McDonald's and Corporate Social Responsibility?

By Paul Hawken

The April 14th McDonald’s Report on Corporate Social Responsibility is a low water mark for the concept of sustainability and the promise of corporate social responsibility. It is a melange of homilies, generalities, and soft assurances that do not provide hard metrics of the company, its activities, or its impacts on society and the environment. While movements towards transparency and disclosure are to be applauded, there is little of either in the report. That their report is based on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRIs) calls to question whether the GRIs have anything to do with the concept of sustainability or true
corporate responsibility.

This is not a report about stakeholder rights as they would have one believe. It is a report about how a corporation that has been severely stung by bad publicity and declining earnings now wants to plead its case to its critics. It states that those NGOs that continue to criticize just don’t want to make things better while ignoring what their critics are most concerned about.

The McDonald’s Social Responsibility Report is like Ronald McDonald-a fantasy. It presupposes that we can continue to have a global chain of restaurants that serves fried, sugary junk food that is produced by an agricultural system of monocultures, monopolies, standardization and destruction, and at the same time find a path to sustainability. As the founder of The Natural Step (TNS) in the United States, I can say that nothing could be further from the idea of sustainability than the McDonald’s Corporation.

The Report states that “being a socially responsible leader [their self-appointed term] begins a process that involves more awareness on the issues that will make a difference.” McDonald’s has known for decades that the food it serves harms people, promotes obesity, heart disease, and has detrimental effects on land and water. Addressing that one issue would make a difference. They have known about the detrimental effects of their food just as the tobacco companies understood the impact of their products. Yet they have done little to modify their menu. In the arena of social equity, McDonald’s has resisted from its inception all attempts to organize its workers, and through industry trade organizations has consistently and intensely lobbied against raises in the minimum wage. To say McDonald’s has actively worked to crush trade unions is an understatement.

It is good to see ideas about materials and reduced waste being promoted by corporate actors. But it is equally important to note that corporations who do that only have not changed in any major respect and may be using these superficial changes to avoid deeper structural issues that do address sustainability. Essentially, if corporations can make more money by using less stuff, less waste, less pollution, so much the better. But the nature of their corporate activity has not changed and that is certainly the case for McDonald’s.

For years it has promoted and demanded the least expensive standardized food for its chains. In so doing it has created powerful incentives for the centralization of food processing, agribusiness, and long supply lines, all of which reduce American food security. For McDonald’s to announce that it now wants to have antibiotic free chickens is a slap in the face to the thousands of small poultry farmers who could not compete and were forced out of business by the agri-corporations that introduced the very industrial chicken practices that required antibiotics to avoid massive die-off of their flocks. Simply stated, standardized food destroys agricultural and biological diversity. Nothing could be more antithetical to the recovery of overstressed farmlands than fast food.

At this juncture in our history, as companies and governments turn their attention to sustainability, it is critical that the meaning of sustainability not get lost in the trappings of corporate speak. There is a growing worldwide movement towards corporate responsibility and sustainability, led in many cases by companies whose history and products have brought damage and suffering to the world. I am concerned that good housekeeping practices such as recycled hamburger shells will be confused with creating a just and sustainable world.

Transnational corporations such as McDonalds and their associated lobbyists and trade associations have led efforts to Americanize trade through representatives at the WTO. They have prevented the strengthening of environmental and labor laws and they have led the effort to eliminate the ability of smaller, more vulnerable nations to determine their economic destiny. In other words, they embrace “sustainability” as long as they can make money and it doesn’t change their overall purpose, which is to grow faster than the overall world economy and population and increase their share of the world’s economic output to the benefit of small number of shareholders.

The question we have to ask is what is enough? Is it enough that one in five meals in the US is a fast food meal? Does that satisfy McDonald’s? Or do they want that figure to be one in three, or how about one in two? How about the developing world? Does McDonald’s want to see the rest of the world drink the equivalent of 550 cans of soda pop as do Americans? Do they think every third global meal should be comprised of greasy meat, fries, and caramelized sugar? They won’t answer those questions because that is exactly their corporate mission. They have 29,000 restaurants with nearly 3,000 new ones added each year.

A valid report on sustainability and social responsibility must ask the question: What if everybody did it? What would be the ecological footprint of such a company? What is McDonald’s footprint now? The report carefully avoids the corporation’s real environmental impacts. It talked about water use at the outlets, but failed to note that every quarter-pounder requires 600 gallons of water. It talked about recycled paper, but not the pfisteria-laden waters caused by large-scale pork producers in the southeast. It talked about energy use in the restaurants, but not in the unsustainable food system McDonald’s relies upon that uses 10 calories of energy for every calorie of good produced. “Sustaining” McDonald’s requires a simple unsustainable formula: cheap food plus cheap non-unionized labor plus deceptive advertising = high profits.

An honest report would tell stakeholders how much it truly costs soc
iety to support a corporation like McDonald’s. It would detail the externalities borne by other people, places, and generations: The draining of aquifers, the contaminated waterways, the strip-mined soils, the dangerous abattoirs where migrant workers are employed, the inhumane, injury-prone dead-end jobs preparing chicken carcasses for Chicken McNuggets, the global greenhouse methane gas emitted by the millions of hamburger cows in feedlots, the impact of their $2 billion advertising and promotional campaigns to convince young people to demand their food, the ethics of using toys to induce
small children into their restaurants. The list is longer than this. What the report is short on is candor, transparency and corporate honesty.

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See a list of issues that McDonald’s did not deal with in its Report on Corporate Social Responsibility:
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Anti-McDonalds’ world: This website gets a million hits a month. [sorry this link is no longer available]