Today, December 10, is Human Rights Day. On this date in 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
When most people think of human rights violations, they think of injustices committed by governments, groups, and individuals.
But corporations are also guilty of gross violations of human rights.
From Global Exchange:
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In honor of international human rights day, Global Exchange has released a report on the “Most Wanted” Corporate Human Rights Violators of 2005. We developed this list to illustrate that on issues as diverse as assassination, torture, kidnapping, environmental degradation, abusing public funds, violently repressing worker rights, releasing toxins into pristine environments, destroying homes, and causing widespread health problems, it’s not just governments that are to blame. Corporations carry out some of the most horrific human rights abuses of modern times.
Familiar companies like Dow Chemical, Coca Cola, Caterpillar, Lockheed, Philip Morris, and Wal-Mart are included on our list of the worst corporate criminals of 2005, which gives you information about the abusive behavior of each corporation, and tells you who is responsible and how to connect with and support people who are doing something about it. The full list is available here. Briefs on each corporation’s violations are below.
The more you know, the less these corporations can continue their abuses out of public eyesight; so share this information with your friends, get on the phone with the CEOs themselves, and exercise your rights as a citizen and consumer today. When corporations act like criminals, we have the right and the power to stop them, holding leaders and multinational corporations alike to the accords they have signed. Around the world—in Venezuela, Argentina, India, and right here in the United States—citizens are stepping up to create democracy and hold corporations accountable to international law. We invite you to join them by taking action!
GLOBAL EXCHANGE’S LIST OF “MOST WANTED” CORPORATE HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATORS OF 2005
(Click here for full details on each corporation as well as corporate contact information and a list of groups working to hold these corporations accountable)
CATERPILLAR. For years, the Caterpillar Company has provided Israel with the bulldozers used to destroy Palestinian homes. Despite worldwide condemnation, Caterpillar has refused to end their corporate participation in house demolition by cutting off sales of specially modified D9 and D10 bulldozers to the Israeli military. Peace activist Rachel Corrie was killed by a Caterpillar, D-9, military bulldozer in 2003. Since Rachel’s death at least three more Palestinians have been killed in their homes by Israeli bulldozer demolitions.
CHEVRON. From 1964 to 1992, a toxic “Rainforest Chernobyl” was unleashed in Ecuador when Texaco (now owned by Chevron) left more than 600 unlined oil pits in pristine northern Amazon rainforest and dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic production water into rivers used for bathing water. The toxic crude oil and formation water seeped into the subsoil, contaminating surrounding freshwater and farmland. As a result, local communities have suffered severe health effects, including cancer, skin lesions, birth defects, and spontaneous abortions
COCA COLA. Between 1989 and 2002, eight union leaders from Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia were killed after protesting the company’s labor practices. Hundreds of other Coca-Cola workers have been kidnapped, tortured, and detained by paramilitaries who intimidate workers to prevent them from unionizing. In India, Coca-Cola extracted 1.5 million liters of deep well water, which they bottled and sold under the names Dasani and BonAqua. The groundwater was severely depleted, affecting thousands of communities with water shortages and destroying agricultural activity. The remaining water became contaminated with high chloride and bacteria levels, leading to scabs, eye problems, and stomach aches in the local population.
DOW CHEMICAL. Dow Chemical has been destroying lives and poisoning the planet for decades. The company is best known for the ravages and health disaster for millions of Vietnamese and U.S. veterans caused by its lethal Vietnam War defoliant, Agent Orange. In 2001, Dow inherited the toxic legacy of the worst peacetime chemical disaster in history when it acquired Union Carbide Corporation and its outstanding liabilities in Bhopal, India. Dow refuses to address its liabilities in Bhopal or even admit their existence.
DYNCORP/CSC. Private security contractors have become the fastest-growing sector of the global economy during the last decade—a $100-billion-a-year, nearly unregulated industry. DynCorp, one of the providers of these mercenary services, demonstrates the industry’s power and potential to abuse human rights. While guarding Afghani statesmen and African oil fields, training Iraqi police forces, eradicating Colombian coca plants, and protecting business interests in hurricane-devastated New Orleans, these hired guns have bolstered the security of governments and organizations at the expense of many people’s human rights.
FORD MOTOR COMPANY. The US addiction to oil is linked with a host of human rights and environmental problems, including human rights abuses in countries such as Nigeria, Ecuador, Sudan, South Africa and Indonesia. It has prompted the US government to cozy up to human rights violating governments such as that of Saudi Arabia; pushed indigenous people off their land; destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres of rainforests; fueled wars for oil, such as the war in Iraq; and polluted cities, endangering the health of millions of people. Automobiles are the single largest consumer of oil in the US, and among US automakers, Ford is the worst. Ford has the worst overall fuel economy and highest greenhouse gas emissions.
KBR (KELLOGG, BROWN AND ROOT). KBR provides logistical support for war, occupation and unlawful detention. The company provides key support services that enable the US troops to continue their occupation of Iraq. Many third-country national (TCN) laborers have been hired by KBR to work in Iraq These TCNs, once in Iraq, are often forced to put in 10 hours or more a day of hard labor, seven days a week, They sleep in crowded trailers, lack adequate medical care, and wait outside in scorching heat to eat “slop.” KBR also constructed the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, where hundreds of detainees have languished for more than three years, many of whom have suffered abuse and torture.
LOCKHEED MARTIN. Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest military contractor. In 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion, the company held $21.9 billion in Pentagon contracts. Providing satellites, planes, missiles, and other lethal high tech items to the Pentagon keeps the profits rolling in. Lockheed is a classic war profiteer. The company advocates war and then profits from it. Lockheed Vice President Bruce Jackson was a key player at the Project for a New American Century, the intellectual incubator of the Iraq war. Since 2000, the year Bush was elected, Lockheed’s stock value has tripled.
MONSANTO. Monsanto promotes mono-culture—the practice of covering large swaths of land with a single crop. This practice pushes out subsistence farms and destroys arable land by drastically decreasing soil and water quality for years, draining soil of key nutrients. Monsanto is the world's leading producer of the herbicide glyphosate, marketed as “Roundup.” Roundup is sold to small farmers as a pesticide, yet harms crops in the long run as the toxins accumulate in the soil. Plants eventually become infertile, forcing farmers to purchase genetically modified Roundup Ready Seed, a seed that resists the herbicide. Exposure to Roundup Ultra is documented to cause cancers, skin disorders, spontaneous abortions, premature births, and damage to the gastrointestinal and nervous systems.
NESTLE. Nestlé buys cocoa beans for its chocolate from farms that use illegal and forced child labor. The company is the third largest buyer of cocoa from the Ivory Coast, has processing, storage and export facilities there, and is well aware that even the US State Department estimates that some 109,000 children are working on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast under the worst and most hazardous form of child labor. This summer, the International Labor Rights Fund and a Birmingham law firm filed a class-action lawsuit against Nestlé and several of its suppliers on behalf of former child slaves.
PHILIP MORRIS (a.k.a. THE ALTRIA GROUP INC.). Nearly five million lives per year are claimed by the tobacco industry, whose product results in premature death for half the people who use them. Among tobacco companies, Philip Morris is notorious. It is the world’s largest and most profitable cigarette corporation and is also a leader in pushing smoking with young people around the world. Although the company says it doesn’t want kids to smoke, it spends millions of dollars every day marketing and promoting cigarettes to youth. Overseas, it has even hired underage Marlboro girls to distribute free cigarettes to other children and sponsored concerts where cigarettes were handed out to minors.
PFIZER. Pfizer is the largest pharmaceutical company in the world, and is also one of the worst abusers of the human right to universal access to HIV/AIDS medicine. Pfizer produces the anti-retroviral drug fluconazole under the name Diflucan, and sells it at prices that poor people with AIDS cannot afford. The company refuses to grant generic licenses of fluconazole to governments in countries like Brazil, South Africa, or Dominican Republic, where patients are forced to pay $20 per weekly pill, though the average national wage is only $120 per month.
SUEZ-LYONNAISE DES EAUX. Suez has made billions of dollars in profits turning the human right to water into an unaffordable luxury. Suez has raised water rates, cut off the water of people unable to pay, refused to extend services to poverty-stricken neighborhoods, and then threatened legal action when contracts are terminated. For example, in Manila, Philippines, after seven years of water privatization under a Suez company, studies showed that water rates increased in some neighborhoods by 400 to 700 percent, and the negligence of the company resulted in cholera and gastroenteritis outbreaks that killed six people and severely sickened hundreds more.
WAL-MART. Wal-Mart maintains its low price level by allowing substandard labor conditions at the overseas factories producing most of its goods. The company continually demands lower prices from its suppliers, who, in turn, make more outrageous and abusive demands on their workers. In September 2005, the International Labor Rights Fund filed a lawsuit on behalf of Wal-Mart supplier sweatshop workers in China, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nicaragua and Swaziland. The workers were denied minimum wages, forced to work overtime without compensation, and were denied legally mandated health care. Other worker rights violations that have been found in foreign factories that produce goods for Wal-Mart include locked bathrooms, starvation wages, pregnancy tests, and workers being fired and blacklisted if they try to defend their rights.
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