Human Rights
Universal Rights: Worldwide Action
Corporations can greatly affect human rights around the world, starting with how they treat their own employees
and extending into using their influence on foreign governments to encourage respect for all workers. How
corporations respect universal human rights serves as a crucial yardstick by which to measure corporate
responsibility across different cultures and different countries. Key issues include:
Sweatshops: Over the past decade, tremendous attention
has focused on the links between corporations and
sweatshops. Violations of human and labor rights in factories
worldwide have become the target of increasingly potent
campaigns by labor, citizen and student groups.
Security: In response to the killings of protestors by
security forces guarding corporate facilities, there has been
growing pressure on companies - particularly in the resource
extraction sector - to ensure that they safeguard their own
security without violating human rights.
Repressive Regimes: Where corporations do business in
countries ruled by repressive regimes, they face pressure to
ensure that they are not complicit in the regime's abuse of
human rights. Moreover, in countries such as Burma and the
Sudan, companies have been targeted by pro-democracy
forces for providing the ruling regime with the money and the
legitimacy it requires to stay in power.
Common Standards: Wherever corporations do business,
they face pressure not to relax their consumer, environmental
and labor standards where government regulations are weak
or not enforced.
How We Screen on Human Rights
Trillium Asset Management Corporation typically avoids
investing in companies that are involved in egregious
abuses of human rights. We seek profitable investments in
corporations that are proactive in supporting human rights.
We investigate reports linking a company in which we
invest to human rights abuses. When we have concerns,
we ask companies detailed questions about their workplace
and security standards and quiz them about their links to
repressive regimes to find out whether they provide those
regimes with undue support.
On the issue of sweatshops, we seek to invest in companies
that are leaders in the workplace standards that they
set and in the monitoring systems that they use for their
manufacturing contractors.
What We're Doing
Trillium Asset Management Corporation has a long record of
expertise and engagement on human rights issues, dating
back to the anti-apartheid struggles in the 1980s, when we
provided our clients with South Africa-free portfolios and
actively lobbied pension funds to divest from South Africa.
More recently, we have been active in shareholder activism
and state and local laws in support of human and labor
rights in countries including Afghanistan, Burma, China,
East Timor, Sudan and Tibet. We have made presentations
on how people can lobby companies to support human
rights at the annual meeting of Amnesty International and
at meetings of many of the organization's local chapters.
Where we hold stock in companies with a mixed record
on human rights, we use a combination of dialogue
and shareholder resolutions to press for further positive
changes in policy and practice.
In 1992, we were the first social investment firm to take
action in support of the democracy movement in Burma.
Since then we have helped build campaigns to file
shareholder resolutions at companies in Burma and to
enact local, state and federal laws on Burma.
In 1992, we also filed the first shareholder resolution
by a social investment firm addressing the problem of
sweatshops. Since then, the issue of sweatshops has
been central to our dialogue with retailers and brand name
goods companies.
In 1995, just days after the killing of Ken Saro-Wiwa, we
filed the first shareholder resolutions at oil companies that
do business in Nigeria. Since then, through a combination
of dialogue and shareholder resolutions, we have
continued to press the oil companies to ensure that their
security forces respect the human rights of the people of
the Niger Delta.
In 1997-98, we pressed Unocal to abandon discussion with
the Taliban on the prospect of laying a pipeline through
Afghanistan that would put millions of dollars in royalties
into the regime 's hands. We confronted the company 's
board of directors at its 1998 annual stockholder meeting
to demand a complete account of their relationship with the
Taliban.
In 2003, we worked in concert with Amnesty International
to help persuade ChevronTexaco to develop a
comprehensive human rights policy that it will apply to
its operations around the globe, including human rights
hotspots in Africa and the Middle East.