A Critique of the Business Case for Corporate Social Responsibility: Equality and Workplace Health and Safety

The promotion of a business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR) is often understood as a fairly recent method for motivating companies to act ethically and enable positive social change in areas such as human rights, equal pay and workplace health and safety. In fact, the idea that corporate responsibility benefits business is not new. While CSR has been widely discussed leading up to and since the turn of the century, paternalistic capitalism with its roots in enlightened self interest has existed since the days of the Industrial Revolution in Britain (Smith 2003). The recent tendency has been to focus on reducing “reputational risk” (Smith page 60) in consumer, labour and equity markets. Reframing issues that have a legal face, such as human rights, labour practices, pay and employment equity, workplace health and safety and, increasingly, environmentally sustainable operations, into a broad, integrated “package” of socially responsible behaviour called ‘CSR’ is, however, relatively new. Moreover, this broad concept of CSR appears to fits readily with a political shift evident in many developed market economies, where prescriptive regulation of employers has mostly changed to a government preference for less interventionist, goal setting regulatory regimes. This shift often reflects a push towards deregulation, thus allowing more internal control by industry in the name of flexibility and competitiveness in a global economy (Dorman 2000; Tombs 2005). A broader brush approach to employer responsibilities, with fewer resources allocated to, say, inspection and enforcement in favour of more education and training, makes promotion of a business case attractive for government agencies (Tombs 2005). And, bundling all the facets of social responsibility together could make it easier for business to demonstrate reputation as a good corporate citizen if public attention is highlighted in one or two areas rather than all, otherwise their task is, of course, more difficult. Focus on the economics of social responsibility, rather than on social or moral values, also reflects the current political climate. In 1991 Drache and Gertler highlighted the Canadian government’s commitment to free market economics and a parallel elevation of the marketplace over the political and social. Today, this predominance of the market and associated removal of trade barriers (often through deregulation) is evident in a number of Canadian policy initiatives, such as Advantage Canada (Canada 2006) and Atlantica (Arsenault 2007).