On Mother’s Day, Chunghwa Telecom launched a NT$499 unlimited 4G mobile access campaign, which was dubbed “the 499 chaos” for the long lines it caused outside the company’s outlets. The Taipei Department of Labor fined the company NT$1 million (US$33,431) for making its employees work overtime, and the National Communications Commission, citing a lack of complementary measures, demanded improvements, threatening a fine of between NT$300,000 and NT$3 million.
A look at the company’s shareholder structure shows that it is quasi-government-operated rather than private. The biggest shareholder is the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, which holds a 35.29 percent stake, and eight of the 11 board directors are appointed by the ministry. While the remaining three directors are independent, they are nominated by the board and the major shareholders, which means that the board is more or less completely controlled by the ministry.
Corporate responsibility traditionally involved a company’s responsibility toward its shareholders, but that has evolved into corporate social responsibility. The responsibility of companies is no longer just a pursuit of maximizing profits, it must also consider the interest of stakeholders.
The EU defines corporate social responsibility as companies taking responsibility for their effects on society, according to the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights.
These principles state that governments should not only guide private business toward respect for human rights, they should also adopt further measures to guarantee that government-operated and semipublic businesses respect human rights.
The International Organization for Standardization has also developed a corporate social responsibility standard — ISO 26000 Social Responsibility — to certify whether a business fulfills its social responsibilities.
The standard covers seven core topics: organizational management, human rights, labor, environmental protection, fair operations, consumers and community. Among these, the health and safety of employees and consumers play an important part. Judging from the social chaos resulting from the campaign, Chunghwa Telecom does not care about the health and safety of employees and consumers.
The main three stakeholders in corporate social responsibility are the corporations themselves, the government and the community. Chunghwa Telecom’s management strategy reflects the company’s position, but in practice it also represents the government’s position. This means that the planning of management strategy cannot be only a matter of private enterprise ideas — the sensitivities and the importance of corporate social responsibility must go beyond that.
In a time when government policy implementation emphasizes Internet use, people are still lining up outside Chunghwa Telecom outlets in the middle of the night, while employees work until they drop and customers block the doors so that the employees cannot close for the day.
As a high-tech company, Chunghwa Telecom has many flexible strategies for handling applications that can be used to correct the situation. Despite that, management continued to legitimize the chaos created by the company.
It is obvious that they failed to live up to their corporate social responsibility, not to mention the corporate social responsibility of a quasi-government-operated business.
Yang Cheming is a professor at Taipei Medical University’s School of Healthcare Administration.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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