YOU WAKE up from a thoughtless sleep in your quaint home, as the sun rises over the horizon of town. The room then becomes filled with the aroma of garlic from a pot of rice and you hear the crackling and frying of your favorite beef tapa being sautéed into your wife’s special sauce. In an instant, your children come running down, taking their respective seats on the dining table. As you also get seated, you start the meal with a prayer and open your eyes to see the kids hastily start hoarding big scoops of rice and spooning mounds of tapa onto their plate. Once everyone is done, everyone packs up to leave for school and work. As you leave your home, you stand in front of the doorstep feeling grateful for the lingering feeling of security that your family will experience until the end.
This depicts a slice of life of the stable and comfortable lifestyle that every Filipino family dreams of. It has always been one of the development goals of the Philippines to uplift the economic status of every Filipino in poverty through efforts from the government and NGOs. These institutions have been able to implement projects and programs with a common goal to make the Philippines a better place for everyone to live in.
The efforts from the private sector should also not be discounted. Businesses from over the world now see the value of “giving back,” which spearheaded the practice of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR involves using excess profit to extend help to different sectors of development such as the environment, underdeveloped communities, and even their own human resources. However, as benevolent as it may seem, the motives of some companies become twisted along the way.
In the case of corporate-community partnerships, what a company can usually do is to provide revenue streams for the people. There are some companies who actually hire the people into the company, but most would rather provide short-term projects for them to generate income. However, the CSR department of the company must always consider the long-term profit of the business, as it makes a “social impact” in society. This is the gray area where the conflict between the community’s and business’ interests arise.
Many companies find self-enhancing motives through CSR. For most, it does successfully enhance goodwill and company image, which will attract both customers and talented workforce. Another factor is the enactment of the tax break for companies who give at least 3% of their profits to CSR. Although the goal was to encourage more companies to practice CSR, the drawback is fact that there are companies who do not bother going beyond the minimum.
What is worse is that there are companies who look at CSR as a big marketing project for them to generate revenues and cheap labor from the community itself. Development has ceased to become the core of CSR and companies limit their capabilities to providing only band-aid solutions, thus not targeting the real developmental problem. This results to the continued instability of jobs and even limited opportunities for the people within the community to achieve a sense of fulfillment.
Excessive capitalism is a phenomenon that is too late to be stopped now, but it does put CSR to the test to what it is exactly for. Companies should not only strive to find the golden mean between development and profit-making, but it should also realize how “genuine” CSR should be practiced.
