They argue that image is not always important for a company's balance sheet, and that companies are constantly altering and making their rhetoric more sophisticated. This tendency is also seen in corporate attitudes towards labour. Only by setting down basic standards for companies to adhere to, coupled with regulation ensuring the standards' enforcement, will labour rights be upheld. Legislation should clearly lay down the cost of non-compliance. Whilst legally enforceable codes of conduct are indispensable, often they are inadequate.
Laws change more slowly than businesses in a dynamic and competitive world.
Laws are enforced by officials whose interests cannot always be expected to be in consonance with the public's and who, in many countries, are too few and too poorly resourced to effectively regulate practices. For a regulatory framework to function requires, among others, a conscious public opinion and public pressure, organised countervailing interest groups, and mechanisms for arbitration. The following suggestions combine the need for better regulation with the need to support communities, labour and local governments in mining areas to strengthen them and to exert pressure and to lobby. A polluter- pays principle, extended to social costs, should be at the centre of Investment Codes. Social harmony should be correctly appreciated as a valuable input into sustaining investor interest.