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Holy Land Principles targets major delivery service UPS to ensure their policies respect the rights of all employees including Arabs, Palestinians and Muslims. Mac Bridge Principles apply to corporate conduct by all
For the first time in its history, UPS has been presented with a Resolution regarding its fair employment practices in Israel-Palestine.
The huge delivery company, with 424, 000 employees, operates in approximately 220 countries and territories. It entered the Palestine-Israel market in 1994 through a licensed contractor and has 900 employees there.
The Capitol Hill-based Holy Land Principles, Inc. called on UPS at its Annual Shareholder meeting in Wilmington, Delaware, on May 5 to sign the Holy Land Principles — a corporate code of conduct for American companies doing business in Palestine-Israel, based on the very effective Mac Bride Principles for Northern Ireland.
The Holy Land Principles are pro-Jewish, pro-Palestinian and pro-company. The Principles do not call for quotas, reverse discrimination, divestment, disinvestment or boycotts. The Principles do not take any position on solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The Principles do not try to tell the Palestinians or the Israelis what to do. The Holy Land Principles only called on UPS to implement the Holy Land Principles. (There have been some unfortunate and irresponsible attempts to misrepresent and demonize the Principles but these attempts will not be allowed to succeed).
The Resolution received over 144 Million votes, 144,652,201 (7.8%), with 172, 041,160 abstentions. At close of business on May 5th, the value of UPS shares was $102.14. So the value of the share votes for HLP represented $14,774,775810.14.
The value of abstentions was $17,572,284,082.40.
Therefore, the combined total of money not supporting UPS was over $32 Billon ($32,347,059,892.54) and, therefore, a total of 316,693,361 votes not supporting UPS.
Fr. Sean Mc Manus—President of the Washington-based Holy Land Principles and Irish National Caucus, which also launched the Mac Bride Principles — said: “This is a good result with which we are pleased. For the first time ever, UPS has been “Resolution-ized, ” our term for facing a company with the Holy Land Principles.”
Fr. Mc Manus explained: “Isn’t it truly remarkable that until we launched the Holy Land Principles, on International Human Rights Day, December 10, 2012, this issue had never been raised before in the corporate boardrooms. Surely that is most peculiar since SRI groups and faith-based organizations have been filing a great many Resolutions on so many worthy issues? Why was this issue ignored? But now the elephant in the (board) room can no longer be ignored.
None of the 545 American companies doing business in the Holy Land will be able to evade this issue. The Holy Land Principles is an idea whose time has come.”
Barbara Flaherty, Executive Vice President, who presented the Resolution, said: “We were very grateful for the courteous reception the UPS board gave us. We will be coming back to them next year with another Holy Land Principles resolution, and we hope that this fine American company will then sign the Holy Land Principles— thus sending out a wonderful signal about fairness and equality to all their employees in the Holy Land.”
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Hanania also writes about Middle East issues for the Arab News, and The Arab Daily News criticizing government policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hanania was named "Best Ethnic American Columnist" by the New America Media in November 2007, and is the 2009 recipient of the SPJ National Sigma Delta Chi Award for column writing.
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