Community ripples make waves in Latin America

Contributor, Josie Jardim, is General Counsel for GE Corporate Latin America

When GE enters into a community in Latin America, the impact on its new employees is immediate: a safe working environment, health insurance and decent wages. But the company’s footprint moves far beyond GE’s doorstep, making an impact on the communities in which we operate that grows exponentially.

As a Brazilian, it’s particularly important to me that more companies operate in my region with rigorous process and compliance standards like GE. We help to raise the environmental, health and safety bar by sharing best practices with other companies, performing pro bono work to help build stronger legal and compliance systems in the area, and by our policy of only purchasing from companies that comply with environmental and labor laws.

Our supplier policy can make a great impact in countries such as my native Brazil, which has a large number of people holding informal jobs with no form of government-backed insurance because they are not officially recognized as employees by their companies.

GE and many other large companies in Brazil require our suppliers to demonstrate that their workforce is firmly aligned with employment and labor laws by requiring potential suppliers to submit proof that they have paid the social security-style taxes for each employee before we will do business with them. We also check to make sure these businesses not only have the required safety equipment for their employees, but that they are using it.

The result is that smaller companies realize that the only way they can do business with us is if they recognize and adhere to the local environmental and labor standards. It shows that we are using our size – and the strength of being a big company – for the benefit of the community.

I love being Brazilian – and I love working for a company that will not tolerate the mistreatment of people or do business with companies that violate any part of the law.

I’m proud that our efforts, in the end, help to build an awareness of the importance of these regulations, which in turn, penetrates into the community and takes root.

* Read my full perspective about GE’s role in Latin America
* Read Charles Moore’s perspective about business’s contract with society
* The Role of Business in Community Building