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Mission Responsible by Lauren Byrne
A past president of the board of ICCR, Fr. Séamus Finn
currently serves on the executive committee of 3IG, which represents a
post-9/11 coming together of the major world religions to participate
in what is known as “socially responsible investing.”
It isn’t easy getting face time with Séamus Finn. It’s
not that he didn’t want to be interviewed for Irish America; in
e-mail exchanges he was friendly and willing. Pinning him down to a time
and place was the problem.
This member of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a missionary order of
5,000 priests and brothers in 60 countries, reckons he travels on average
125,000 miles a year, which means he’s rarely in any one place for
very long. Earlier this year, however, a public policy conference at Harvard
Law School created an opening.
We could meet, he said, at the end of the day’s session and before
he made a dash for a brief visit to his 94-year-old mother who lives north
of Boston, after which he was heading to Indonesia. I imagined it would
be easy to spot him in the crowd emerging from the conference room that
afternoon: he’d be the one in black suit, white dog collar, eyes
glazed with travel fatigue. In the end it was he who approached me, sporting
an open-necked shirt, tweed jacket, and the broad smile of a man who clearly
enjoys his life.
It’s his several roles that keep Reverend Finn on the move. He
is director of the Oblate Order’s Justice, Peace & Integrity
of Creation offices in Washington, and their representative at the Interfaith
Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) and at the International Interfaith
Investment Group (3IG), two of the world’s leading faith-based investor
organizations.
His past accomplishments include his involvement with the shaping of
the McBride Principles, developed to ensure fair labor practices in Ireland,
and he’s the sort of person journalists turn to when they need background
on the Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka, just one of many places he has an
insider’s knowledge of.
“Some people have compared me to the tinkers back home,” Finn
smilingly told me, revealing his origins, now obscured by his American
accent, in the reference to Ireland’s subculture of traveling people.
Born in Kanturk, Ireland, he moved with his family to Lowell, Mass., when
he was 14 years old.
He conveys the magnitude of this cultural shift by pointing out that
the number of pupils at the Lowell High School where he was enrolled was
twice the size of the entire population of Kanturk. His father, an auto
mechanic, never really adjusted to life in the depressed former cotton
manufacturing town, he says. His mother and the females in the family
of seven proved more adaptable.
Recalling memories of when he entered the priesthood, Finn smiles at
the thought of the t-shirt with the words “Join the Oblates and
see the world” that his father jokingly gave him, not knowing then
the full extent of his son’s life of nonstop travel, only that as
a missionary priest Séamus would see more of the world than his
brother, Dan, a diocesan priest who has spent all his life in the Boston
area.
In the 1970s, in an effort to end South Africa’s apartheid regime
and concerned about the growing production of armaments by U.S. companies
for the Vietnam War, Tim Smith, a Methodist minister, got together with
a number of other faith-based investors to form the Interfaith Center
on Corporate Responsibility.
Today the New York-based ICCR is a coalition of 275 religious institutional
investors representing over $100 billion in investments, which they have
leveraged, Smith, its former director, has been quoted as saying, to “protect
the environment, end sweatshops, guarantee equal employment, improve healthcare
access for the poor and elderly, and build a more peaceful world.”
For the past twenty years Finn, who has a doctorate in social justice
from Boston University, has engaged with governments on behalf of the
Oblates of Mary Immaculate on public policy issues and with corporations
on a wide range of human rights and environmental issues. A past president
of the board of ICCR, Finn currently serves on the executive committee
of the more recently formed 3IG, which represents a post-9/11 coming together
of the major world religions to participate in what is known as “socially
responsible investing.”
It’s the obverse of the get-rich-quick approach – one that
espouses ideas like keeping workers healthy and therefore productive,
and keeping the environment cleaner and therefore more sustainable –
and one to which religious organizations bring a special perspective,
Finn argues. “There is a capricious, greed-driven side to human
nature, and it’s clear that for some people the accumulation of
wealth is the number one priority they have in terms of the meaning of
their lives, and one has to be honest about that.
And sometimes shareholders are not any different. They’re looking
for the greatest return – that’s a feature of the system.
The faith perspective says, Hold on a minute. Human beings are created
in God’s image and likeness.” He elaborates further, “Our
perspective is from biblical and Catholic social teaching and what our
understanding of what the mission of the church is. We’re not interested
in making money so that we’ll have it in five years to pay someone’s
college tuition or because we want to buy a bigger house. I’m not
saying those are bad, but we feel that we have a vocation to look at the
longer view.”
While the Oblates may not be personally invested in a particular mining
company in Bolivia with environmental issues, say, or a flower farm in
Kenya whose employees are being exposed to pesticides, their mission centers
close to such places make them accessible to Finn, and the information
he gathers can be shared with ICCR or 3IG investors who do have a financial
stake in these concerns. With bases all over the world, the Oblates have
an unusually wide-lensed view of multinational corporations. “We
have colleagues in Indonesia, Latin America, and in sixteen countries
in Africa, and they wonder are they getting a fair shake; are any of these
companies really interested in anything but making as much profit as they
can.”
One of Finn’s frequent destinations is indeed Bolivia, where he
has been participating in ongoing discussions between community leaders
and mine owners about improved safety conditions for workers and the need
to develop cleaner technologies to protect the surrounding environment.
With the benefit of twenty years’ experience he knows that bringing
about such changes is a “long, slow process.” But not an impossible
one. After all, he says, “Reinvention is part of the story of capitalism.”
There is no radical agenda, no whiff of revolutionary ardor, about the
methods of ICCR or 3IG. Divesting from a company that is engaging in poor
practices is only ever a last resort. Instead, ICCR investors prefer to
stay involved, leveraging their combined financial clout to induce change.
Finn explains, “We want to simply say that there are a number of
things that should be included in the balance and some have to do with
human rights. How do you treat your workers? How did you make this money?
Was it fairly made or did you steal it? We want companies to count the
environmental costs, the social costs, in their budgeting. Then I think
you have a holistic system.”
The increased transparency of Nike’s operations and the promise
of a sustainability report from Wal-Mart by summer of 2007 were some of
the breakthroughs for ICCR that Finn pointed to when asked for some examples
of past successes. “We’ve been asking Wal-Mart for the past
eight or nine years. We’ve been saying we don’t think your
business model is sustainable. It might demonstrate some short-term money
but it’s not viable in the long run. You’re creating hostility,
you’re creating enemies!”
When I checked on the status of the sustainability report at the end of
the summer, Finn responded that it was still in draft form. At that point
Wal-Mart had just released a reduced profits forecast. Was this proof,
I asked, that they should have heeded ICCR’s warnings? Séamus’s
circuitous response revealed that the world lost a fine politician when
he chose the priesthood: “I think it is fair to say that these [reduced
profits] should be attributed to a number of different causes; competition;
China issues, etc. which would, I believe, fall under a sustainability
report.”
In July this year the SEC sent ICCR and other investor groups scurrying
into action when it announced that it was considering imposing restrictions
on shareholders’ rights to sponsor advisory resolutions, the main
tool investors use to draw attention to their concerns. If the past offers
any clues, then chances are high that ICCR in collaboration with other
interested bodies will succeed in skewering the proposal. In 1998 more
than 300 socially responsible and other groups successfully joined forces
to oppose a similar SEC plan to end the shareholder resolution process.
On the last occasion I contacted Séamus it was to get his response
to the SEC proposal. He only had time to direct me to the topic on ICCR’s
Web page. He was heading out the door to the airport, he said.
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