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Friends, I have been busy with a PhD, but that is now completed and I will be posting again soon.

News (here and here) of the decline of the prospects for the oil industry continue with reports that some oil producers have seen the writing on the wall for their industry and are now investing in a range of renewable energy businesses. At the same time we hear that Saudi Arabia is diversifying its economy away from oil. Nevertheless Exxon, the most conservative of oil companies continues making Abbott-esque statements like cutting oil production was “not acceptable for humanity.”
We should applaud and encourage those companies that looking to change, even if it might seem a bit late and only when the economics, rather than other more communitarian considerations, became impossible to deny. We should invest our own money in them – superannuation, for instance – and require governments to do likewise.

I think it is also worthwhile reviewing our attitude to the ‘recalcitrants.’ It is easy to stand on the boundary and throw rocks but I am inclined to say that a dose of understanding of their position is worth it, not least because we are all partial complicit in its coming about.

The oil industry and its partner the auto industry must be two of the least technologically agile we have. There has not been significant change in the core technology of the auto industry – the reciprocating petrol engine – for near on 100 years. You can’t convince me viable alternatives have not been found (and probably squashed). So by and large the oil industry has not needed to change either. We know from organizational behavior in other industries that this kind of change is hard, really hard.

So, there are generations of industry culture tied up in the technology of the early 1900s and people are not going to just turn on sixpence to do it differently. Why? They are scared. Scared that they will not, as an industry or as people, survive in an environment they do not understand. But that would be to miss an important point, which is that they are also an energy industry. What they have and know very well – better I expect than many energy technology start-ups – is how to deliver energy into the user community including industry, large and small business and consumers. They know how to distribute, market, sell and how to manage customer relationships in ways that the success of the renewables sector will depend.

If we support them we will also create community relationships that celebrate courage to make positive business change. That will give a more agile energy sector a social licence of great value to them and to the community generally. That is why I think we should be investing in them, and demanding that our governments do the same.

Another episode in the drama of Victorian dairy farmers supplier pricing has the Murray Goulburn Co-operative reducing prices paid for milk at the farm gate without consulting the farmers affected. The co-operative was brought into play to stop the gouging of dairy farmers by the market dominant retailers. Instead, their own co-op is the one now screwing them over. Given that Murray Goulburn has been partially listed on the ASX, its status as a co-op is in doubt.
These events point to two failures of the social contract between producers, manufacturers and consumers. The first is to fail to see that the participants in this drama are all humans who have (I would say) an equal right to share in the benefits of the productive economy we are all engaged in. Manufacturing and distribution, in the form of Murray Goulburn, principally its managers, but also its shareholders, have treated the farmers instrumentally by preferring their own welfare over the welfare of the farmer’s and their families. (I would say they have not seen the farmers as creatures made in the image of God) Management has done this by accepting high salaries and plush accommodation and the shareholders by accepting dividends and capital growth of their equity while allowing the managers to force  prices down. Consumers are complicit by accepting low prices and giving the their business to retailers which participate in the price gouge. Political commentator Waleed Aly has pointed to this problem in his call for consumers to pay a few cents per litre more for their milk and to eat more of other locally made dairy products. Incidentally, such a move would help Murray Goulburn too.

The second failure is that business and consumers have not seen the whole chain of production, manufacturing and distribution as an organic part of society that needs to be nurtured to ensure that it is sustainable as a key component of our food system. Bleeding the farmers dry will break that system and destroy community, especially small, fragile rural communities.
This problem needs us to respond as active and committed consumer activists, as Aly suggests.

Providing young people with an internship that pays effectively $AUD 4 per hour (this week’s Australian federal budget) has been, understandably, criticised in the press and social media as exploitation. Most of the commentary focuses on the relative amounts of the payments and on arguments over the contribution to the person of an existing welfare payment. These concerns skate over some deeper problems.

First, the low payment embeds the notion that young, yet-to-be-skilled people deserve less remuneration and so a lower standard of living than everyone else, or that they should be subsidised by their parents, if they live at home, as some need to do given the low pay rates.

Second, it reinforces the idea that internships are cheap labour, opening the door to exploitation.

Third and more importantly for society as a whole, is the idea that the training of staff is not the responsibility of the organisation employing people but someone else – usually not identified, or that the employee should pay for it personally. This is especially problematic where the same employer expects the employee to arrive work-ready and productive (read profitable) on day one. The concern here is that the business organisation is not really participating in society in the broad sense of making a social contribution at the community and personal level through careful development of a skilled workforce that is valued and well provided for in all respects.

Most businesses are not like this. Good businesses contribute to the common good in a variety of ways including the building of good, employable, productive people. These businesses reap a reward by creating workforces that are enthusiastic and therefore productive, committed and therefore careful, and loyal and therefore with low absenteeism and turnover costs. They are also good product ambassadors in the community and will go on to be, themselves, good employers and community participants

This policy move by the Australian Federal Government only gives oxygen to those who are not like this, the exploiters.

Ferrovial, a Spanish infrastructure company, has made a take-over offer for Broadspectrum (formerly Transfield), the company that manages Australia’s detention centres as well as a large amount of infrastructure like toll roads. According to press reporting (The Guardian 30 April 16) Ferrovial does not see a strategic position for detention centre management in its business portfolio, has not included it in its valuation of the Broadspectrum business and implied it will be divested once the take-over is completed.

Coming in the week that the PNG Supreme Court found detention of Australian asylum seekers illegal and the PNG Prime Minister’s announcement that the Manus Island detention camp must close, Ferrovial’s intention to divest looks like good news and a perhaps surprisingly honourable decision by the company. It will not do any harm to the growing protest in Australia against detention and criticism of Australian migration policy that is supported by both major political parties, especially with an election only weeks away.

But I say perhaps honourable; we don’t know what was at the heart of Ferrovial’s motivation. Is this a principled decision from Ferrovial’s business ethics standards? Their 2015 Management Report states: ‘The Code of Business Ethics provides that “all actions undertaken by the company and its employees shall scrupulously respect the Human Rights and Civil Liberties enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”’

Looks good, however, the executive director of the ‘No Business in Abuse’ organisation suggests this move is in response to the ‘legal and financial liability’ of detention centre management, that is, it is a business risk issue. If so, the decision is not in fact principle­–based but is instrumental, on an assessment that weighs risk to the business on financial and, probably, reputational factors.

That means if the business climate changed or if the business could be managed in such a way to minimise reputational damage, then the business of detention would be on again. More importantly, the business decision is made on the basis of the welfare of the company, principally its shareholders, not on the basis of the welfare of asylum seekers. What looks like a welcome ethical decision would be instead an entirely instrumental business decision financial on financial grounds.

Indeed it may put asylum seekers – the ones in Nauru at any rate – at greater risk. Ferrovial will sell-off the detention centre business at a discount because of the high business risk profile and so possibly to a lower cost provider. This would ultimately mean a decline in the volume and quality of services to asylum seekers, if that is possible.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have been on pilgrimage. Here is an article I wrote about the experience published in the August Issue of The Melbourne Anglican.

From 9 April 2015 the Good Business Project will be in Italy walking a part of the Via Francigena, starting in Pavia, just south of Milan and finishing in Rome five weeks later.

Come back here to see regular updates.

In 1970 Johann Baptist Metz wrote that the risk to our future is that, with technological advances, humans shift from being subjects of civilisation’s technological process to being its product. The question is: development, progress, process – for whom? The problem is not technology – we have it, it is one of controlling economic-technological processes. We have the technological means but we lack appropriate goals, process and priorities. The question is political and social, not technical. I think it is also theological and missiological.

This seems to be devastatingly borne out in the destruction of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 last week. The Pro-Russian rebels (probably) or the Russians themselves (less likely) or the Ukrainians (possible but unlikely) had the technical means for tragedy but not the moral decision-making capacity to avoid it. Against the technical capacity of the missile (and the airplane) they seem positively stone-aged.

We know where God is – in the airplane debris and on the refrigerated morgue-train. Where is the Church in these communities? Well, we are praying and lamenting, Rachel is weeping for her children. But unless we stand up and walk our our west-doors to transform these communities our prayers and tears are for very little except to comfort ourselves.

Several years ago the UN issued a set of Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. I may be missing something but they seem to have had relatively little airplay, so I was surprised to stumble over them recently. Within a wider commentary, they make three simple yet profound statements of claim on businesses and governments, that:

• each State has a duty to protect human rights, including in relation to the activities of businesses acting domestically an extra-territorially;
• each business has a corporate responsibility to respect human rights and to take action to prevent abuses occurring and to make corrections where it fails, and
• States are required to set in place judicial and legislative means by which there is access by the injured to remedy.

The human rights to which these principles refer to are the International Bill on Human Rights (which contains the better known Universal Declaration plus some other documents). I find this an interesting document in several ways. First, the high level of onus on both States and businesses (including business leaders) to ensure compliance and the level of due diligence and reporting that should surround it. These expectations imply accountability without specifying to whom exactly. Second, the breadth of application, which might extend out to related parties, such as suppliers. Third, where there is a conflict between business’ requirements, still it is expected the human rights principles will be respected. Fourth, where abuse has taken place, States are required to set in place judicial mechanisms for effective remedies to be provided to the affected parties, state-based grievance procedures or monitored non-state-based grievance procedures.

You could argue that it contains little that is new but I would say that the collection of these principles by a body with the status of the UN, and force of the principles it contains is new. In particular, I think it is worth noting the clear move in these principles to locate the responsibility of business formally into the public sphere. Not that it hasn’t always been there but these principles make it quite clear that the operations of business should be open to public inquiry, that business is responsible for a level of care for people on human rights terms and that the State has a duty of oversight and where necessary enforcement. The principles give support to those advocating more formal versions of the social licence to operate and challenge self-regulation, especially where it has become cartel-like.

While the principles lie confined to a UN document they have few teeth. Governments need to adopt them as state principles and build enabling legislation to give effect. The business impact of governments doing so for globally competitive companies is obvious and we can expect reluctance to adopt without there being a ‘level playing field’. Witness Australia’s Carbon Tax and Emissions Trading debate!

In my view it is the responsibility of the Church to engage in the debate over the implementation of these kinds of social principles because they provide a contemporary and operationally effective way of giving action to our principles for the protection of the most marginalised people in society. Some will argue that this is not the business of the Church, but I say if it is a matter of public principle, which is what the UN says, then it is a matter of concern for the Church as a socially engaged participant in plural society.

One of the key issues of the Enlightenment that confronts people of faith is the largely successful project to relegate faith and religion to the private sphere. In doing so the ‘public square’ has been evacuated of the presence of the Church, the public profession of faith by the faithful and of public discourse on principles of faith, especially where ethics are concerned. Certainly there are some who speak out, the Pope for one, William Dean in the history of Australia and we cannot discount the influence of these prominent people. But I think it is the case that public political discussion is almost entirely on the subject of mundane civil politics, which is now overwhelmingly about economics.

Yet we sense a dissatisfaction with the uber-rationalism of neoliberal politics and its economics. Even philosophy, which has been no friend to faith, is beginning to doubt the claim of universal rationality suspecting there is something missing. So people like Thomas Nagel reject the material reductionism (that all of what takes place in the universe is able to be explained by biology and its foundational physics and chemistry), that has been a mainstay of atheists like Richard Dawkins.

It has been interesting then, in the last couple of weeks to receive invitations from Melbourne and Monash universities to public square events. The first, at Melbourne University Faculty of Business and Economics, was an event of the Cluster for Organization Society Markets (COSM). This group is interested in the relationship between the market and other spheres of political life – economics, finance, science, arts, music and, to my surprise, religion. COSM plans to conduct a research program on these relationships. The second, at Monash University Business and Economics, was a presentation by Ed Freeman, the founder of Stakeholder Theory – the best (in my view) account of community relationship with business going. His presentation was on the need for business to evolve a ‘new story’, to move away from the old paradigms of profit, production and growth and look to how the business adds value to the community.

In both emergent attitudes to business, economics and community relationship there is a clear opportunity for the viewpoint of the Church to be put. But is the Church the right institution to do this? Metz’ work on public theology distinguishes between anthropological Christianity and incarnational Christianity. The former focuses, obviously, on the human in the world and human institutions and preferences. It is bound in the Church and in this world. The trouble is anthropological Christians have a tendency, where not diverted by worldly idolatry, to become world deniers. Engagement in the public square is problematic for world-deniers, naturally. Metz says the alternative of incarnational Christianity has something to say to the world because it provides a vehicle for hope – in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and the promise of his return – the hope of a future that lies outside the limits of the world, and which locates fulfilment outside the world. Eschatology.

Yet, in recognising the God-created-ness of the world, incarnational Christianity has a love for it and seeks to engage, and transform. However, in abandoning the anthropological I wonder if the institution of the Church, at least as we presently know it, has to be a casualty too? Certainly all the traits that make it inward looking must go. It must be prepared to make its claim on truth in terms the secular world can access – 1 Peter 3.15. It must expect to be a minority and yet in community and open to those who are not sharers of its particular faith. It must be bold and prepared to step outside the confines of its community and its buildings. It must make its truth claims boldly but respectfully of those who doubt them; it must not resile from making these claims even when ridiculed. It must never try to simplify faith in order to make it more palatable because that will leech out all its meaning and its beauty, what makes it compelling. Only a confident, well-argued and sophisticated faith will make the grade in this emerging public square.

References:

Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford, 2012.

Metz, Johann Baptist. Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology. Translated by J. Matthew Ashley. New York, NY: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1992.