Film Review: Canning Paradise

Posted: May 15, 2013 in Films, Natural Resources
Tags: , , , , , , ,
1

English: Bluefin tuna.

English: Bluefin tuna. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

‘Canning Paradise’ is a 90 minute documentary primarily about the commercial tuna fishing industry being established near the town of Madang in Papua New Guinea, but also more generally about the globalised economy rubbing up against traditional ways of life.

Papua New Guinea recognises traditional land ownership in its Constitution, which is fortunate for traditional villagers as they rarely have formally recognised land titles. This provision makes it difficult for the  Government to appropriate land for development. The film also explores the benefit this has had in preventing PNG from becoming a peasant economy.

The village of Madang is a little different because it was formerly a Catholic mission. A court case found that the Catholic Church owned the village’s land and its surroundings, which it on-sold to the Provincial Government in 1991. The Government has decided to open it for development by establishing a so-called Pacific Marine Industrial Zone (PMIZ). This sounds like it is an export processing zone (EPZ) but it isn’t, it’s a title only, no special laws have been passed to exempt companies in the area from normal laws, which is what happens in EPZs.

The Philippino canning company RD Tuna have set up in the area with a number of fishing vessels. Under the deal, the PNG Government receives only 2-8% of the profits in royalties, which amounts to about $50 million. The tuna ends up in one of RD Tuna’s three brands: Diana, Dolly and Dolores.

The PMIZ has numerous issues, for example its rusty vessels do not meet environmental standards which PNG does not have the resources to police effectively.

RD Tuna also mostly employs flown-in Philippino workers rather than locals. Both the company and the Government support the in-house, company-friendly union. When 500 of the Papuan workers went on strike in 2010 over low wages, wage theft and freedom of association, most of them were sooner or later terminated. It seems that the people of Madang are not destined to share in the bounty being extracted right off their shores.

‘Canning Paradise’ is a well made film: not in the sense of being slick, but in the sense of being true to its subject. It conveys the complexity of this issue in depth, resisting the temptation to propose quick solutions. The interviewees were unanimously of the view that a traditional economy has a value even if it can’t be readily expressed in dollars, but beyond that there was no sense at all of a clear way forward. I guess that’s reality: few problems are capable of having straighforward, elegant solutions like you will see proposed in a 4-minute TED talk.

The DVD is available from Ronin Films.

*Postscript: This is the 150th post on fairforall.org. The site recently received it’s 15,000th visit – thanks for your support!

Related posts:

Corporate opacity at Olympus

Posted: April 15, 2013 in Books
Tags: , , , ,
0
Olympus E-PM2 with Tokina 80-400mm

Olympus E-PM2 with Tokina 80-400mm (Photo credit: hto2008)

I was really looking forward to reading ‘Exposure: Inside the Olympus Scandal‘. Perhaps unfortunately it has parallels to the fictional ‘Rising Sun‘ so I was hoping for a similarly dramatic story of moral uprightness in the face of wrongdoing. Maybe some readers found that to be the case, but as I worked through the book I thought the ethics of the situation became murkier.

In brief: Briton Michael Woodford was made President of Olympus in 2011. Just a few months into the job he became aware of an accounting fraud when it was leaked to independent magazine Facta by an anonymous employee. He tells his executives to investigate it but gets stonewalled and, when he pushes the issue, the board dismisses him.

The fraud in question was a loss incurred all the way back in the late 1980s during Japan’s property slump, when an investment turned sour. Company insiders had kept it out of the accounts all that time before deciding to realise the loss in 2008 by purchasing a phoney company and counting the $700 million debt as an ‘advisory fee’. Woodford wryly comments that, had it been real, it would have been the largest advisory fee in history.

But that’s as far as the scandal goes. There’s no hidden agenda, no underworld involvement, not even any personal enrichment arising from these shenanigans. The perpetrators were motivated purely by the desire to protect their own company. A victimless crime then? Not exactly; the shareholders were clearly being misled, however massaging of ugly facts is so commonplace in Japan that it’s difficult to call it wrongdoing (see earlier post about laws vs norms). The Economist described the Olympus affair as “not so much a scandal as a state of mind”.

Is it just a simple clash of Anglo American vs Japanese values? Woodford didn’t think so. He argues forcefully while at Olympus (and again in his book) that such practices are rotten and need to change. Japan’s closed-rank corporate culture, he says, did wonders for the country in the postwar era but now that those companies have grown up they need to be able to adapt to changing circumstances. Unquestioning deference does not allow people to take the necessary risks to fight off competitors, notably including those in next-door Korea. Woodford passionately wants Olympus to succeed but sees its own corporate culture as its biggest challenge. How much impact his actions will have in the long term remains to be seen.

Here he is talking about his experience on Australian television:

Shareholder value versus value to other stakeholders

On the narrower question of the fraud itself, I can empathise with the unknown people who were trying to correct the damage. They remind me of the hapless crew of the Battleship Yamato who continued to man the guns even when the ship’s fate was sealed. Woodford comes from an Anglo-American perspective of shareholder capitalism. In his view the profitability of the company is the number one value. The Japanese, on the other hand, see the company in a more embedded fashion: it exists in a web of relationships including the other members of its keiretsu conglomerate, suppliers, customers, employees and factory towns. It sounds noble to make the company face the music, but what effect does it have on the ongoing wellbeing of all those stakeholders? (If that sounds touchy-feely, don’t laugh; the U.S. Government used exactly these justifications to rescue both the financial industry and General Motors)

Faced with such ludicrously high responsibility, it’s not hard to see why the poor devils working in Olympus’s back offices opted to delay the day of reckoning. I’m not saying it was the right call, just that it’s understandable with the pressure they would have felt.

Harvard Business Review ran an article last month titled ‘Long CEO Tenure Can Hurt Performance’. It compared the stock return of several companies against the length of tenure of their CEO and, sure enough, the short-term CEOs saw the greatest rise in stock price. What was omitted was whether the companies stock prices performed better after the CEO in question departed; not as well, I suspect. However that is a tactical argument. The real point is that bundled into the article is the Anglo-American assumption that the share price is the measure of a company’s worth, and what it accomplishes in the real world is only an adjunct to this. I’m not convinced.

See also:

Related posts:

Awareness-raising games

Posted: March 27, 2013 in Apps
Tags: , , , ,
0

By coincidence, recent weeks have seen the release of two ‘do-gooder’ video games, bringing activism into a largely untapped medium.

sweatshop-580x407

“Sweatshop” (www.playsweatshop.com) is a game produced by Britain’s Channel 4, in which people learn how sweatshops work by acting in the role of a factory manager. It gained extra press coverage by being de-listed by Apple from their App Store a couple of days ago. It is probably better considered as a game about ethics, as you experience the conflicting demands on the manager, than a game that encourages activism. I’m not sure how many people would want to take on the role of the oppressor. No doubt they thought about this during development, it must have seemed difficult to make a sweatshop employee the protagonist. Which brings us to the second game…

half-the-sky-the-game

“Half the Sky” (www.facebook.com/HalftheGame) – a game in which the player takes on the personna of a rural woman working her way towards empowerment, which is a much more appealing plot line. As an added feature, playing the game raises real-life dollars for seven partner development organisations. Cute huh?

Laws and social norms are different things

Posted: March 18, 2013 in Responsible business
Tags: , , , , ,
1
Law School

Law School (Photo credit: Tulane Public Relations)

A little over a week ago, the Australian Council of Trade Unions released recommendations for unions to improve their internal governance, primarily in the area of finances. The panel was announced at last year’s tri-ennial Congress as a response to allegations of misuse of union funds at one particular union.

It should be noted that the people involved in this incident have since been charged with fraud so there is no deficiency of regulation. The recommendations propose tightening-up of internal procedures so that it is more difficult for this kind of conduct to take place unseen.

This got me thinking again about the difference between regulatory compliance and ethics.

All laws have the effect of categorising human behaviour as acceptable or unacceptable. The problem is, the real world does not lend itself to tidy distinctions, so laws become more complicated as they define exceptions and then define exceptions to exceptions. Moreover, this process doesn’t take place in a vacuum; as soon as you proscribe one form of misconduct, another will spring up in its place. You could call this the ‘Hydra Effect’.

It’s worth asking what effect, if any, does legislative redress have on people’s sense of right and wrong?

I don’t think there is a hard and fast answer to this but can see three interpretations:

  1. It sends the message that society disapproves of the conduct and thus the law has a normative effect. This may be true in some areas -notably criminal law- but it seems a little naive to believe that law and morality could be so closely correlated in an era when the laws of the state run to thousands of pages. I once attended a defensive driving course where there was a free-for-all discussion about what were the correct road rules in certain situations – everyone was just guessing! (We know what drivers really do when faced with such ambiguous situations: they don’t consult the rule book, they simply fall back on politeness and decide who will give way using hand signals)
  2. Legislation could in some situations have the perverse effect of lowering standards. Take financial regulation for example: most people involved with finances are behaving honestly at the outset. Then, in response to the actions of a few individuals, the law steps in to set a certain benchmark. That benchmark will most likely be lower than people’s personal standards, as it sets only a minimum standard of behaviour. The normative effect of the law makes them ask themselves, ‘Why should I bother? Here is a clear signal that I don’t need to take as much care as I have been’. How many times have you heard someone say, defensively “But we were acting within the law”? Mandatory CSR targets fall into this category, e.g. carbon emissions treaties and ‘Fair Trade’ standards (see earlier post).
  3. You could attempt to sidestep this dilemma by taking a position that law-makers oughtn’t be interested at all in whether or not the law has a normative effect on people, they should simply see it in an instrumental fashion designed to bring about a particular result – or, even more cynically, see it as a way of reacting to public opinion. You might call this the ‘checks and balances’ view. Immigration laws are an example. Stock exchange rules are another: their purpose is simply to avoid certain outcomes and the moral status of human actors involved becomes irrelevant. This view has its place (see post) but if you apply it universally, you will end up ascribing unrealistic levels of responsibility to Governments, as if their mere fiat alone is sufficient to determine what people do in the real world. Or, if you admit that they can’t, then you’d have to advocate allowing individuals completely to follow their own moral lights. That is basically an optimist’s vision of the law of the jungle.

This leaves us between a rock and a hard place. Yes, laws do carry a normative effect but you can’t rely on that alone.

There was a book by Jim Collins a few years back that advocated the use of “Stop Doing” lists. The idea is that more work will always find its way to you, creating the need for an ever-lengthening “To Do” list; so, to be able to stay on top of things you need to discipline yourself to make a list of what you need to stop doing to free up the necessary time.

Legislators and pressure groups, take heed: more law isn’t always the solution. It might help, but of itself it won’t be enough to bring about the intended change.

Related posts:

Free entertainment? Yes – it’s called advertising

Posted: March 8, 2013 in Consumer campaigns
Tags: , , , ,
2
20100426_cooky_1

Girls’ Generation endorse an LG handset.

Almost a year ago I first encountered ‘K pop’ (and that was before Gangnam Style I might add) and my musical taste has never quite recovered. I should have known it was too good to be true that these extremely high quality production music videos could be getting made without someone paying the piper.

It all seems like harmless fun: the K pop idols come across as being more hard-working and modest than many of their North American counterparts. The whole phenomenon seemed to be emblematic of a newly confident 21st Century Asia. Still does.

Then as I was walking through Sydney’s World Square I noticed a familiar face in a shop that sells beauty products: Yoona from the group Girls’ Generation. Curious, I wondered what other products the group has endorsed.

Well, it turns out that Girls Generation, collectively, are rated as Korea’s single most influential product pushers.  Their list of endorsements is so extensive it has its own Wikipedia page and includes Samsung, Hyundai and Philips Van Heusen, all of whom have current labour and/or environmental controversies.

These nine sirens work very, very hard at persuading people to buy stuff, without asking too many questions about where it comes from or how it is made. They, or at least their label, SMTown, are getting paid a lot to do so.

K pop stars, you see, aren’t struggling artists trying to break through the clutter. They are employees, completely owned by their record labels who find, package and then promote them relentlessly. They sign on in their teens to fifteen-year contracts. The music is all written by other people and put in front of them to sing. Their employer has the power to decide everything from what they eat to who they can date (typically no one! … sorry fellas) I’m sure they get no say over their brand endorsements either. Faust-like, they barter away their right to object when they signed on with the label. Korea has such a culture of conformity that it’s difficult to imagine a lone objector anyway.

The performers are themselves in need of better protection of their rights. Four members of another girl group, KARA, recently tried to sue their label, asserting that their contract was unfair. Essentially it made them carry the risk of poor sales and in one year each of the performers were paid just $10,000.

South Korea’s corporate hegemony could be the closest thing we can see in real life to Huxley’s Brave New World, a place where everyone cheerfully keeps the wheels of production turning without daring to ask questions. Just keep buying those cellphones and televisions thanks very much.

This is the dystopian 'Neo Seoul' from the film Cloud Atlas. It's hard to pick the difference

This is the dystopian ‘Neo Seoul’ from the film Cloud Atlas. It’s hard to pick the difference

Evil masterminds?

So when you want to point the finger, who is it that is responsible? Does the buck really stop with a handful of charming but ethically undiscriminating young ladies? Not really. The K pop idols are only so popular because of dupes who are suckered in by all the colour and movement, and all I can say is “Touchez”.

We have met the enemy, and he is us ~Walt Kelly

* Al Jazeera also looked at this issue of ‘Who’s to blame?’ only a week ago. Here is the segment:

Related posts:

Actually yes, do keep it personal

Posted: February 26, 2013 in Consumer campaigns
Tags:
1
3D TV static

3D TV static (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The early advocates of universal literacy and a free press … did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies – the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.

-Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958)

I was thinking more about the “Boomerang” theory of activism, which relies on getting results through media embarassment (see earlier post).

If you think about it, it’s inherently limited.

Realistically there is only so much airtime that the media is going to give to labour issues. Have a look at this infographic to see what I mean. Labour rights stories rarely make glamorous news, unless they are tragic.

There’s only space for one labour rights story at any given time. A few weeks ago it was Foxconn. Before that it was the Bangladesh factory fire. Before that it was the Pakistan factory fire. These factories represent a drop in the ocean. It just underscores the difficulty of ‘scaling up’ advances in labour rights.

Maverick social critic Ivan Illich was on to this decades ago. He asked people to take a hard look in the mirror: What is it that you are trying to accomplish? Do you want to “fix” things permanently? Why? He called this the ‘soft underbelly’ of delusions of power.

Institutions of public health and education are, he said, the empty husks of the formerly Christian values of Western society, trying to make things better but no longer wanting to make any personal contact with their beneficiaries. I suspect that he would include labour regulations on that list.

I visibly encountered what he meant when I visited an aboriginal settlement in Australia’s Northern Territory some years ago. The largest building in town was the “CDEP” shed (the acronym stands for Community Development Employment Projects). It contained every imaginable kind of building or farming tool, up to and including articulated motorised diggers. It was all provided free by the Australian Government in a kind of guilty reparation for taking the aborigines’ land without compensation all those years ago. And it was all sitting there unused. People don’t put a value on free gifts.

You can pay people to work, but you can’t pay them to care

Similarly if labour advances are brought about by distant organisations that are not in touch with the beneficiaries, then who are they really for? The results will inevitably evaporate as they are not used. Advances won by public relations and legal means do not, on their own, represent a victory; the victory is the winning of respect.

The workers who’ve migrated from rural areas to manufacturing districts aren’t doing it so they can have lives filled with ‘things’, they just want to contribute to their families and gain dignity and respect along the way. When I glance around the train carriage, though, and see the number of people looking at their little glowing screens I sometimes wonder who is free and who is enslaved.

Related posts:

Reciprocity – the basic problem with First World living

Posted: February 10, 2013 in Ethical decision-making
Tags: , ,
1
Red Packets

Red Packets (Photo credit: xcode)

Reciprocity is so fundamental to social organisation yet we don’t often bother to name or think about it.

An underlying norm of reciprocity is by itself a powerful engine for motivating, creating, sustaining, and regulating the cooperative behavior required for self-sustaining social organizations, as well as for controlling the damage done by the unscrupulous. (Wikipedia)

An example of reciprocity in action are the hundreds of millions of packets of money being exchanged around the world today wherever Chinese culture has had an influence.

Reciprocity as a norm pre-dates its more recent manifestations such as the Golden Rule of Christianity or the similar formulation promulgated by Confucius (Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you).

In contemporary nation-states it finds its way into positive law and, when it doesn’t, it is what drives activism to make laws fairer.

The problem is that it is something we devised in a small group world, where co-operation is necessary for survival, whereas today we live in a planetary society. However the underlying necessity is no less valid, in fact if anything it is even more valid than it was in millennia past.

Pre-modern humans knew survival skills. They knew how to find their own food and could survive if isolated from their community. Larger scale social organisation meant specialisation and abandoning the ability to fend for oneself in every respect. Now that has gone a step further and arguably entire nations are now integrated in the same manner.

Yet … where’s the reciprocity gone in this equation? Those people who work in other nations making our clothes, growing our food, assembling our consumer knick-knacks, what do they get for their trouble? Poverty wages that would never allow them to aspire to the same kind of lifestyle. How fair is that?

We all tolerate this, we are all aware that we are tolerating it, and we feel uneasy about it because of reciprocity. If they were merely poor it would be another matter, but they are poor because people pay them peanuts, in the name of the consumer: i.e. you and me.

All of this because “they” are so far away we never get to meet them or learn their names.

Related:

Older Entries