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Campaign Option: Total Ethical Procurement

Below is the original proposal presented at the Forum 09. Total Ethical Procurement was chosen to be one of the new Corporate Power campaigns.

Working with students, People & Planet support staff are currently working to develop up the new Corporate Power campaign. For the latest updates, check out the Corporate Power homepage.

Essential Info

Neo-liberal capitalism has created a race to the bottom within which products and services no longer represent their true value. The environment, indigenous peoples, workers and communities around the world have paid the high cost of low prices and corporate greed.

Corporate abuse is an integral product of the system and not just limited to the high street or a few bad apples. Corporations supply our educational institutions. The most effective way we can tackle corporate power is by changing the institutions we have power over: universities, colleges and schools. From this base, we need to take the next steps, and use the educational sector to change other sectors and government policy.

220 Schools and 60 Colleges and Universities have already achieved Fairtrade Status and sell Fairtrade products, but Fairtrade mainly covers a few agricultural products. People & Planet’s Redress Education campaign has ensured that Universities, Colleges and Schools procure and sell only sweat-free hoodies and sports gear. The Go Green campaign also works towards environmentally sustainable procurement. But all this is not enough.

The TEP campaign aims to ensure that every good and service procured by every university, school or college has not been produced in a way that destroys the environment, impoverishes poor farmers or violates workers’ human rights. This way it directly attacks the ‘race to the bottom’ that corporations use to maintain profits, economic dominance and political power.

Aim & Objectives

TEP aims to attack corporate power by creating a movement for Total Ethical Procurement, which would ensure that all products brought by the education sector, and eventually all other UK sectors, are socially just, labour- abuse free and environmentally sustainable, from electronics, garments and stationary, to construction materials.

Campaign objectives are:

• All UK educational institutions only procure goods and services that have been produced in an environmentally and socially sustainable way.

• Corporations that supply to universities, schools or colleges either end labour rights abuses, exploitative supply chain relationships and environmental destruction or no longer get to supply the institution.

• The education sector becomes a model for other public sectors, showing how all procurement can be done ethically, and which suppliers do or do not uphold ethical standards

• This leads to a change in government regulation, legislating that all public and private institutions and sectors must procure ethically.

Targets & Strategies

Our strategic model for achieving Total Ethical Procurement is ‘education’ ‘confrontation’ and ‘solution’.

Education

Objective 1: All British educational institutions only procure goods and services that have been produced in an environmentally and socially sustainable way.

Targets

• Students: Building student support for TEP campaign will be vital in achieving institutional change. Actions may include petitions, sweat-shop simulation, demonstrations to highlighting specific corporate abuses, Fairtrade sampling, sweat-free fashion shows, film screenings etc

• Institutions: Campaign strategies would include lobbying VPs/Management/Head-teachers to achieve specific TEP goals. Groups would also work with ethical procurement managers directly.

Strategies

The TEP campaign structure is influenced heavily by P&P’s previously successful ethical consumerism campaigns. TEP proposes that groups work to achieve the following goals:

1. Create an Ethical Procurement Steering group. Including Management, Procurement Manager/bursar, Students, Staff, Consumers, 2.Appoint an Ethical Procurement Manager whose role it would be to ensure the transition to Total Ethical Procurement
2. Education Institution Policy - Committing the University, school or college to Total Ethical Procurement. 4.Vice Chancellor/head teacher/principal publicly commits to TEP. Its principles and application

Ideas for Strategy 1.

Using already existing Fairtrade Steering Groups Something P&P groups can proudly celebrate is that nearly all universities that have P&P groups have now become Fairtrade universities. Over 200 schools and some colleges have too. This involved our members helping to set up Fairtrade Steering Groups who are made up of staff and students and steer colleges towards progressively more use and promotion of Fairtrade products.

This is not enough. Only agricultural products are Fairtrade, and Fairtrade does not reach higher up the supply chain to include factory workers, who are often just as exploited by corporations as small farmers. The Fairtrade Steering Groups can remain but should redefine their purpose, with our help, to make a transition to all products bought being ethical, not just in the field, but along the whole supply chain.

Ideas for Strategies 2-4

• Use other Independent Labeling Organisations as products certified by these have achieved an strict social and/or environmental criteria and guarantee certain standards. These could include:

1. Fairtrade Labeling Organisation — Guarantees a product is Fairly Traded: fair price, fair working conditions, environmental standards and right to organise.
2. Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) — Guarantees that forestry products are socially and environmentally just.
3. Soil Association — Guarantees products are organic

• Universities that Count: 70 universities have signed up to [Universities that Count] (http://www.journal-online.co.uk/article/5328-edinburgh-institutions-sign-up-to-become-universities-that-count). This scheme is a benchmarking scheme for best practice in socially and environmentally sustainable procurement. Our campaign would want to see more than this although provides information for universities to learn from.

• Promoting poverty aware procurement on campus. The Environmental Association of Universities and Colleges (EAUC) are engaged in a project to report on the poverty impact of all products procured by universities and the ways to maximise the positive impacts universities can have on poverty.

Confrontation

Objective 2: Corporations that supply to universities, schools or colleges either end labour rights abuses, exploitative supply chain relationships and environmental destruction or no longer get to supply the institution.

Target

Corporations would also be targeted to cease/change practices that are socially and environmentally unjust. The threat of a university boycotting a certain supplier gives us leverage to force that supplier to either change their practices or lose the contract.

Strategies

Previous P&P campaigns such as Redress Fashion or Stop Esso have succeeded in creating brand damage to corporations and raising awareness but have struggled to force them to change their practises. Why? Because the bad practice is their raison d’etre. Esso is an oil producing company, an inherently environmentally destructive activity. Topshop is a cheap clothes company, inherently socially damaging.

TEP builds on this learning by targeting corporations through the leverage of huge supply contracts with universities — a tactic used successfully by the Worker Rights Consortium in the US — or by encouraging the use of smaller, genuinely ethical suppliers. So it is able to really hit corporations where it hurts — their pockets. After-all, as students, our pockets are not always large enough to make boycotts really hurt.

Putting direct pressure on socially and environmentally unjust firms that supply an institution and demanding a change e.g. end to anti-union. This may include demonstrations, non-violent direct action and lobbying.

UK universities, schools and colleges could form a British version of the successful US Worker Rights Consortium. Universities that are affiliated to the Consortium are required to source most university logo apparel from supplier factories that are in compliance workers rights. If corporate abuse of workers is discovered then affiliated universities break off procurement from that corporation.

A recent example of how this amazing idea can restrict corporate abuse is in the case of the Russell Corporation. Fruit of the Loom’s subsidiary Russell Corporation have recently announced the closure of facility for university logo apparel in Honduras because of workers attempts to organise and form a union, according to a report. Workers at the facility have called on a consumer boycott in solidarity with their struggle.

People & Planet groups at Warwick, Birmingham, Coventry, Nottingham and Aston have joined together to protest against the repression, and to ask their universities to cut off links with Fruit of the Loom. In the US, because of the existence of the Workers Rights Consortium, universities such as Duke, Georgetown, Columbia, Miami, Rutgers and Wisconsin have already cut off all links with Russell, putting the corporation under extreme pressure to change their decision. The case continues…

Schools, universities and colleges could form an Ethical Procurement Consortium that cuts of corporations for either environmental, supply chain or labour abuse.

Solution

Objective 3: The education sector becomes a model for other public sectors, showing how all procurement can be done ethically, and which suppliers do or do not uphold ethical standards.

Objective 4: This leads to a change in government regulation, legislating that all public and private institutions and sectors must procure ethically.

Target

Government: lobbying and pressurizing government for regulatory change. The government is already aware that procurement needs to start becoming environmentally sustainable (see DEFRA Report and DEFRA Action Plan. They need to feel grassroots pressure to implement these ideas.

They have made less progress on socially sustainable procurement that involves no human and labour rights abuses in supply chains. But there are ways that this can be achieved, as laid out by the EAUC.

Strategies

Lobbying and pressurising government for regulatory change, showing depth of support across the education sector and voters more generally.

Actions

• Targeting Students: Building student support for TEP campaign will be vital in achieving institutional change. Actions may include petitions, sweat-shop simulation, demonstrations to highlighting specific corporate abuses, Fairtrade sampling, sweat-free fashion shows, film screenings etc. The TEP campaign advocates the highlighting and awareness of the links between corporate abuse and educational procurement.

• Targeting Institutions: The TEP campaigns actions would include a combination of lobbying, pressure building and awareness raising. Actions may include the lobbying VPs/Management/Head-teachers to achieve specific TEP goals. Students and educational institutions may form Ethical Procurement Consortiums to enable ethical procurement. Once the institutional TEP goals have been achieved a group may work closely with their ethical procurement manager. If VP/teachers are against positive changes then pressure building and awareness raising actions will be necessary including media stunts, rushes, flash mobs, events, demonstrations, non-violent direct action, and more lobbying.

• Targeting corporations: In order to highlight corporate abuse, actions such as protests, non-violent direct action, media stunts, lobbying corporations, letter writing, petitions and events.

• Targeting Government: Through petitions, lobbying events, speaker events, direct action, media stunts, and making connections to other campaigning organisations such as the Fairtrade Foundation, the Stop Climate Chaos coalition, the NUS, NUSSL, Labour Behind the Label and War on Want.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• We are all responsible for what our schools, colleges and universities purchase, making the campaign applicable to all educational institutions and allowing groups from schools, colleges and universities to campaign in solidarity and to organise together.
• Combines the successes of previous People & Planet campaigns, builds on current awareness and takes the next step! We can use already existing Fairtrade steering groups and turn them into a force for all exploited workers in the supply chain, not just some.
• Huge amounts of campaign research and reading already exist. A report due to be published in January 09 by the Environmental Institution for Universities and colleges (EAUC) will also show how Total Ethical Procurement is possible. The Department for Environment and Rural Affairs are also already looking into ways to integrate social justice into procurement. We could show them how.
• Tackles the root social and environmental injustices of current corporate consumerism; destruction of environments, sweatshops, union repression etc.
• Clear and achievable goals. Achievements can be easily measured and celebrated.
• Campaign has a future beyond People & Planet and educational institutions. Educational sector will be used as a model for total ethical procurement for other public and private sectors.
• All educational institutional instructions are different. TEP gives People & Planet groups the structure and goals to take the campaign forward and make a real difference within there institutions.
• TEP campaigns in solidarity with workers, union organisers, indigenous people and environmentalists from the Global South, who need us (and sometimes call on us, as in the recent case of the Fruit of the Loom workers) to end huge, socially destructive procurement contracts . Offers a wide range of possible actions to suit all groups; from small, specific institutional change to radical campaigning and regulatory change.

Cons

• Combines some elements of the Go Green campaign, such as the focus on sustainability managers, and so might be said to clash. However, TEP merely takes the Go Green demands further, by asking that the sustainability manager has a more holistic perspective on what sustainability means, i.e. socially sustainable too.

• TEP starts off as purely educational institution focussed. This is a strength as previous campaigns have shown that we can effect real change there. TEP then tries to move outwards to other sectors. However, as it is so education focussed, it might be best for it to be supplemented by another more global corporate power campaign strand. (It doesn’t have to be the only strand).