Business Better and the Transparency Problem

Two of the largest supermarket chains beloved by sustainably inclined people  for their business better approach-Whole Foods and Trader Joes – share a dubious distinction with Wal-Mart. Like the big box retailer that social progressives love to malign, Whole Foods and Trader Joes are both virulently anti-union.

Similarly,  the popular business better Mexican food chain, Chipotle, purveyor of free range chicken and “Food with Integrity” also supports practices that pay the people who pick its tomatoes an annual average pay of rough $10,000, and allows for workers to be routinely, beaten and robbed of their pay. Since 2006 Florida’s Coalition of Immokalee Workers has been working to improve tomato picker worker conditions. These are conditions so awful that since 1997 they have lead to seven federally prosecuted cases of modern-day slavery according to Grist. Since 2006 Chipotle has refused to work with the Immokalee workers to improve and ensure decent conditions for their laborers -despite Immokalee having received commitments from competitors Taco Bell, McDonalds, Subway and Burger King.

The point is not to highlight the problems with these particular purveyors of consumer goods, but rather to highlight a larger issue with sustainability: transparency.

It’s impossible to know if something is truly sustainable without knowing how it was grown, manufactured, or sourced, and what its effects are environmentally and socially on those who create and consume it. Yet, in this age when seemingly every nugget of personal info can easily be found with a google search, companies remain remarkably, shockingly opaque.

This is something that organizations such as Wal-Mart have tried to tackle, with the launch of its
Sustainable Product Index, and in the general rise of corporate non-financial reporting. Yet paradoxically, the rise of sustainability reporting may obscure as much as it reveals and hinder sustainable development as much as it helps.

This problem stems primarily because we as consumers and investors often fail to ask the correct questions. When Whole Foods and Trader Joes champions, what is, by most measures a generous compensation and benefits package for its employees, we don’t think to ask whether those employees have the right (if they so choose) to assemble and work for the conditions they feel are best.

This is problematic, first because it leaves employees beholden to a beneficial overlord. The well being of Whole Foods employees rest firmly in the hands of Whole Foods executive team; a changing of the guard could lead to a change in employee well being – with little recourse. The risks however extend beyond that of Whole Foods employee. In New York City, for example, most supermarket chains are unionized. Many people who work at the supermarkets do so less for the pay, which often hovers only a few dollars above minimum wage – but for the benefits. This is important for two reasons. First, because many supermarket employees hold down more than one job and their supermarket jobs often provide their only access to health benefits, and secondly because supermarket work – which often entails carrying heavy boxes and working with potentially dangerous machinery (deli slicer, anyone) – is potentially harmful. If more supermarkets that are non-unionized move into the city, it not only erodes the collective bargaining base of existing unions (by pushing existing supermarkets out of business) potentially negatively impact the well being of supermarket workers that don’t work for Whole Foods. Stated differently, Whole Foods employees may be no worse off for not being able to unionize, but the labor force in general might be.

Try finding that discussion in a company’s sustainability report.

A similar problem is often times we glean meaning that’s not actually what’s written. When Trader Joes tells us that they work closely with suppliers to get its consumers the best prices by cutting out the middleman, the statement rings with an unstated belief that they wouldn’t do business with someone they knew to be nefarious. Yet tell that to the seventeen year old girl who died in the grape fields of Charles Shaw – purveyors of Trader Joes much beloved two buck chuck, or.

The question is not of intent – many businesses are genuinely trying to take steps to be environmentally more sustainably, and socially more responsible. The question, becomes how do we best reflect the consequences of their actions – in other words how do we make businesses more transparent – so that we as consumers can make the best decisions over which businesses to frequent with our dollars?

Post continues: www.justmeans.com/Business-Better-Transparency-Problem/31159.html