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The Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) at McDonald’s has just started blogging. In his blog, he claimed that the driver that motivates them to adopt CSR is doing the right thing and because it is part of their company ethic and identity. But is McDonald’s really doing the right thing? For decades McDonald's has been criticized for selling unhealthy food, exploitative advertising targeted at children, production of packaging waste, and ecological damage caused by industrial processing of its products. One could argue that the CSR programmes that McDonald’s have undertaken are actually done to distract the public from the ethical questions posed by their core operations. I agree with this because most of the changes that McDonald’s had introduced for the past decade has not been successful in addressing the main concern of the public i.e. the food it serves still harms people, promotes obesity among children, and has detrimental effects on land and water.
On May 1 2002, the Centers for Disease Control issued a report stating that childhood obesity and related diseases had doubled in the past 10 years, specifically citing high-fat fast-food as a cause. If McDonald’s is truly concern about the public health, it would have included this fact into its Corporate Responsibility Brochure. McDonald's knows about the harmful effects of its food yet it never admitted to this and has done little to modify its menu. An honest CSR behavior would be to tell the public how much it truly costs society to support a corporation like McDonald's. It should disclose all societal and environmental costs that are not accounted in financial statements, borne by the society. Only then, McDonald’s is truly doing the right thing.
Does McDonald’s take social responsibility in their action? Obviously not since it still engages in exploitative marketing to children. Research shows that every month, 90 percent of the children between 3 and 9 in America visit a McDonald's. The average child sees about 40,000 commercials a year on television alone, and that figure does not include product placements in movies, television shows and, most recently, songs. If McDonald’s is truly concern about the community, it should stop using its creative marketing team to lure children into buying their product. This suggests that the core values of the company are anything but to nourish and protect children. A communitarian would argue – how can this be acting in a CSR manner.
Does McDonald’s take environmental responsibility in their action? Though it did implement some changes which it regards as being environmentally responsible, I would say no because in substance, McDonald’s do not care about the environment. Rather than addressing highly alarming environmental issues which society ought to know, it chooses to disclose only petty ones. For example, it talked about water use at its outlets, but failed to disclose that every quarter-pounder requires 600 gallons of water. It talked about recycled paper, but not the pfisteria-infected waters caused by large-scale pork producers in the Southeast United States. Although McDonald's tries to dress its CSR in different form, the substance of its corporate activity has not changed and the larger environmental impact of these underlying activities is dramatic and troubling.
The reasons behind McDonald’s adoption to CSR, whether driven by ulterior motives, or interests beyond the enterprise, are subject to debate and individual interpretation. But it is undeniable that McDonald’s did make some positive changes in the name of CSR, or at least thought to have done so. This effort may amount to CSR, after all there is no one comprehensive definition of CSR. Even if McDonald's continues to operate by sticking to its sole mission, that is to maximize shareholders’ wealth, it may still qualify as acting in CSR (a bogus one).
Tags:
ethic
Posted at: 09:15 PM | Add Comment
