Many people like to think of big corporations as their friends,
and the corporations certainly don’t try too hard to convince people otherwise.
In fact, recent efforts on social media by large companies have taken advantage of this
by using a personal touch, and often turning their company into a loveable character, run
by a very real, sarcastic and witty individual.
However, large companies are amoral at best -- more interested in profit than doing what’s
right.
Companies only tend to go out of their way to do the right thing if social pressure means
they could lose or gain sales, and they will sometimes do callously evil things if they
know they can get away with it.
In today’s article, we will go over ten shocking times corporations abused their power
to put profit over other people’s safety, wellbeing and privacy.
10.
Cutter, A Division Of Bayer, Sold HIV Tainted Medicine In Asia And Latin America
Back in the 1980’s, Cutter, a division of the Bayer Pharmaceutical Giant, had a bit
of a problem on their hands.
They had medicine that was meant to treat hemophiliacs and the medicine worked quite
well at helping blood to clot, they also had a lot of stock on hand.
Unfortunately, they also found that the medicine had been tainted by HIV, but getting rid of
it would have meant losing a lot of profit.
Heat treating would likely make it safe, but it might make the medicine not as effective.
Now, they had a bit of an issue because they weren’t really worried about people getting
infected with HIV, but there were countries that might slap them with crazy penalties.
The medicine, called Factor VIII Concentrate, was sold to Asia and Latin America instead
of Europe and North America.
Eventually Cutter Biological did start selling a heat treated version, but there is evidence
they were still selling the tainted stock a year after that because they wanted to get
rid of it.
Thousands of hemophiliacs were infected with HIV, and some contracted AIDS and died as
a result.
Over the course of the decades, Bayer has had to pay out 600 million dollars to the
victims of their divisions lack of basic human ethics.
To this day, however, after settling a lot of cases out of court, they still contend
that they acted ethically, and responsibly, based on the information they had at the time.
9.
Foxconn Has A Problem With Contract Employees Committing Suicide -- So They Install Nets
Several years back many people heard about a company called Foxconn in China that was
treating their employees so bad they were committing suicide -- in 2010 alone 18 employees
ended their own lives.
Employees lived in a large dormitory style like factory, working many months at a time
or longer staying in the factory on contracts.
You had no real time for friendship or a social life and talking was completely forbidden
while working.
Twelve hour working days were common, and employees were often berated and publicly
humiliated or punished for not meeting proper productivity standards.
The companies response to the media outrage was to point out that eighteen suicides in
a year was about the national average, and that in a factory as large as theirs, it made
sense that it reflected that average.
They also installed nets to catch jumpers who might try to kill themselves, and asked
new employees to sign saying the company wouldn’t be responsible if they killed themselves -- they
removed this after an outcry.
The company does now have a labor union, but it is basically a joke as the CEO of the labor
union personally works for the head of Foxconn.
Since the outcry Foxconn has put window dressing on the problem, but if anything the pressure
on the workers is even worse and now they have nets stopping them from ending it all
when it just gets to be too much.
Now, as the company is known for making products for Apple many people blame them or expect
them to be responsible for fixing the problem, but Foxconn also makes products for the other
tech giants, such as Dell, Sony and many more.
8.
Nestle And Other Chocolate Companies Buy From Third World Farms That Use Child Labor
The chocolate confection industry is currently valued at a little over 100 billion in sales
per year, and is expected to grow to around 160 billion by 2024.
Big companies like Mars, Cadbury, Hershey, Nestle and others all want a piece of the
increasingly large pie, and most already post large revenue numbers every year.
Now, Nestle’s global brand sells far more than just chocolate, but they posted total
sales in 2018 of close to 100 billion, with a tidy net profit of a little over ten billion
US dollars.
The GDP of Ghana and the Ivory Coast, the two countries who produce the vast majority
of the worlds chocolate, is currently about 87 billion combined.
Since the early 90’s, the developed world has becoming increasingly worried about the
child labor problem in the chocolate producing nations, and has encouraged the big chocolate
companies to do something about it.
Nestle and other big chocolate companies have pledged a total of 500 million combined between
all of them recently to make more schools and teach as many as 300,000 farmers.
They are also focused on helping them increase productivity, which is probably the wrong
way to stop child labor.
While they have helped some schools be built, experts don’t think nearly enough is being
done.
Between Ghana and the Ivory Coast there are roughly 55 million people, so 300,000 is probably
not even close to the majority of the farmers that need to be reached.
Big chocolate has also been setting deadlines to fix the issue and blowing past them for
decades and their latest deadline looks just as unsustainable.
They claim they will only buy from certified sources by 2020, but with 2 million children
still working, and experts believing the problem is getting worse and not better, at least
in the short term, they are unlikely to reach that goal -- unless their certification program
allows for child labor.
While no one has an easy answer, experts believe it is a problem that is going to require a
lot more than 500 million dollars to fix, and without a proper partnership with the
governments, and true legal enforcement to stop child labor, the problem is never going
to go away.
Unless the companies who the economies of these countries rely on pressure them, they
will never have a reason to step in and do anything about the problem.
7.
Nike And The Rest Of The Big Clothing Industry Utilize A Lot Of Overseas Labor
After spending decades cleaning up their image, In 2017, new protests started to emerge against
Nike, primarily led by a group called the USAS, a student organization whose acronym
stands for United Students Against Sweatshops -- they have been protesting over allegedly
poor work conditions in factories, alleged anti-union tactics, and not allowing an independent
organization run by universities called the Workers Rights Consortium to inspect Nike
factories.
Also in 2017, there was renewed interest in an ongoing problem in Cambodia, a country
that has a garment labor force of about 600,000 people, mostly women.
Essentially, Cambodia doesn’t have some of the same standards as their neighboring
Vietnam, who by law mandates factory temperatures are not to go above 32 degrees Celsius, whereas
the government in Cambodia has no specific set standard in terms of temperature.
Fainting is common, and mass faintings are not unheard of -- in 2016 a little over 1000
faintings was considered a great improvement over about 1800 the previous year.
It is important to understand that a lot of these factories are not directly run by Nike,
or the other clothing companies.
Many of them are run by contractors under Nike’s employ, or even by sub-contractors.
Now, this doesn’t absolve them entirely of responsibility, and Nike agrees.
Nike, Puma, Asics, and others have been working in countries like Cambodia to improve conditions
in factories producing their garments, but the experts feel that the issue is that they
are not doing nearly enough.
Some have offered longer term contracts to ease worker fears, or installed cooling systems,
given safety training, or even handed out energy bars and other useful things.
However, the biggest problem is that the best wage that Nike and the other big garment makes
are pushing for is the minimum wage, and in the majority of countries where clothing is
produced, the minimum wage is well below the living wage to get by in that country.
Until all of the large clothing companies (not just Nike), pressure the governments,
and the contractors and sub-contractors under them, to provide a living wage as part of
their codes of conduct, many living and working in garment making countries will continue
to struggle mightily working long days, simply in the hopes to get by.
6.
Philip Morris Made Anti Teen Smoking Ads -- They Were Ineffective, Obviously
In 1999 Phillip Morris announced their plans to start making anti-teen smoking ads, and
the outcry was pretty much immediate.
At the time, there were plans for a national anti-smoking campaign for actual public health
that would cost about 1.5 billion dollars, and many states were running some very hard
hitting anti-smoking ads that graphically showed the physical effects of smoking and
what it could do to your body, including showing someone smoking through a tracheotomy tube.
People who criticized Phillip Morris felt that the 100 million dollars they were spending
on anti-smoking ads would be better spent by groups that actually had a real reason
to want people to not smoke.
However, Phillip Morris insisted on running their own ads, and it was quickly apparent
why the experts didn’t want them making anti-smoking ads, and why they felt it was
pretty much just an underhanded move to dilute the message of the hard hitting ads.
The ads depicted teens basically just saying things like “I don’t need to smoke to
prove myself”, which as some surveyed teens explained, didn’t really give them any particular
reason not to smoke.
In fact, random teens who were surveyed about the various different anti-smoking ads always
found the ones by Phillip Morris to be the least effective, whereas the ones that showed
the most graphic depictions possible of the dangers had the most positive effect when
it comes to making people not want
to smoke.
5.
Mylan Hiked The Price Of Live Saving Epi Pens By More Than 400% To Make Money
In 2015 with increasing notice of pharmaceutical price gouging due to the infamous pharma bro,
people started raising hell that the price of life saving epi pens had been hiked by
400% in just a few short years.
A drug company called Mylan bought the patent in 2007, and started needlessly raising the
price.
It went from 50 dollars for a single epipen, to 600 dollars for a two pack in just seven
years.
The CEO of Mylan, Heather Bresch, saw her company gain about a billion extra dollars
in profit per year because of this, and saw tens of extra millions of dollars in personal
salary.
When called before a congressional committee, she gave all kinds of excuses, but she didn’t
really need to -- the sickening actions her and her company took were entirely legal.
There really are no price caps or any kind of laws that would prevent the pharmaceutical
companies from doing this, and because they own the patent, they have been doing everything
they can to prevent a generic from entering the market.
However, a company called Teva had been working on approval for a generic for some time, both
to get past the FDA’s inspections and to work their way past legal challenges from
Mylan.
In 2018, they finally got approval, and you can now buy a generic two pack for about 110
dollars, which is really just 10 dollars more than the original price, as they were 50 dollars
for just one.
Mylan, still being tone deaf, has offered their own “generic alternative” for the
“generous” price of just 300 dollars for a two pack -- how big of them.
4.
Conditions At Tyson, Perdue And Pilgrim Factories Allegedly Led To Diaper Use On The Line
A couple years back, a report by Oxfam -- a charity focused on ending poverty -- found
that there were incredibly abusive conditions at many chicken processing factories, including
those owned by giants like Tyson, Perdue and Pilgrim.
These factories are said to not only be very dangerous even when proper safety standards
are met, but it is cold, unappreciated work.
These things would be bad enough, but the worst part is that after interviewing thousands
and thousands of employees, they were left with horror stories of people routinely being
denied bathroom breaks when they needed them.
According to this report, many employees were resorting to adult diapers, not just to urinate,
but also to defecate on the line.
While this is an awful way to treat your employees and abusive on so many levels, it should also
bother you even if you don’t really care about human suffering because it’s disgusting
that something like that is going on right next to food that is being prepared for you
to buy at the supermarket.
While all the major chicken suppliers such as Pilgrim, Perdue and Tyson at first claimed
that the company policies were already against such things, and denied that something like
that could be widespread, Tyson eventually responded to an Oxfam petition (which garnered
well over 150,000 signatures) by promising to incorporate more safety training and bathroom
breaks to improve conditions in the workplace.
3.
Family Dollar Got Around Overtime Laws By Calling Hourly Employees “Managers”
Family Dollar is not really a store you tend to think about much.
You might shop there if you tend to be really thrifty, or maybe you stop in to one once
in a while to get a certain thing really cheap, but it really isn’t a part of popular culture
like McDonald’s or Walmart -- it’s just not on the radar.
However, in terms of abusive companies, it has been one of the worst and certainly managed
to get itself in a lot of hot water a few years back.
Essentially, the company was struggling to meet all of its costs, and felt that the one
place where maybe they could cut was in terms of labor.
So, they started calling almost everyone a manager, then having them spend their day
doing non manager tasks.
Family Dollar thought they had found a loophole, wherein they didn’t have to give any extra
compensation for overtime hours.
Many employees complained of being expected to work 60-80 hours a week, often being forced
to work 12 hour days, without being paid time and a half for their overtime hours.
Unfortunately for Family Dollar, they did not get away with it.
Well over 500 improperly classified managers sued in 2011, and in 2014, Family Dollar settled
to the tune of about 1.5 million dollars in lawyers fees and unpaid overtime.
2.
Facebook Analyzes Your Private Messages And Gave Permissions To Spotify And Netflix
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted to scanning your private messages in order
to look for things like child pornography, which is all well and good as long as no human
is actually looking at the messages unless there is a really, really good reason for
someone to be doing so -- such as law enforcement has requested documents and sent the proper
documentation themselves.
However, Zuckerberg’s Facebook was caught at the end of last year in yet another privacy
scandal -- although they will claim it is all legal, as you sign your privacy away when
you join them.
The scandal was because Facebook, in order to better help certain partners target ads
to you, had given permission to apps like Spotify and Netflix to not only read your
private messages, but see who else was in chat, and even delete them.
Now, there is no evidence they were deleting messages, or that random employees even had
access or were reading people’s private conversations, but the fact they would even
give other companies that ability at all is quite disturbing.
Facebook, for their part, doesn’t seem apologetic -- they just stubbornly contend that they
had every right in terms of your privacy agreement with them, so too bad for you if you don’t
like it.
1.
Big Oil Allegedly Knew Decades Back What Sustained Oil Use Would Do To The Climate
In 2015, a leaked report that had been commissioned by Exxon back in the 1980’s showed something
that shocked a lot of people around the world, and also kind of just confirmed what a lot
of other people already thought.
The report showed a climate change model due to the use of fossil fuels and increased CO2,
that was pretty on track in terms of how scientists believe it has, and will continue to affect
us, today.
In 2017, another report was leaked, this time commissioned by Shell, but also from the 1980’s,
and it had pretty similar findings to the one commissioned by Exxon.
Now, Exxon and Shell deny that they had some kind of advance knowledge, and plowed ahead
anyway knowing it would damage the planet.
They deny that they put together a misinformation campaign about climate change and what their
product would do, while knowing full well what it would do.
Exxon has also defended themselves by saying that the single leaked document is out of
context.
Now, this would be a fair enough defense -- they could argue that it was simply a single report
out of many, and that they chose to reject it and didn’t believe it, or considered
its doomsaying hysterical or inaccurate -- however, they also have refused to be transparent about
the issue, when doing so would really help clear up what they did or didn’t know, and
when.
The state attorney general of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, opened up an investigation into
whether Exxon misled consumers, after the initial memo was leaked in 2015.
Exxon immediately sued her, claiming that she was biased and didn’t have jurisdiction,
however, it doesn’t look like they are going to win their case.
They have repeatedly lost appeal after appeal, and after the Supreme Court refused to grant
them certiorari, it looks like they may have to hand over 40 years of internal climate
change documents to the state attorney general of Massachusetts.
Now, we don’t know what the oil companies did or didn’t know, and when, but it is
just a little bit suspicious that Exxon is working so hard to avoid releasing the documents
that would clear up that little “out of context” leak from 2015.