A lot of multinational corporations have voiced their support for Black lives lately and committed to internal improvements-- like diversifying boards and recognizing Juneteenth as a paid employee holiday. That’s great. But by failing to address fundamental supply chain issues-- what products they sell, who makes them, and under what conditions-- these companies ignore the negative impacts their business operations have on millions of people of color.
What would the world look like if big businesses actually implemented Black Lives Matter (BLM) values throughout their business models? The short answer: very different.
This post gives examples of the hypocrisy between corporate PR and business impacts on people of color. It imagines steps companies could take towards creating a world where anti-racist statements align with operations.
If companies really supported BLM values, they would take human rights abuse across global supply chains more seriously.
Many corporations that publicly support BLM persistently disregard Black and Brown lives throughout their supply chains. Take repeat offenders Cargill and Nike.
Cargill
Last month, agribusiness giant Cargill released a statement in support of Black lives in which it committed to help combat anti-Black racism in the communities where the company operates and create a more inclusive culture within Cargill. The company has since posted on Twitter and Facebook that it “stand[s] with all who have spoken up to say Black lives matter and ‘not ever again.’” However, Cargill’s belief that “equal rights and human dignity are absolute” apparently does not extend to the workers in its global supply chains.
Since 2001, Cargill and other major chocolate companies like Nestle have promised to end child labor in their cocoa supply chains. And yet, it is estimated that more than two million Black children are still working under dangerous conditions in the West African cocoa sector, which produces most of the world’s cocoa. Many of these kids have been trafficked and are forced laborers.
With the distraction of empty promises to adequately monitor and respond to abuses and corporate social responsibility projects that sporadically address symptoms of deeper problems, Cargill has repeatedly pushed back its voluntary deadline to eliminate child labor in its supply chains. Cargill’s new self-imposed goal is to end child labor in its supply chain by 2025, although it’s unclear how this will happen if the company continues to ignore root causes of forced and child labor like grossly underpriced cocoa. In the meantime, the company has spent nearly two decades talking about the issue in Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives and fifteen years trying to get a class action brought by former forced child laborers in the Cote d’Ivoire cocoa sectors dismissed from federal court.
To implement BLM values, Cargill could start by paying more for the cocoa it sources from West Africa, tracing its cocoa supply chains, publicly reporting on independent monitoring, and implementing effective grievance mechanisms for victims.
Nike
Nike has built itself as a brand that supports athletes of color. For example, it recently featured activist football player Colin Kaepernick in its thirtieth anniversary advertising campaign. Last month, the company published a statement of support to the Black community and pledged millions of dollars to organizations fighting racism in the US. But Nike has a long way to go to protect workers manufacturing and producing apparel for it around the world-- mostly people of color.
Nike was one of the main targets of the anti-sweatshop movement of the 1990s, and over the years it has responded to negative publicity about its supply chain practices by adopting aspirational sustainability policies and working with independent monitors. But the company’s relationship with independent monitors has been tenuous. In 2016, it denied the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC)-- an independent monitor-- access to one of its supplier’s facilities, a factory in Vietnam with consistent red flags for workers’ rights. Nike cut off even more access the following year. Furthermore, despite paying more for athlete sponsorships, Nike consistently performs lower than other multinational apparel companies on living wages for workers. In fact, between 1995 and 2017, workers’ shares of the price customers pay for a pair of Nike shoes dropped by 30%.
Nike could take a concrete step to improve the lives of the millions of workers of color in its supply chains by adding third-party beneficiary language to its Supplier Code of Conduct to provide workers a legal tool to enforce supplier promises on human rights and environmental protection.
If they were committed to supporting people of color, companies would refrain from contributing to, and profiting from, the prison-industrial complex.
Many companies claiming to support BLM use US prison labor to produce their goods as cheaply as possible. People of color disproportionately make up the US incarcerated population, and if Black and Latinx people were incarcerated at the same rate as white people, the country’s prison population would drop by approximately 40%. Of the 2.2 million people currently incarcerated in the US, about half perform some kind of labor in prison, and 63,000 produce goods for customers outside prison walls. Prison labor is also, arguably, a form of legalized racial discrimination in which incarcerated people of color perform less desirable jobs-- for nominal or no pay under worse conditions-- than their unincarcerated counterparts.
Although there is not much data on how many companies use US prison labor, the number is likely in the thousands. For example, more than 4,000 companies-- both US-based and international-- hold service contracts of $150,000 or more with prisons in New York, California, Texas, Ohio, and Florida. More than 300 of these companies also use prison labor.
If these thousands of companies wanted to live BLM values, they could revise their business models to not rely on artificially deflated labor costs and stop using prison labor altogether. Or they could guarantee that suppliers relying on incarcerated workers recognize the same labor rights and provide the same benefits and pay as they do for workers outside of prison; ensure that all work performed is purely voluntary; and ensure that incarcerated people’s failure to work will result in no loss of privileges.
If they wanted to implement BLM values, companies would quit selling harmful products that promote Eurocentric beauty standards.
In addition to supply chain abuses that harm workers of color, some companies that publicly support Black lives and embrace diversity in advertising also sell problematic beauty products.
Take Unilever. Despite its recent statements and Dove’s real beauty campaign that promotes natural beauty mainly to Western consumers, Unilever's prevailing message to South Asian consumers has been: lighter skin is more beautiful. Unilever's Fair and Lovely brand sells skin-lightening products mainly in South Asia that feed into harmful social constructs of beauty and are dangerous to human health.
Recently, Unilever faced public outcry over the company’s hypocrisy. But rather than remove its skin-lightening products from the market, Unilever renamed its “Fair and Lovely” brand “Glow and Lovely.” It plans to replace all references to “fair,” “fairness,” “white,” “whitening,” “light,” and “lightening” on its packaging with “glow,” “even tone,” “skin clarity,” and “radiance.”
If Unilever wanted to take action to support people of color, it could discontinue skin-lightening products and all other beauty products that promote racist beauty standards, are harmful to human health, or both.
Cindy Wu and Amy Kato are Legal Interns and Avery Kelly is a Staff Attorney at Corporate Accountability Lab.
