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.
I have taken the opportunity here to post the full text of the remarks I prepared for the session. The remarks are entitled: “Peaches and Plums do not Speak, but they are so Attractive that a Path is Formed Below the trees” [桃李不言，下自成蹊]: China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights. As its title suggests, the remarks consider the points of necessary convergence between the emerging and robust system of global trade being developed by China through its Belt and Road Initiative and the normative framework of the UN Guiding Principle. I suggest points of convergence as well as challenges to both systems for the necessary task of building a win-win common future.
