McDonald's and Corporate Social Responsibility?

[Guest guest]

McDonald's and Corporate Social Responsibility?

A Ronald McDonald Fantasy

 

Paul Hawken is the author of " The Ecology of Commerce " and " Natural

Capitalism. " He is the founder of the Sausalito-based Natural Capital

Institute and is on the advisory board of Food First/Institute for Food

and Development Policy, a non-profit public interest group.

 

 

 

This April, the McDonald's Corporation issued its first report examining

its record as a socially responsible corporation. " Social responsibility

is not a project or a program, Jack M. Greenberg, McDonald's CEO said in

a press release. " Acting responsibly is the way McDonald's does business. "

 

McDonald's April 14th " Report on Corporate Social Responsibility " is a

low-water mark for the concept of sustainability and the promise of

corporate social responsibility. It is a melange of homilies,

generalities, and soft assurances that do not provide hard metrics of the

company, its activities or its impacts on society and the environment.

 

While movements towards corporate transparency and disclosure are to be

applauded, there is little of either in the report. This is not a report

about stakeholder rights, as McDonald's would have one believe. It is a

report about how a corporation that's been severely stung by bad

publicity, poor service, dirty restaurants and declining earnings now

wants to plead its case to its critics. It states that critics don't want

to make things better, but it ignores what their critics care about.

 

Instead, the McDonald's Social Responsibility Report is like Ronald

McDonald: a fantasy. It presupposes that we can continue to have a global

chain of restaurants that serves fried, sugary junk food that is produced

by an agricultural system of monocultures, monopolies, standardization

and destruction, and at the same time find a path to sustainability.

Having worked in the field of sustainability and business for three

decades, I can reasonably say that nothing could be further from the idea

of sustainability than the McDonald's Corporation.

 

The Report states, " being a socially responsible leader [their

characterization] begins a process that involves more awareness on the

issues that will make a difference. " Yet the company has known for

decades the food it serves harms people, promotes obesity, heart disease,

and has detrimental effects on land and water.

 

On May 1st, the Centers for Disease Control issued a report stating that

childhood obesity and related diseases had doubled in the past 10 years,

specifically citing high-fat, fast food as the cause. Addressing that one

issue would make a difference. McDonald's has known about the harmful

effects of their food just as the tobacco companies understood the impact

of their products. Yet they have done little to modify their menu.

 

In the arena of social equity, McDonald's has from its inception resisted

all attempts to organize its workers, and through industry trade

organizations has consistently and intensely opposed raising the minimum

wage. To say McDonald's has actively worked to crush trade unions is an

understatement.

 

It is good to see ideas about materials and reduced waste being promoted

by major corporations. But it is equally important to distinguish between

corporations that offer progressive rhetoric but don't change their

internal practices or their impact on society and the environment. If

corporations can make more money by using less stuff, less waste, less

pollution, so much the better. To be sure, McDonald's has made progress

on recycling, but the underlying nature of their corporate activity has

not changed and the larger impact of these underlying activities is

dramatic and troubling.

 

 

As companies and governments turn their attention to sustainability,

it is critical that the meaning of sustainability not get lost in the

trappings of corporate public-relations speak. For years, McDonald's has

promoted and demanded the least expensive standardized food for its

chains. In so doing it has created powerful incentives for the

centralization of food processing, agribusiness, and long supply lines,

all of which reduce American food security. For McDonald's to announce

that it now wants to have antibiotic free chickens is a slap in the face

to the thousands of small poultry farmers who could not compete and were

forced out of business by the agri-corporations that introduced the very

industrial chicken practices that required antibiotics to avoid massive

die-off of their flocks. Simply stated, standardized food destroys

agricultural and biological diversity. Nothing could be more antithetical

to the recovery of overstressed farmlands than fast food.

 

At this juncture in our history, as companies and governments turn their

attention to sustainability, it is critical that the meaning of

sustainability not get lost in the trappings of corporate

public-relations speak. There is a growing worldwide movement towards

corporate responsibility and sustainability, led in many cases by the

very companies whose history and products have brought real damage and

suffering to the world.

 

I am concerned that good housekeeping practices such as recycled

hamburger shells will be confused with creating a just and sustainable

world. Transnational corporations such as McDonald's and their associated

lobbyists and trade associations have led efforts to Americanize trade

through representatives at the WTO. They have prevented the strengthening

of environmental and labor laws and they have led the effort to eliminate

the ability of smaller, more vulnerable nations to determine their

economic destiny. In other words, they publicly embrace " sustainability "

as long as they can make money and it doesn't change their overall

purpose, which is to grow faster than the overall world economy and

population, and to increase their share of the world's economic output to

the benefit of small number of shareholders.

 

The question we have to ask is what is enough for McDonald's? Is it

enough that one in five meals in the U.S. is a fast food meal? Or do they

want that figure to be one in three, or every other meal? How about in

the developing world? Does McDonald's want to see the rest of the world

drink the equivalent of 597 cans of soda pop a year, as do Americans? Do

they think every third global meal should be comprised of greasy meat,

fries, and caramelized sugar? They won't answer those questions because

that is exactly their coporate mission. They have 29,000 restaurants with

nearly 3,000 new ones added each year.

 

A valid report on sustainability and social responsibility must ask the

question: What if everybody did it? What would be the ecological

footprint -- the impact on the natural world -- of such a company? What

is McDonald's footprint now? The report carefully avoids the

corporation's real environmental impacts. It talked about water use at

the outlets, but failed to note that every quarter-pounder requires 600

gallons of water. It talked about recycled paper, but not the

pfisteria-laden waters caused by large-scale pork producers in the

southeast. It talked about energy use in the restaurants, but not in the

unsustainable food system McDonald's relies upon that uses 10 calories of

energy for every calorie of food produced.

 

" Sustaining " McDonald's requires a simple unsustainable formula: cheap

food plus cheap non-unionized labor plus deceptive advertising equals

high profits. An honest report would tell stakeholders how much it truly

costs society to support a corporation like McDonald's. It would detail

the externalities -- the societal and environmental costs not counted in

corporate annual reports and accounting documents -- borne by other

people, places, and generations.

 

In McDonald's case, these externalities include: the draining of

aquifers; the contaminated waterways; the strip-mined soils; the

dangerous meatpacking plants where migrant workers are employed; the

inhumane, injury-prone dead-end jobs preparing chicken carcasses for

Chicken McNuggets; the global greenhouse methane gas emitted by the

millions of hamburger cows in feedlots; the impact of their $2 billion

advertising and promotional campaigns to convince young people to demand

their food; the ethics of using toys to induce small children into their

restaurants. The list is longer than this. What the report is short on is

candor, transparency and corporate honesty.

 

 

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