Abraham Lincoln once said, “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow, by evading it today.” This is becoming increasingly true for companies who want to protect themselves from scandal.
Loblaw CEO Galen Weston, who you might know as the affable geek from the President’s Choice commercials, has been all over the news lately due to his company’s connection with a textile factory that collapsed in Bangladesh on April 24th. The collapse has claimed 580 lives (a number that continues to grow) and has raised questions about the allocation of blame.
The extraordinary negligence of the factory’s owner, Mohammed Sohel Rana, without a doubt, deserves top billing. After discovering cracks in the building an engineer was brought in to examine it. The engineer urged the owner to shut down the factory, a request that was ignored. The building collapsed the next day.
However, Mr. Weston has announced that Loblaw will compensate the families who lost a loved one. Furthermore, the company is taking new measures to regularly and personally inspect buildings in foreign countries where its merchandise is being produced.
Gone are the days when a company could feign ignorance about abuses happening at a plant located in some distant country. These days information travels at light speed to every corner of the Earth.
This has been a troublesome development for companies whose morally-dubious operations in third-world countries had been traditionally swept under the rug. Everything changed after Nike’s use of child labour was exposed in 1996. Well, sort of.
Companies still outsource operations to third-world countries because it is cheaper. It’s cheaper because working wages are low and safety standards are nonexistent. What changed is that companies are starting to understand they are liable to receive bad press if they don’t take responsibility for their connection to these factories.
In public relations you should respond to crises in an ethically responsible way. Loblaw is the only company to step forward — of 30 who were having merchandise manufactured at the plant — and one could argue that they are doing more than they need to. Some companies might not have the profit margins to be able to respond in this manner.
The lesson to be learned is that the public is always watching. The rug is gone. Everyone will see your mess, and how you respond to it will define the character of the organization you represent.
Assorted Timbits 