Читать книгу Patty's Industrial Hygiene, Program Management and Specialty Areas of Practice - Группа авторов - Страница 105

The public, ESG financial analysts, and activists groups have concentrated on environmental pollution and sweatshop labor issues that are most prominent in developing countries including China. This has been reinforced in the safety and health areas by some terrible human catastrophes such as the more than 1100 fatalities and 2500 injured from the Rana Plaza building collapse at a garment factory in Bangladesh on 24 April 2013 (17). Today, there is still a push for major corporations to practice CSR and sustainability in their organizations and throughout their supply chains but it has increasingly being driven by the investor and financial community. History has shown that companies with highly rated programs in sustainability outperform others financially and thus are good investments. This might be expected as companies with good sustainability performance could be assumed to be managed well in all areas. An investment survey from Morgan Stanley showed this logic:

…investors appear to place a premium on sustainability: Nearly three quarters (72%) of those surveyed believe that companies with good environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices can achieve higher profitability and are better long‐term investments (18).

As another very recent example, the BlackRock investment firm's annual letter (2017) to the CEOs of the world's largest public companies stated, “Society is demanding that companies, both public and private serve a social purpose…to prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society” (19). The Wall Street Journal reported that there are over 460 US equity funds with an ESG focus (20). The significance is that the current trend in nonfinancial reporting is to view safety and health as a major contributor to what is termed, “human capital.” Additionally, many large institutional investors such as the AFL‐CIO pension fund, the California pension funds for teachers and state employees (CalSTRS and CalPERS represent over $500 billion) and a number of others have established benchmarks for investing that included ESG performance. Investors today are looking at more than simply the “bottom line” for their investments. This is a strong driving force for sustainability and EHS departments to demonstrate good performance.