Friday, November 22, 2019

The Norway Pension Fund Global and Migrant Workers: Council on Ethics Recommends Exclusion of G4S PLC (UK)






The Pension Fund Global has recently distributed notice of the Recommendation, made substantially earlier, by the Council on Ethics that G4S PLC (G4S) be excluded from investment by the Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG) due to an unacceptable risk that the company is contributing to systematic human rights violations. The recommendation is based largely on an assessment of G4S's treatment of migrant workers in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (the Emirates), who are in large measure migrant workers from India, Pakistan and Nepal, among others.

The recommendation, of course, is not unexpected.  And it continues a trend in Western Europe to put pressure on Gulf States with respect to their treatment of migrant and guest workers.  The decision comes on the heals of years of scandals relating to this issue that has caught a number of enterprises, most famously FIFA, in its net.  It represents a calculated but not imprudent strategy of threatening misbehaving states indirectly by going after the key business partners that are important to those states. That importance can be a function of prestige (FIFA) of of the management and maintenance of order among a large foreign population with respect to whom the rights of citizens are not to be accorded.

At a fundamental  level, of course, is the issue is one of disciplining states on the periphery of Europe with respect to migration in ways that might align these non-Western states with Western sensibilities, cautions, and approaches--all offered as global consensus positions. More fundamentally still, one can only wonder the extent to which the European crisis of migration--and especially its threat to what had once been a cosy set of European values, made more cozy still by the remoteness of migration of the sort encountered now--plays a role in both the policy drift of the Pension Fund Global and its instrumental use by Norway. Of course, that policy might also be assumed to have paid dividends as a means of expiating Europe's sins against Jews and Roma but on the bodies of people's other than Jews or Roma, and still comfortably removed from the European heartland.  That is not to say that the issues are neither profound nor the suffering of the migrant and other workers not profoundly distressing.  Indeed, it is altogether too easy to have a look and conclude that such conditions are intolerable.  And yet law, and the normative systems on which it relies for its legitimacy are not solely directed by a sense of personal outrage, nor by the stratagems of politics. And most fundamentally, the issues touched on touch on the nature of labor and line drawing on an essentially exploitative relationship--when does the demand of a labor "boss" to an "employee" become the command of "masters" to their "slaves." Those issues are only lightly touched on here and only at their extreme.  And yet they alsop merit much greater consideration.

For all that the Recommendation is at its most useful precisely for pointing out the global conditions that make it so easy for the situation condemned in the Gulf to arise virtually anywhere. It might have been more useful had it confronted the fundamental issue of labor-slavery in a more straightforward way.  There is an issue with respect to which enterprises are  in  a strong position to intervene and to change culture through their own behavior. Yet it is with respect to the issue of migration--and to its global resolution--that the attention of states (particularly) and enterprises (as complementary regulatory sources) ought to be moving to solve.  That resolution is not bound up in the piety of speeches or in the declaration of public bodies well insulated from close contact with the awful realities of these lives.  Moreover, as much as the power of markets and the societal field has grown, and as much as the largest corporate multinational production spaces may have regulatory authority within its sphere of activity, migration requires more than market power and regulatory authority over production chains. Here (at last) one comes face to face with one of the clearest residual duties of the state--the protection of its demos and its territorial space in a way compatible with internal constitutional principles and external principles of international law and norms.  To those ends, resolute action is required--in law and enforcement, public, domestic and international--from sources other than the Pension Fund Global, and through other than global business.

The Recommendation follows below and may be accessed here.

















 













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