American free enterprise groups have stepped up their campaign against
corporate social responsibility by holding a ‘counter-event’ to the
biggest annual CSR conference in the US.
Three groups set up the event in the same hotel in Washington DC where
more than 1000 CSR proponents were gathered for the annual conference
of Business for Social Responsibility. Their meeting was billed as ‘the
first organized effort to challenge the left’s longstanding campaign to
use corporate America to advance its radical social and political
agenda’.
The counter-event was organized by the National & Legal Policy
Centre, the Free Enterprise Institute and the Competitive Enterprise
Institute, which now intend to hold a similar conference annually.
The anti-CSR speakers included Wayne Winegarden, chief economist at the
US-based consultancy Sterling International, David Hogberg, executive
director of the Capital Research Centre think-tank, and Nick Nichols, a
senior lecturer at Johns Hopkins University.
Hogberg, who claimed the event was ‘a very good start for the effort to
return the corporation to its original purpose, making a profit’, told
delegates that CSR’s ‘rhetoric of responsibility’ masks ‘a leftist
agenda of government regulation and wealth redistribution’.
Although the anti-CSR lobby remains small, it has shown signs of
increased activity in the past year, particularly in the US. One of its
main outlets is the year-old CSRwatch website, which gathers articles
and opinions critical of the corporate responsibility agenda (EP6,
issue 6, p2).
