دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی افزایش مسئولیت شرکتی با افشای شیوه های کاری و حقوق بشر - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

This paper critically evaluates Transnational Corporations’ (TNCs) claimed adherence to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)’s ‘labour’ and ‘human rights’ reporting guidelines and examines how successful the GRI has been in enhancing comparability and transparency. We found limited evidence of TNCs discharging their accountability to their workforce and, rather, we found evidence to suggest that disclosure was motivated more by enhancing their legitimacy. TNCs failed to adhere to the guidelines, which meant that material information items were often missing, rendering comparability of information meaningless. Instead, TNCs reported large volumes of generic/anecdotal information without acknowledging the impediments they faced in practice.

7. Discussion and concluding remarks

With awareness of breaches of labour rights and human rights increasing, more attention is paid to the fair treatment of the workforce in global value chains. TNCs are increasingly under pressure to provide an account of how fairly and ethically they treat their workforce. In this paper, we focus on the largest TNCs and closely examine the information they reported on their external as well as their internal workforce in their value chains, having adopted the GRI reporting guidelines on the labour practices and human rights and declaring the status of their compliance with each specific aspect in an index table. While TNCs in our sample generally realise the significance attached to their external workforce, evidence of over-claiming on all indicators suggests that TNCs fail to pay close attention to the reporting guidelines.

The GRI core indicators are generally ‘material’ to most companies (GRI, 2011, p. 7). However, in those cases where some information may not be material to some companies, the specific cases can be identified and their non-materiality declared – with reasons – in the reports. The GRI sets out clear guidelines on the materiality of the information which require companies not only to identify the key issues but also to actively engage with their stakeholders. While the absence of materiality could be an issue on some GRI categories (e.g., major oil spillages under EN GRI categories, not under scrutiny, here), it is difficult to see how any of the labour or human rights categories, defined under the GRI guidelines, could allow any company to exempt themselves. However, attempting to justify material exemption should at least be transparent. Instead, we found numerous cases of TNCs reporting large volumes of irrelevant information (as also observed by Fortanier et al., 2011) as a means of deviating from the key information disclosure required. There appeared to be a tendency among some TNCs to claim full disclosure in their GRI index tables (S8, S6 and S4 – see Fig. 1) even though, in the report itself, the absence of core details were explained away as being irrelevant to home country government regulatory requirements.