Swiss Olympic: New sustainable procurement strategy respects living wages
Posted: March 22, 2011 Filed under: Company reports | Tags: Living wages, Procurement strategy, Swiss Olympic Leave a comment »Swiss Olympic developed a new sustainable procurement strategy (together with my University Institute), which it now tests for six months. I would regard this policy as “political CSR”. Swiss Olympic does not produce garments but rather buys stuff for its sport campaigns etc., thus the new strategy defines rules for the products being purchased, which is actually more similar to public procurement than to CSR. Doing this, the strategy looks for the most advanced standards.
For instance, the Swiss national olympic committee in future plans to purchase most of its clothes from companies that are member in an MSI and who have signed a living wage policy. Most of the cotton clothes purchased must be organic. While NGOs have usually been criticizing national olympic committees for not sufficiently respecting workers’ rights, Swiss NGOs very much praised the new sustainability strategy in a public hearing for being very advanced regarding its standards, transparency and stakeholder participation.
The policy is now in a test phase; time will now show, whether the quite ridgid policy works in practice, which depends on there being companies, who fulfill the standards required by Swiss Olympic, which is a particular challenge regarding the living wages.
On April, 14th, there will be a OEBU-apero in Berne at which the new policy will be presented. If anyone has questions about the strategy, you can contact me.
Invitation: Comment Swiss Olympic’s concept of sustainable procurement
Posted: September 15, 2010 Filed under: Standard | Tags: Fair procurement, Political CSR, Sustainable procurement, Swiss Olympic Leave a comment »
In an action-oriented research project we developed a “political CSR” concept of sustainable procurement for Swiss Olympic. This organization is the governing body of Swiss sports organizations. It has 82 sport associations and 22.000 sports clubs as a member.
The political CSR approach was proposed by two management scholars (Guido Palazzo & Andreas Scherer). It follows a Habermasian, i.e. discursive, approach, according to which the best arguments shall decide upon the strategy. At Swiss Olympic we adopted this approach in the following way: We recently invited major stakeholders to comment our concept. We will then consider the suggestions and make transparent all comments we received. If Swiss Olympic rejects suggestions, we also make the reasons for the rejection transparent.
This is the last call for participating in the discourse. If you want to participate, please download the concept and guidelines here and send me an email with your comments until next week. Please keep the comments very specific, and, if possible, support your arguments with scientific evidence.
