When corporations refuse to practice due diligence by not establishing grievance mechanisms for remedy of abuses against the hidden 94% of their workforce in their global supply chains, they perpetuate a depraved model of profit-making that has driven inequality to a level now seen as a global risk in itself.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the responsibility of corporations to address worker grievances in their supply chains to prevent inequality.
Sharan Burrow's quote emphasizes the critical role that corporations play in ensuring fairness and accountability within their global supply chains. By neglecting to set up proper grievance mechanisms for the vast majority of their workforce, companies not only fail to uphold ethical standards but also contribute to systemic inequality, which poses risks not just to individuals but to society as a whole. This highlights the broader implications of corporate practices on global welfare and stability.
In practice
During a corporate social responsibility seminar, one might use this quote to stress the importance of ethical practices in supply chains.
What Qatar chose is a system where a worker is owned by his employer. When your employer forces you to live in squalor, makes you work longest hours in extreme heat, doesn't allow you to change jobs, doesn't pay your wages on time, abuses you physically and psychologically, you have no way out, you can't leave. You are trapped.
There is no doubt that the participation of women in the workforce is a serious productivity boost, but to enable this ambition, there must be investment in care - child care, aged care, disability care, health, and education - which are essential social support structures to enable women to work.
The real tragedy of minimum wage laws is that they are supported by well-meaning groups who want to reduce poverty. But the people who are hurt most by higher minimums are the most poverty stricken.
Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research, more on research on lifestyle drugs than on life saving drugs, and almost nothing on diseases that affect developing countries only. This is not surprising. Poor people cannot afford drugs, and drug companies make investments that yield the highest returns.
Economy consists in a due and proper application of the means afforded according to the ability of the employer and the situation chosen; care being taken that the expenditure is prudently conducted.
If you paid Americans a living wage, they would be able to pay for products made by Americans in America.
The first requisite of a sound monetary system is that it put the least possible power over the quantity or quality of money in the hands of the politicians.
If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.