Today, Corporations are requested to practice “Corporate Social Responsibility” (Hereinafter, called as “CSR”). In this concept named “CSR”, various areas are implied. Human rights is always enumerated as one of these areas. For example, United Nations’ Global Compact contained three areas, that is, “Human Rights”, “Labour” and “Environment”, on which enterprises are to work. Also in Japan, some Research Organ builds “human rights” into the standards that investors (personal investors or institutional ones) select investment designation.
But when we look into these standards, we found some difficulty about them. For example, Quantiative restriction of “Triple Bottom Line”, weakness on common understanding of human rights problems, lack of Buraku Problem, and difficulty of quantative grasp on human rights problems, and so on. Nevertheless, in spite of these difficulties, We believe that it is important that comprehensive standard on human rights as CSR might be constructed.
Under this consideration, we, the Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Research Institute, settled on “Index concerning the practice on Human Rights in the Corporations”, and executed the preliminary survey using this Index, in cooperation of the member enterprises of “Osaka Industrial Federation of Dowa and Human Rights Problem” in 2004. This report introduces the outline of the result of this survey.
Part 1 examines the development of CSR in these days and significance of human rights in a tide of it, in particular, from the viewpoint of positioning of human rights in a CSR index.
Chapter 1 of Part 2, “A trial of CSR Survey in Human Rights and a main characteristic of the result” analyses the findings in the light of so-called “PDCA cycle” (“Plan”, “Do”, “Check”, and “Act”) in the management system. As positive points, we found followings:
- Many office documents such as management ethical codes contains the idea of “respect for human rights”;
- Many companies, that are object of this survey, equip the intra-office system and elect the person in charge to practice human rights issues.
- Many Companies practices in the positive employment of “socially vulnerable groups”, such as persons from Discriminated-against Buraku, Korean residence in Japan, single mother and so on
- Each company clarifies its own problem in any issue area.
- Furthermore, we found the various “Best Practices” in human rights.
On the other hand, we found some negative point.
- In the framework of business ethics, we can recognize any progress in construction of management cycle. But in the area of human rights, in particular, “Plan”, “Check” and “Act” side of the PDCA cycle is weak.
- We can find the weakness of the direction of human rights practice in total.
- Measures about the human rights issues on a international plane.
- Information about the issue of human rights is not disclosed very much.
In Chapter 2 of Part 2, we examine the situation of individual human rights issues by every question item.
Section 1 outlines the profile of companies that answered our questionnaire. 70 enterprises in total kindly cooperated with this preliminary survey. 90% of them are companies whose capital scale is more than 500 million yen. 70 % has more than 1 thousand employees. In that sense, most of answering companies are “Big Business”.
Section 2 examine the development situation of the “intra-office system of human rights”. As a main characteristic, most of companies devise a business ethics policy and specify respect for human rights, but it is only 40% of an object company that declare human rights respect at the actual place when they develop overseas business. There are few companies where the management top announces a message of human rights respect.
Section 3 points out the actual situations about equality between man and woman and gender in object enterprises. Generally speaking, Gender bias in an employment policy of a Japanese companies is severe. About average length of service, a difference with a entire employees and women is four years. But some companies introduces “Positive action” for the purpose of the realisation of equal opportunities and treatment between male and female. Furthermore, most companies take an anti-sexual harassment measure.
Section 4 introduces actions of the companies to help independence of handicapped persons. Japanese legislation for promotion of handicapped person employment prescribes obligatory employment rate with 1.8%, and half of companies achieved this rate. But only 23% of answer companies promote to make their workplace accessible.
As for Buraku issue, we found out positive progress in Section 5. Human rights enlightenment activities in office is practiced in more than 90% of answer enterprises, and more than 70% of them make an effort for the positive employment of socially vulnerable peoples. But company who expresses their commitment on fair employment activity are relatively few.
In Section 6, we examined working conditions and treatment of the part-time workers and other non-regular workers, because non-regular workers increase today, and as a result, a problem that their working conditions may threaten their human rights is pointed out. A few companies effort to realise the principle of the same value labor same wage or to change of an employment form to a regular worker. However, it became clear that there was a still severe difference between regular and non-regular workers.
It is following Section 7 that examine the situation about the actions that incorporated respect of human rights in management activity in itself. Companies offering an goods and/or services to contribute to human rights respect is 26%. The companies which include an item of human rights respect in a procurement standard or business standard is 10%. These numerical value can never say to be high, but should rather be evaluated as an advanced company.
In Section 8, we consider the situation of the co-operation with human rights NGO. On Buraku Issue, 50% companies cooperate with NGOs, on handicapped, 20%, and on gender, 11%. In addition, there are few companies who cooperate with NGOs working on non-citizens or minorities living in Japan, and international human right NGOs.
Lastly, we questioned about information disclosure on human rights activities. 33% have already devise a policy document about information disclosure, but in the area of human rights, There are a few companies disclosing information through any medium.
As for the investigation that we made this time, we do not think enough, from the viewpoint of the number of object companies, and contents of the item of the questionnaire. So we might raise the qualities of the index with the cooperation of various people, and contribute to promotion of human rights activities in Japanese company.
