USCIB’s Adam Greene says that ISO’s member organisations are creating further confusion around the 26000 standard
USCIB’s Adam Greene says that ISO’s member organisations are creating further confusion around the 26000 standardAs the co-chair of the industry stakeholder group of the ISO working group on social responsibility – the group that developed ISO 26000 – I enjoyed reading your article in February on rogue certifications of ISO 26000 [EthicsWatch analysis: ISO 26000 – Certification denied].
The guidance standard has only been published for a few months but we have already seen a number of examples where consultants and certification bodies have “certified” an organisation to ISO 26000 – something that is expressly prohibited in the document to which they claim to be certified.
As unfortunate as such rogue certifications are, it turns out that the consultants offering them are not even the biggest problem on this front – that distinction belongs with the structure of ISO itself.
Most of the stakeholder groups involved in the ISO social responsibility working group agreed that ISO 26000 should not be certifiable. Indeed, the only group that was in favour of certification represented the consultants in the process. As a result, the decision was taken in the working group that ISO 26000 would not be certifiable.
However, it turns out that ISO’s national standards bodies are not bound by that decision, something that came as quite a surprise to many of us in the process.
Under the ISO rules, its national standards bodies are free to develop national variations of ISO 26000 for the sole purpose of offering certification – and many are. The latest example is the Danish standard DS 26001, where the title is obviously designed to link the product with ISO 26000.
These national standards have two main problems.
First, they create very real confusion in the marketplace by offering certification to 26000-like standards that the uninformed will clearly confuse with ISO 26000, making people think that ISO 26000 is certifiable.
Second, they turn the entire rationale for ISO upside down: rather than creating international standards in order to avoid many different national standards, ISO 26000 is being used by national standards bodies to create many different national standards so that they can sell certifications!
ISO itself has no authority over its national member bodies (quite the opposite, in fact), so these national standards are fully legal under the ISO system, regardless of the fact that they contradict the explicit statements in ISO 26000 that it is not intended or appropriate for certification.
Adam Greene
Vice-president, labour affairs and corporate responsibility,
United States Council for International Business