افزایش مسئولیت شرکتی با افشای شیوه های کاری و حقوق بشر: حالت چارچوبی GRI Have labour practices and human rights disclosures enhanced corporate accountability? The case of the GRI framework

1. Introduction: workforce reporting as part of corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda This paper examines the information that transnational corporations (TNCs) report on their workforce in accordance with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines. The analysis presented contributes to the debates around accountability and legitimacy theory. That is, it examines the extent to which disclosure acts as a platform to embellish or exaggerate ‘good behaviour’ for the purpose of boosting corporate image, rather than enhancing transparency for the purpose of discharging corporate accountability to their workforce. With the increasing attention paid to the impact that global value chains1 have on labour rights, this paper examines the extent and quality of information reported on the internal and external workforce of the world’s largest companies. This is done using the GRI reporting guidelines on labour (LA) and human rights (HR). The GRI provides detailed guidelines with the intention of raising transparency and ultimately corporate accountability to stakeholders (GRI, 2011, p. 10). The extant literature on workforce reporting tends to concentrate on internal workforce issues in one specific country (e.g., Williams & Adams, 2013) while workers further down the value chain (the external workforce) remain almost invisible. This paper focuses on issues related to the external as well as the internal workforce. Issues relating to the employment conditions of the directly employed workforce of the TNC differ to those of reporting on the external workforce. For the former, reporting falls within the boundaries of the TNC and under their direct authority, rendering access to data relatively easy. In contrast, reporting on the external workforce falls outside corporate boundaries, making data access more complex. This is compounded by the international cross border nature of such relationships, bringing additional legal, institutional and socio-cultural dynamics into play. So TNCs may have reasons to find reporting on the external workforce challenging. Most of the human rights endeavours of civil society activities relating to the external workforce are not enforceable by international institutional benchmarks such as UN frameworks (Sikka, 2011) or by national-level government (Cooper, Coulson, & Taylor, 2011). At a deeper level, promoting the ethical treatment of supply-chain workers is challenged by the global institutional environment: the preeminent neoliberal hegemony on corporate governance not only privileges the interests of capital over labour, it actively promotes the marginalisation of any interests competing with the pursuit of shareholder value (Sikka, 2010).