Opere et omissione: if sourcing’s not pragmatic, it’s not ethical

Catholics claim the Pope’s infallible. Mercifully that doctrine doesn’t apply to his political judgements, or my parish priest would be giving me a hard time this coming Sunday

"Living on 38 euros ($50) a month - that was the pay of these people who died. That is called slave labour" said Pope Francis on May 1, talking about the Bangladesh tragedies.

But later on that day, he went on to say “Work is fundamental to the dignity of a person. I think of how many, and not just young people, are unemployed, many times due to a purely economic conception of society, which seeks selfish profit, beyond the parameters of social justice” He then called on governments to tackle high unemployment and eliminate slave labour associated with human trafficking.

The founder of the Pope’s religion seems to have been clear about the dangers of his teaching being misapplied to political complications: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's”, said Jesus – which over the following 2,000 years many have taken as a warning to clerics against getting involved in political debate.

That’s not how the current Pope sees the biblical text, and Jorge Borgoglio, before he became Pope Francis, had a long tradition of speaking out on social issues. In a series of interviews published last week (Papa Francesco. Il nuovo papa si racconta. Conversazione con Sergio Rubin e Francesca Ambrogetti) he goes so far as to describe what in his view is the greatest problem facing the world.

For what it’s worth, I agree with him. And it’s not Islamic fundamentalism, deficits, slow growth or climate change: it’s unemployment (or in other contexts, underemployment, and often in his talks, youth un/under employment in particular) that he sees as the core of everything else.

Now he usually goes on to argue that’s because the world is pursuing the wrong objectives, and that’s not something this Blog has any expertise in.  But most of my education was at the hands of the religious order to which Pope Francis belongs (the Jesuits), so I suspect I have some basis to challenge, respectfully, his apparent belief that the world would be a better place if businesses didn’t source clothing from Bangladesh.

Imagine you’re a sourcing manager at Inditex: not just the world’s biggest specialist buyer of clothing, but the largest retail business of any sort headquartered in a country whose majority population acknowledges Pope Francis as their spiritual leader. And let’s assume you accept his overall ethical philosophy, and also agree with him that underemployment is the world’s biggest scourge: how should you make buying decisions?

Well, first of all you don’t stop moving production round the globe. The biggest social achievement of the past 20 years has been the collapse in global poverty: In 1990, 43% of the world’s population met the official definitions of living below the local poverty line, and by 2010 that had dropped to 21%. Many economic development experts seriously believe it’s not just realistic, but on balance probable, to expect that figure to drop below 10% by 2030. The fall in poverty over the past 20 years comes mostly from the move of many business processes from the West to poorer countries, and the buying power created as a result in formerly poor countries.

All other things being equal, anyone with a sense of ethics has to believe creating jobs in Bangladesh (whose economic development is more dominated by the garment trade than any other country’s) is a good thing. Now every day of his priestly life, the Pope has examined his conscience for whether he has followed his principles “opere et omissione” (“in what I have done and in what I have failed to do”), as his Church would expect that virtuous Inditex sourcing manager to do. It would probably be immoral, goes the principle, to continue buying from a rich country (or a middle-income country one, like Argentina) if more jobs could be created in a really poor country like Bangladesh. Failing to grasp the opportunity to create new jobs is immoral, just like exploiting poverty.

Now a lot of moral obligations go with that decision to buy from Bangladesh. A fully moral person sourcing for Inditex would ensure Bangladeshis making her garments worked in safe buildings, were treated properly and had a remuneration system that enabled them to work their way out of poverty. She might or might not support initiatives like the Accord on Fire & Building Safety in Bangladesh (AFBSB), or insist that suppliers had unions: there’s a serious argument that self-appointed worker representatives in Bangladesh aren’t all just motivated by altruistic concern for workers, that some union representation might do more harm than good, and that the mess in Ashulia is the result of wilfully destructive agitation

But there’s a really strong argument that insisting on high wages in Bangladesh isn’t among those moral imperatives. The current $50 a month is more than those garment workers would be getting if they still depended on their family’s subsistence farming upcountry. Garment making in Bangladesh is so difficult that it may well take only a small hike in wages to move clients to somewhere sourcing’s easier, like Cambodia. It may be that the generally low productivity buyers find in Bangladesh isn’t something better training or investment can iron out: it takes more people to sew a shirt together there because it’s simply impossible to assure continuously available power, or for components to arrive in the right order. So there’s a point where higher wages might move production from Bangladesh to somewhere that needs the jobs less.

Given all this, a moral sourcing manager may well be doing more good sourcing at low wages in Bangladesh than at higher wages in a better-off country. She’d be behaving immorally (opere et omissione, remember) if she didn’t work to improve conditions in Bangladesh – but she’d be just as immoral if she moved production somewhere political activists felt more comfortable seeing on the label.

It’s all a complicated maze of moral issues. That moral sourcing manager needs lots of advice, both on ethics (which is the Pope’s job) and on the practicalities of sourcing (which is mine). But her religion makes it clear that ultimately her conscience decides where to source from, and that’s her responsibility – not mine, and not the Pope’s.

Because ethics needs to be as humble in all this as any other ideology. Not one of the four million jobs created in the Bangladesh garment industry over the past two decades can be attributed to the new fashion of ethical sourcing – though ethical sourcing has a lot to help our moral sourcing manager.

Every one of those four million jobs comes from a business seeking better value. The same day the Pope attacked Bangladeshi wages, he added “Dignity is not bestowed by power, by money, by culture - no! Dignity is bestowed by work.” The work that’s created dignity in Bangladesh for four million people and their dependants was the result of the profit seeking system he disapproves of.

There are times when making the right ethical decision is just too important to be left to the ethicists.