What am I 'to the bottom line'?

Nowadays you hear quite a few people talking about socially responsible businesses. But I often have occasion to wonder what has gone wrong with our economic system in the first place. Should not all businesses be socially responsible? Are we not all living on the same planet? Are we not all interconnected? Is it not true that no man is an island?

The problem, I have decided, is that the human factor has been almost completely eliminated from economic thinking. People have been stripped of their complicated humanity in the name of free-market efficiency.

To change that, the first thing we must do is to stop accepting the word "marketing' unconditionally.

Marketing allows businesses to think of the world as a place to sell things instead of what it really is, a complex organisation of people with different languages, customs, cultures and religions, needs, wants, desires, joys and hates. Also, it ignores the fact that the best thing about real markets - from food markets in developing countries to flea markets and crafts fairs here - is the behavioural diversity of the people and products you find there.

To marketeers, people are not people. They are customers. Members of a demographic. Lira signs. Opportunities. Potential scores. Marks.

We are now getting so much junk mail that I recently threw away my new debit card because I wrongly assumed that I had received yet another letter from my bank inviting me to invest in some new bond. And what about that endless supply of e-mail spam? My e-mail server is supposed to stop these messages but they deviously get through.

The next thing we need to do is to de-emphasise the so-called "bottom line", because it forces business to focus on money to the exclusion of the welfare of its employees, its relationships with its environment, community, competition and, today, even its stockholders. And are not these the very factors that contribute to the health and profitability of every business?

If the world is only a market and the only thing that counts is the lira-and-cents bottom line, then you can expect to see a lot of disconnected behaviour. We have that now with Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing and the rest of the people and companies that confirmed our sneaking suspicion that the only difference between the stock exchange and a casinò is that you get free food and a show at a casinò.

What has happened to the social contract? Remember? You worked at a job for 40 years, retired, and the company or the state gave you a pension at the end of it. Your company did not pick up and move to China at a whim, because labour is cheaper there. The state did not decide to undercut your healthcare because it was no longer sustainable. You were paid a decent wage so you could afford a modest, middle-class lifestyle.

It took a lot of struggle to get the eight-hour day, the 40-hour work week and time-and-a-half for overtime, not to mention things like pensions and free medical care which are so threatened by our government today. Knowing that ordinary people in many other countries in the European Union are similarly threatened does not make the threat any easier to digest.

Hard-working people are now spending a large part of their lives cowering in economic terror. We are afraid of losing our jobs, or else we have already lost them, or else we are working far too hard and still not earning enough to live on. The dream we were promised, the one where working hard leads us to success, is turning to vinegar in our mouths.

One hopeful sign is that the movement for social responsibility in business, while still small, is growing. These socially responsible businesses recognise that there are always human and environmental costs that need to be factored into every successful business equation.

Another hopeful sign is the movement against globalisation. In this country and across the world, more and more people are refusing to be used and exploited. They do not want to be slave labourers and they do not want to see their local culture destroyed by the branding of large corporations.

In their book Corporate Predators: The Hunt For Mega-Profits and The Attack on Democracy, Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman expose the pervasiveness of rights violations committed by corporations both domestically and abroad.

Transnational corporations (TNCs) wield extraordinary power and influence in today's global economy. In fact, about half of the top 100 economies in the world now belong to corporations, not countries. The ability to export substantial capital has provided these corporations with major leverage against local and national officials, both domestically and abroad.

Many politicians, unwilling to risk further factory relocation overseas, offer substantial tax incentives to TNCs. Similarly, many of these same politicians are also fearful of inhibiting corporate profitability and, in turn, hurting the national economy through greater regulation of TNCs abroad. Thus, political attempts for corporate accountability have largely failed due to the dominant bargaining position of TNCs.

Developing governments have persuaded TNCs to relocate factories into their countries by offering lower environmental and labour standards. Transnational corporations have enjoyed greater profitability through the decreased production costs that exist in such countries. However, this private profitability has come at great societal cost. For example, though reports of sweatshop conditions in garment factories are commonplace, the number of prosecutions of such abuses by developing governments is negligible.

Transnational corporations have denied responsibility for such abuses, claiming they are simply providing needed jobs to developing regions. Many TNCs, especially ones that rely on consumer name recognition, have established "codes of conduct" for their foreign factories in response to growing media reports of systematic rights violations. However, while these codes of conduct may seem impressive, they have been largely ineffective at realising the goals they purport to pursue.

We, as individuals, must speak up now against this kind of dehumanising, all-marketing-all-the-time economic thinking. If we fail to insist that our humanity be treasured as an important factor in our nation's economic health, it will be as Harris Collinwood wrote in the New York Times magazine recently that people have "always taken for granted that better days are coming. Is our present angst the first flicker of suspicion that the better days have already been and gone?"