Enriched by high oil prices, Chevron Corp. will spend up to US$15 billion buying back its own stock _ a commitment that pleased shareholders and rankled critics clamouring for bigger investments in projects that might help lower energy costs. The three-year repurchase program announced Wednesday served as yet another reminder of the cash cascading into [...]

Drugmaker Merck & Co. plans to donate enough doses of its cervical cancer vaccine, Gardasil, to inoculate 1 million women in some of the world’s poorest countries. Whitehouse Station, N.J.-based Merck announced the gift today at the third annual Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York. The company said at least 3 million doses of [...]

More than 416.000 children under the age of 18, of which almost 225.000 younger than 14, are involved in (often bonded) child labour in India’s cottonseed fields. Most of them are girls. They work in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Compared to the 2003-2004 harvest season the total number of [...]

Last year, the Church of Norway asked the Norwegian Government Pension Fund to consider divesting the fund’s holdings in Caterpillar Inc. The reason: Caterpillar was selling the Israeli army bulldozers that were being used against Palestinian civilians. Given the avalanche of negative publicity that swamped Wal-Mart last summer when the pension fund dumped its stock [...]

Inside the ‘parks’, within each factory, a carefully calculated use of imported machines and local labour in finely calibrated proportions, is designed to maximize returns for the investor. It is not difficult to figure out why for certain orders, specific machinery is switched off and manual processes used. According to these mysterious formulae, each member [...]

During the talks to renew IBM’s Italian internal collective agreement, an employee group asked for a salary increase, prompting IBM to cancel their “productive results benefit”, resulting in a loss of more than $1300 / year per employee. This prompted a majority of IBM Italy employees to vote to strike in Second Life for the [...]

Many Western companies are waking up to the importance of going green. Boeing is one such company that has undergone an image makeover and gone green. The Boeing 787, which is scheduled to enter service in May 2008, is twenty per cent more fuel efficient than other mid-sized wide body aircraft. “The 787 will be [...]

Cisco Systems and the City of San Francisco are looking to technology to battle climate change. San Francisco is one of three cities initially selected by the San Jose-based networking giant to take part in its Connected Urban Development Initiative. Cisco is deploying expertise, equipment and research to Seoul, Amsterdam and San Francisco for [...]

In 2006 and 2007, UNI Finance conducted a survey on finance companies’ commitments to Principle 3 of the UN Global Compact, “Businesses should uphold the freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining”. 35 major finance companies were asked to elaborate on their commitments to Principle 3. In a second [...]

In the last two decades the corporate sector has started to play a growing role in the international development. The separation between business and the United Nations has become less significant.  One expression of this evolution is the United Nations Global Compact. Kofi Annan, former Secretary General launched this initiative at the 1999 World Economic [...]