Biden Releases a “National Action Plan on Responsible Business Conduct”
It includes an interagency task force on “content authenticity”
The Biden administration this week released what it is calling “The U.S. Government’s National Action Plan on Responsible Business Conduct.”
If you are interested, you can read the full 40 page plan yourself. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but there’s a vaguely Leninist tinge to the language of a “National Action Plan.”
Skepticism about such a venture is unlikely to be allayed by the language in the plan itself. “The USG expects businesses to conduct heightened HRDD in conflict-affected contexts in line with the UN Development Program Guide on Heightened HRDD for Business in Conflict-Affected Contexts,” the plan says, using acronyms for U.S. Government and Human Rights Due Diligence. “In addition, the USG expects businesses to account for populations that face disproportionate impacts of business activity in conducting HRDD. … businesses should account for the disproportionate harms business activity can have on marginalized populations, including women and girls in all their diversity; persons with disabilities; members of ethnic, religious, linguistic, or racial minority groups; Indigenous Peoples; LGBTQI+ persons; children; and migrant workers.”
How the government can “expect” anything is unclear. A government can require a business to do something by passing a law. Short of that, it all seems vague, and a bit of buck-passing. The Biden administration hasn’t been able to prevent war from breaking out in the Middle East and in Ukraine; now it wants businesses to up their game in the conflict-affected areas?
The plan includes “an interagency task force to drive outreach to international partners on issues regarding content authenticity.” Now that is amusing. “Content authenticity” is the flip side of what the Trump administration used to call the “fake news” problem. Maybe the Biden State Department can start by taking on Al Jazeera. Good luck.
At least “content authenticity” gets to a genuine issue of responsible business conduct, which is delivering genuine value to customers. Of all the ways the U.S. government improvises a definition of “responsible business conduct”—“workers’ rights,” “environment, climate, and just transitions,” avoiding corruption—that most basic definition seems strangely absent. There’s a nod at “generating economic growth and creating jobs” but nothing about serving customers or shareholders. The word “profit” doesn’t seem to appear anywhere in the 40 pages, though responsible businesses seek to provide their owners an economic return on their capital.
The release came from the State Department. It describes the plan as “The Biden-Harris Administration’s release,” and “a whole-of-government commitment,” though the White House hasn’t highlighted the plan.
The plan has gotten almost zero press attention so far. Maybe the business press doesn’t pay attention to news from the State Department, and the State Department press corps doesn’t pay attention to business news. Maybe it seems too technocratic. Whatever the reason, it provides an opening for publications like The Editors, which exist in part to tell you about things that you might otherwise not have known about. It’s our own action plan for “responsible business conduct.”
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