities in times of crisis, but not corporations? The hypocrisy here is stunning.
But my mouth dropped open when I read the next WHO assault on industry.
During a cost-of-living crisis in the UK in 2021, a major fast-food company was donating food. The WHO flagged this as disgraceful because the company used a hashtag: #EndChildFoodPoverty. We have to ask though what the WHO did during this time to help protect the “one million children and 2.8 million adults then living in destitution in the UK”. The WHO mysteriously chose to not give any data on how many this company helped feed within the UK, but here are some numbers found by following the hashtag:
Our partnerships with FareShare and Food Drop have seen us deliver hundreds of thousands of tonnes of milk, bread, eggs, salad and fresh produce to those most vulnerable in our society and we will continue to support communities in need.
“hundreds of thousands of tonnes” of food aid (at the time of their press release) ... According to the WHO report, this company and their actions are shameful. The WHO denigrated the food aid saying “it offers a short-term solution to a social issue without tackling the root cause of the problem”. I think the WHO seems to have forgotten there was a global pandemic going on then and so many parents had lost their jobs.
Industry had thousands of cases where they diverted funds, adapted production lines and shared their skills during the pandemic, where the public suffering was worse than it should have been due to WHO mismanagement in the first six months, and then the WHO publishes a scathing report criticizing these companies for it.
Curious Selective Omissions
There are other aspects of CSR that the WHO chose not to mention in their report, like:
how global industries have acted to protect workers up the supply chain to ensure social and ethical work conditions according to Western standards.
Companies like J&J (an alleged health-harming industry) established pension plans for their employees in the 19th century long before governments had ever considered such actions.
Product stewardship, the commitment to continuously improve products and processes, was the source of industry’s later focus on sustainable development. So many of the health solutions the WHO uses were developed via product stewardship.
The WHO also failed to consider the promotion of CSR-like campaigns used by organizations close to the UN, like civil society groups or foundations. Take for example Bloomberg Philanthropies. If we follow the WHO’s standards of opportunism condemnation, then Michael Bloomberg should be the first virtue opportunist on the list. His donations to the WHO were linked to his nomination as a health ambassador (a title that gives him license to shmooze with world leaders at UN conferences). He is earmarking his funding grants to ensuring a strong WHO position on noncommunicable diseases in order to correct his failed campaigns as mayor of New York. He uses this relationship to continue his battle against the industries he despises.
The WHO should be condemning the false virtue of billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Instead they take his money and do his bidding. Telling.
Part 5 of this Firebreak series will try to understand how so many well-paid WHO representatives with PhDs could produce and publish with such an incredibly stupid strategy document. The next part of this series will consider whether the WHO’s proposed alternative (more funding for activists and civil society organizations) could provide better services than what industry-led initiatives have been able to achieve.