Corporate Social Responsibility:By Dr Shanker Adawal

There is a need for expansion of Corporate Social Responsibility to include the obligation to environmentally sustainable development. CSR has been imposed on businesses as an external obligation, but now it needs to be embraced as a shared responsibility. Alongside sustainability, CSR must also include the viability and prosperity of society and people.

A sense of duty that transcends beyond the borders of the company must be fostered among stakeholders in order to develop a trusting relationship with society at large. CSR should fulfill its societal commitment or purpose by considering its economic viability alongside environmental sustainability, social good, cultural heritage and equity principles.The inclusion of these factors is essential because there are many drivers that impact multinational companies with complex supply chains for their products and services.

Unsustainable consumption is impacting the environment and depleting natural resources. It is necessary to build a strong relation with stakeholders that ensures mutual benefit and sharing of responsibility. In order to expand such relations, business needs to address the following key issues:

New drivers for sustainable consumption must be found and implemented globally in order to ensure environmental sustainability and social welfare. Businesses need to co-create products, services and solutions that are sustainable in all aspects including the production, consumption and disposal or recycling of such products and services.

Businesses must also work together with governments on their shared responsibility for sustainable development by ensuring development within their own countries which in turn will improve stability for countries around the world.

Working towards a single sustainability indicator will help businesses assess, measure and improve the state of sustainable development. This would allow communication of the social and environmental benefits of products and services to consumers. It will also assist in strengthening corporate responsibility.

When I was very young, my father introduced me to social responsibilities by giving me a choice between two different paths to follow in life. The first one led down the path of greed, avarice, and immorality; essentially some form of unethical behavior that would lead to my own self-destruction as well as the destruction of many around me. The other path was one of altruism and giving, not just to family and friends but to people in need all around the world. I chose the latter.

In my life I have had many opportunities to give back both monetarily and through volunteer work. I have chosen the latter more often than not.

I am very proud of my title of Dr. It is an honor that I treasure every day of my life. It is important to me because it allows me to educate people about health and wellness, especially children and young adults. The title allows me to teach others how to live a healthy lifestyle by making good choices about what they eat, how they exercise, how they think and how they act towards others in general.

A few years back I found out that my own company had lost a major client. One of my new business partners told me that, by law, if I didn't keep the remaining clients happy, he could lose his position at the company and hence his own social standing. He had no problem with doing whatever it took to keep everyone happy in order to keep his job and status in society. I, on the other hand, felt that I was more concerned with doing what I could to help the client meet their social want, not what was best for my company.

I didn't always make the right choices at work. I had an issue with a client and decided to tell him how I felt. He turned around and fired me. Wanting to keep my job, I then called a friend of mine who worked in corporate America and asked him if he had any work for me anywhere else. He introduced me to a company that did home health care services and said he would call back with some options. After a couple of hours, he called me and said, "They will take you on but they think you are too old to learn the business and that you should have been fired a long time ago! If you can get them some new clients, maybe they will rethink their opinion of you." I was insulted but I knew he was right. They were my last hope so I took the job.

My new boss was from China and didn't say much to me. After about three weeks, I got a new supervisor who kept asking me why it had taken me so long to get him his clients. I told him that I had been working stupid hours and was too old to learn the business. After my shifts were finished, he then made a comment saying that I looked like a snake and that I should be put down! I felt like he was putting me down because of my race and gender rather than because of anything else.

I went to HR and they said, "Your boss is just being mean." He was later fired for reasons other than his meanness toward me. The work ethic and attitude seemed weak as well as perfunctory. There were no incentives or recognition for doing good work. I was feeling very depressed. I had looked forward to this job because it was supposed to be a career break in which I could learn a new market and industry and transition into working as a consultant for the company. However, after about six months of dealing with them every day, I just wanted to get out of there as soon as I could.

I went back to work with my previous employer. Initially my boss didn't think it would be a good idea but he eventually let me come back. He said that even though he had hired someone else, at the rate things were going, he might need me again soon anyway. I was glad to be back, but found out that my replacement had already been fired. At the time I didn't know the whole story, but later found out that the person who had been hired after me said they wanted to make a run for it and told my boss they didn't care if they were "Black, White or whatever".

As time went on, I noticed my coworkers were becoming increasingly unhappy. The company had been bought out by another company (which eventually folded as well) and we had a lot of new bosses as well as policies that were affecting how we did business locally and in our region. The new bosses kept making changes and not telling us very much about what was going on or why it was necessary. They kept saying these changes were to better our business; we just kept feeling worse and worse about them.

Another coworker and I decided that there was no point in having a union at our company since the bosses didn't seem to listen anyway. We had no influence on what happened happening at the company and felt powerless about it. We decided that maybe we could start a union for ourselves, independent of our employer, in order to create a better environment for ourselves at work. We started looking into it and found out that it wasn't as easy as we thought. There were some new laws coming down from the government which made it more difficult to form a union without corporate permission and the money required trained professionals to do so effectively.

Conclusion

I believe that there are many lessons to be learned from my life experience. One is that when we focus too much on money, status and power, we become increasingly unhappy. When we focus on helping others and giving back to our community and world, things don't have to be so bad.

It is my hope that you will be able to learn something positive from my life story. I have had a lot of ups and downs but no matter how bad the situation was, I always managed to find a way out. Maybe it wasn't the most direct way but it was always one I could learn from in some way.