Each year, Global Exchange releases a “Top Corporate Criminals” list to highlight some of the world’s corporate worst-of-the-worst on issues like violations of human rights and workers’ rights, environmental destruction, war profiteering, and tax evasion and other white-collar corporate crime, just to name a few. More importantly, we create this list to bring your attention to these gross violations and call on you to act.

Additional criteria for including a corporation on this year’s list include: actions that particularly affect citizens of the Global South; global impact of the corporation’s malfeasance; major corporations whose crimes have gone under the radar and need to be highlighted; and corporations whose actions are being met by community opposition.

Trump, his deregulating Cabinet, and the Republicans in Congress are currently dominating media discourse about corruption, attacks on the environment, and human rights and other violations.  But it is important not to forget who holds the purse strings for today’s right-wing ascendance: powerful multinational corporations and the billionaires who are profiting from them.

We must now work harder than ever to resist the influence of corporate power in the White House, the halls of Congress, and in our communities. Join us. Together, we hold the power to rein-in corporate abuse and reclaim our democracy. We can use our purchasing power to endorse Fair Trade, pressure companies to do the right thing, boycott those that violate human rights and the environment, and work to elect representatives that represent the people not corporations. We at Global Exchange encourage you to exercise your power as a global citizen to rein in corporate power, demand social justice and defend the Earth.

Global Exchange’s 10 Top Corporate Criminals of 2018
  • Asia Pulp and Paper: For continued destruction of the Indonesian rainforest and peatlands and attempting to “greenwash” its image for the global market.
  • CoreCivic (formerly CCA) (repeat offender) and Geo Group: For profiting from the incarceration of immigrant families and children and Americans in abusive conditions with substandard medical care.
  • Johnson & Johnson: For marketing and selling vaginal mesh implants which caused serious medical complications; putting asbestos in its talcum powder; concealing the adverse effects of antipsychotic medication Risperdal; and more.
  • Lockheed Martin: For being the largest U.S. government contractor and the largest weapons producer in the world; supplying the bomb that killed 40 Yemeni schoolchildren on August 9, 2018; and more.
  • Monsanto/Bayer: For selling seeds for pesticide ­resistant crops (GMOs) and also making the pesticides, cashing in twice on farmers who become ever more dependent on its products.
  • Navient student loan services: For charging military service members excess interest on their student loans; misreporting information to consumer reporting agencies about thousands of disabled borrowers, and more.
  • Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron:Shell took the top spot from Exxon Mobil as the biggest oil/gas corporation in the world in 2018. Shell intends to exploit 80% of its proven oil and gas reserves before 2030. Chevron is heavily involved in oil drilling in the Amazon rainforest, the “lungs of the planet.”
  • Sig Sauer: For being the largest seller of firearms to Mexican military and federal and state police forces, in a time when Mexico is facing an acute crisis of human rights violations and violent crimes, most of which are committed with firearms.
  • Walmart: For boosting corporate profits by forcing employees to work off the clock; cheating them out of required overtime pay and more.
  • Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase: Well Fargo for forcing customers to buy unnecessary auto insurance policies. JP Morgan Chase for being the largest debt holder of private prison and immigrant detention corporations GEO Group and CoreCivic.

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Asia Pulp and Paper

In 2013, after years of forest destruction and links to human rights abuses, Southeast Asia’s largest pulp and paper company APP bowed to pressure from NGOs and its customers and adopted a Forest Conservation Policy, committing to end forest clearance within its own and suppliers’ concessions, protect remaining forests in these areas, improve management of peatland and work with communities to resolve social conflicts.  Greenpeace International agreed to advise on implementation.

Five years later, APP-owned concessions were still clearing many thousands of acres of forest and peatland. Greenpeace ended all further engagement with APP and parent company Sinar Mas in May, demanding that the company “come clean about all its ownership links to companies with concessions, stop the bulldozers and restore what was destroyed.”  The Forest Stewardship Council, the main global group for certifying sustainable wood, followed in August, and the World Wildlife Fund sent out an advisory to investors to stop association with APP. This is the latest in a string of broken promises and cancelled partnerships made by APP to environmental and human rights groups.

Meanwhile, the Amazon Rainforest has evolved as of 2017 from being a massive carbon sink, “the lungs of the planet,” to a source of carbon emissions, thanks to illegal logging, forest fires set by cattle ranchers and soy and palm oil farmers to clear land for agriculture, and drought. Under former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Amazon deforestation reached a record low in 2012.  Since then President Michel Temer and now President Bolsonaro are doing their utmost to facilitate large-scale agricultural and industrial development in the Amazon, threatening indigenous tribes and “putting a stake in the beating heart of the Amazon.”

Thus it is more urgent than ever that pressure be put on Asia Pulp and Paper to come clean and stop ravaging the world’s second or third (estimates vary) largest concentration of tropical forest  and the most biologically diverse ecosystem in the world.

Learn More:  

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In the Amazon Rainforest:

CoreCivic (formerly CCA) & Geo Group

As the Wall Street Journal wrote in July, “the Trump administration’s new push for more federal detention facilities for immigrants awaiting asylum hearings or deportation has brightened the outlook for the country’s two largest private prison operators…Shares in both companies rose.”

CoreCivic and Geo Group have always been notorious for increasing profits by keeping wages and benefits for workers low, resulting in high employee turnover, insufficient training, and chronic understaffing. This leads to mistreatment of inmates, poor health and mental health care, unsanitary conditions, inedible food, security concerns, riots, increased violence – and dangerous conditions for correction staff.

Now their focus is on undocumented immigrants, including children.  Currently an estimated 73% of immigrant detainees are held in private prisons.  Human Rights Watch reports that more people died in immigration detention in fiscal year 2017 than any year since 2009. According to the New York Times, as of September 2018, 12,800 migrant children were being held in federally contracted shelters, five times the number in custody a little over a year earlier. Most of these were CoreCivic and Geo Group operations.  Both companies have spent millions in political contributions and lobbying to keep their places at the trough.

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Johnson & Johnson

Johnson & Johnson, the world’s largest health care company, has been able to slide by on its benign reputation as the purveyor of bandaids, talcum powder and baby shampoo.  But several scandals in the last few years have tattered that image. The biggest one involves over 24,000 women around the world who have sued the company after suffering serious complications following a vaginal mesh implant procedure. In 2013 juries in several U.S. states found J&J guilty of concealing the adverse physical and emotional effects of the antipsychotic medication Risperdal, promoting it to doctors and patients as better than cheaper generics, and paying kickbacks to physicians and pharmacists to encourage off-label use. Around the same time nearly 10,000 patients who had J&J’s metal-on-metal hips implanted joined class action lawsuits, claiming that they suffered cobalt poisoning, tissue death, and other serious side effects.  In 2014 a J&J subsidiary’s power morcellator device caused rapid spread of uterine cancer and was recalled.

More recently, in July a St. Louis jury awarded nearly U.S.$4.7 billion in damages to 22 women and their families who claimed asbestos in Johnson & Johnson talcum powder caused their ovarian cancer. Finally, Johnson & Johnson has become embroiled in the opioid crisis, with more than 430 lawsuits accusing it or its subsidiaries of misleading patients about the addictive dangers posed by its painkilling drugs.
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Lockheed Martin

On August 9, 2018, a Saudi-led coalition warplane dropped a 227kg laser-guided bomb made by Lockheed Martin on a school bus in Yemen, killing 40 children ages 6 to 11. Eleven adults were killed, and 56 children were wounded.  The bomb was one of many thousands sold to Saudi Arabia by the U.S. as part of billions of dollars of weapons exports.  The latest report from the UN high commission for human rights (August 10) showed that there have been 17,062 civilian casualties (dead and injured) in Yemen since 2015, most of them (10,471) a result of airstrikes.

Lockheed Martin is the largest U.S. federal contractor and the largest weapons producer in the world.  By “perfecting the strategy of spreading jobs on weapons programs in key states and congressional districts,” the corporation has locked in Congressional support from both Republicans and Democrats.

Over the years Lockheed has been involved in numerous other controversies, including artificially inflating prices, bribery of foreign government officials, toxic leaks and environmental racism, and race and age discrimination.

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Monsanto/Bayer

In September 2016 Monsanto, the world’s largest producer of genetically modified (GMO) crops, and maker of Agent Orange, the herbicide Roundup, and neonicotinoids that are linked to the widespread deaths of bees and other pollinators, announced it would be purchased by German pharmaceuticals and chemicals giant Bayer AG, to form the largest seed and pesticide company in the world. This will result in their near-monopoly on the agricultural supply chain worldwide, eliminating marketplace competition, raising prices, and forcing even more farmers to rely on GMOs.

Smaller traditional seed sellers will be unable to compete with this megacorporation, and farmers will pay more for fewer choices of seeds due to the cost of seed treatments and technology fees. Green America reports that the merger is projected to raise aggregate seed prices by 5.5% worldwide. The risk of GMO seed contamination of non-GMO crop fields will soar.  Environmental costs of GMO seeds include ecosystem destruction, eradication of important pollinators, superweed and pest development, and soil degradation.

The agribusiness giant plans to drop the infamous Monsanto name, hoping to cast off the curse of its historically terrible reputation.

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Navient student loan services

Navient is the largest student loan servicer in the United States, managing over 12 million student loan borrowers and more than $300 billion in student debt.  Under Richard Cordray, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) filed a complaint against Navient in 2017 for “systematically and illegally failing borrowers at every stage of repayment. For years, Navient, formerly part of Sallie Mae, created obstacles to repayment by providing bad information, processing payments incorrectly, and failing to act when borrowers complained. Through shortcuts and deception, the company also illegally cheated many struggling borrowers out of their rights to lower repayments, which caused them to pay much more than they had to for their loans.”

The company imposed abusive interest charges and failed to properly discharge (forgive) debt for student borrowers with a total and permanent disability — including veterans whose disability was connected to their military service — making it appear as if those borrowers had defaulted on their student loans when they had not, thus damaging their credit.  In one case the company attempted to collect loans from co-signers after a student’s accidental death.

The CFPB lawsuit is now stalled because Trump Secretary of Education Betsy deVos and new CFPB head Mick Mulvaney are working to impede and eventually drop the lawsuit; however attorneys general in California, Illinois, Washington and Pennsylvania have also filed suit, and in October 2018 the American Federation of Teachers launched a class action lawsuit against Navient.

Learn more:

For assistance: 

Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron

In 2018 Royal Dutch Shell took the top spot from Exxon Mobil as the biggest oil & gas corporation in the world.  The corporation announced a “15-year decarbonization strategy” with great fanfare in 2018. Shell said it will continue to sell all the oil and gas that “society needs” and will move to lower carbon energy “when this makes commercial sense.”  Meanwhile the company reassured investors that it has a “low risk of stranded assets” because “around 80% of its current proved oil and gas reserves will be produced by 2030.”  Shell, which has known fossil fuels create climate dangers since the 1960’s, is heavily involved in the Canadian tar sands projects and owns 60 percent of the huge Athabasca Oil Sands project in Alberta.  In Nigeria, Shell continues to leave “a trail of oil spills, gas flaring, water contamination, human rights abuses and destruction,” after its support of the military dictatorship which resulted in the notorious murder of activist Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1994.

Chevron, a corporate criminal in Global Exchange’s 2017 list, is the second largest oil company in the U.S., after last year’s top corporate criminal Exxon Mobil.  But a peer-reviewed article published in the journal Climatic Change in September 2017 found that Chevron is at the top of the list of 90 corporations (including Exxon) that have been responsible for more than a quarter of sea level rise and about half the global warming from 1880 to 2010.

In 2003, a class action lawsuit against Chevron was filed in Ecuadorian court by indigenous residents, who accused Texaco Oil of making them ill and damaging forests and rivers by discharging 18 billion gallons of heavily polluted water into the Amazon rainforest without any environmental remediation. Chevron, which had purchased Texaco in 2000, maintained that the company had completed cleanup of the pollution caused by Texaco. In 2011, indigenous residents were awarded $8.6 billion, based on claims of loss of crops and farm animals as well as increased local cancer rates. This was the first time that an indigenous group had ever successfully sued a multinational corporation in the country where the pollution took place.

However, Chevron described the lawsuit as an “extortion scheme” and refused to pay the fine.  The case has gone back and forth, and in September 2018 an international tribunal in The Hague ruled in favor of Chevron, finding that Ecuador “violated its obligations under international treaties, investment agreements and international law,” and Chevron is not required to pay any fines Ecuadorian courts had levied previously.  The tribunal then ordered Ecuador to compensate Chevron for any “damages” arising from the initial judgment. Ecuador plans to appeal. Chevron, like Shell, also has a lengthy history of other environmental, labor, worker safety, human rights and financial transgressions.

Learn more — Shell:

Learn more — Chevron:

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Sig Sauer

Sig Sauer is the largest seller of firearms to the Mexican military and federal and state police forces, in a time when Mexico is facing an acute crisis of human rights violations and violent crimes, most of which are committed with firearms. In 2015 Sig Sauer received a U.S. commercial license agreement to sell arms to Mexican military and police forces, resulting in the expected transfer of nearly 200,000 firearms by 2024 — including to state and local police in states with extensive charges of police collusion with organized crime.  The U.S. State Department reviews arms export license applications, but there is no evidence that they have denied any transactions in Mexico based on credible reports of human rights violations by the end users of the weapons.

Since 2006 there have been more than 37,435 disappeared persons, more than 1,610 clandestine graves discovered, and 121,035 gun homicides reported in Mexico. In 2017 and over the first half of 2018 gun homicide rates were the highest in Mexico’s modern history. There is a strong link between the increased firearms trade from the United States to Mexico and the dramatic increase in gun homicides and violence in Mexico. Credible evidence exists that members of a number of police and military units throughout the country have colluded with criminal organizations or committed gross human rights abuses themselves.

The company is a strong Trump ally and a major donor to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for the firearms industry.

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Walmart 

Wage theft involves boosting corporate profits by forcing employees to work off the clock, cheating them out of required overtime pay and engaging in similar practices. In a 2018 report  Good Jobs First and Jobs with Justice reported that Walmart far and away tops the list of corporations in total amount of settlements, verdicts and fines for wage theft: $1,408,901,183 — triple the amount for the #2 offender, FedEx. This amount does not include wage theft of temp agency workers or “independent contractors,” or wage disputes dealt with through arbitration.  After paying its penalties, Walmart has also been sued for continuing to engage in the same illegal labor practices. Walmart is notoriously anti-union; many of its workers receive food stamps and other public assistance to survive on their low wages.

Violence and harassment against women workers in Walmart’s garment supply chain in Asia has been detailed in another 2018 report, by Global Labor Justice.  Women reported “acts that inflicted sexual harm and suffering; physical violence, verbal abuse, coercion, threats and retaliation, and routine deprivations of liberty including forced overtime.”  Walmart has contributed to risks of this violence through excessive working hours, unsafe workplaces, unauthorized subcontracting and other factors.

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Wells Fargo and JPMorgan 

As the Corporate Research Project writes, “Wells Fargo is the smallest of the four giants that now dominate the U.S. commercial banking business, but it has surpassed its larger counterparts in the extent to which it has been embroiled in a series of scandals involving reckless lending practices and customer deception” related to mortgages and auto-lending. Revelations of new scandals continued into 2018: the city of Sacramento sued WF for intentionally steering African American and Latino borrowers into high-risk and high-cost mortgages. Also in 2018, the bank was forced to refund customers for pet insurance, home warranties and other unwanted “add-on” products, and reimburse customers for incorrect pricing and fees for foreign exchange transactions.

In February 2018 the Federal Reserve under Janet Yellen froze Wells Fargo’s growth, barring it from growing beyond its asset size as of the end of 2017 — an unprecedented move meant to show the Fed meant business about Wells Fargo’s misconduct.  The Consumer Financial Protection under Mick Mulvaney fined WF $1 billion in April, but as the Chicago Tribune pointed out, “With its 2018 tax cut, Wells Fargo could pay its $1 billion fine three times over and still have cash to spare.”

JPMorgan Chase is the largest investment bank in the world. It is also the largest lender to CoreCivic and Geo Group, the private prison and immigrant detention corporations, and the largest U.S. funder of tar sands oil.  JPMorgan is the largest financier of “extreme fossil fuels” (tar sands, Arctic oil, ultra-deepwater oil, liquified natural gas, coal mining, and coal-fired power) among all U.S. banks, and is the third-largest financier worldwide (after China Construction Bank and the Royal Bank of Canada). Its investments in this area rose from $7.598 billion in 2016 to $11.645 billion in 2017, a 53% increase in one year. The bank has a long history of charging illegitimate fees, accounting fraud, misleading investors, improper foreclosures, excessive interest rates, bundling mortgages into toxic securities, fraudulent debt-collection practices against its credit card customers, charging African-American and Latino mortgage borrowers higher rates than white customers.

Learn more — Wells Fargo:

Learn more — JPMorgan Chase:

Both: 

Take action:  

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See our Corporate Criminals alumni from previous years

The 2018 Corporate Criminals List was researched and written by Jenny White.

This Saturday, we stood arm and arm with over 20,000 of you in San Francisco and in solidarity with tens-of-thousands of you across the country to say: families belong together—and free.

We heard courageous testimonies from indigenous and immigrant parents and children forcefully separated from each other by U.S. policy. We listened to painful accounts of the lasting trauma that this cruel history has caused.

Powerful speeches connected our present immigrant and refugee crisis to deep rooted institutionalized evils — to a history of U.S. imperialism that has destabilized foreign political systems and fractured economies; and to long-standing racism pervading our zero-humanity immigration system. We were reminded that as long as our laws make migration a crime, migrants can be prosecuted, jailed, and separated from their children at the whims of the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security. And so we echo our Town Hall Summer partner Oscar Chacón’s call: the decriminalization of migration must be the North Star guiding our immigration reform efforts.

“If one is really serious about radical solutions to the constant attacks against immigrant and refugee communities, there are two things we must do: 1. Reject head on the dehumanizing and demonizing narrative about today’s immigrants. Let’s begin by categorically affirming that migration is great, and that immigrants are a blessing for the country and the world. And 2, Let’s propose the abolishment of the 1996 Immigration Law and all it represents.”  Oscar Chacón

Now, let’s use the power of our consumer voices to cut off the corporate money behind Trump’s unconscionable immigration policies. Tell Wells Fargo:  STOP financing CoreCivic and GEO Group, private prison corporations that are profiting off the pain and separation of families.

Private prison companies hold contracts to operate hundreds of prisons, jails, and immigration detention centers across the country — facilities being used to incarcerate and separate familiesTwo private prison industry leaders, CoreCivic and GEO Group, depend on debt financing from banks like yours to conduct their day-to-day business operations, finance new facilities, and acquire smaller companies.  Wells Fargo has played a leading role in financing these debts. In doing so, Wells Fargo is complicit in and profiting from mass incarceration and the criminalization of immigration.

Tell Timothy Sloan, the CEO of Wells Fargo: STOP financing pain for corporate gain!

Me must use our voices, our votes, and the power of our pocketbooks to fight against human rights abuses in the false name of national security. Our democracy and our futures depend on it.

We will continue this important conversation about our immigration crisis and the opportunities we have to move forward in the lead up to the 2018 midterm elections at our next Town Hall Summer event in Fresno on Saturday, July 21 from 11a.m. to 3p.m. Will you join us?

The following blog post is written by Global Exchange summer intern, Sophie Ipsen about her summer project researching corporate criminals for our Top Ten Most Wanted Corporate Criminals of 2014 list. Thank you, Sophie for all your help and hard work all summer!

MostWanted2013

I’m Sophie Ipsen, a 20-year-old college student studying international relations and global business at the University of Southern California.

Growing up, I started volunteering in my community: tutoring low-income students, serving food to recovering drug-addicts, and assisting people with disabilities. These experiences first opened my eyes to the injustices and inequalities in my own backyard. Now, as a young adult and an American consumer, I have become cognizant of the global challenges created by the corporate domination all around the world.

Large corporations control almost everything we touch: from the clothing we wear, to the computers we work on, to the medications we take, and even the food we eat. I was aware of sweatshops, human trafficking, and forced labor prior to my time at Global Exchange, but I had not fully considered all the implications of today’s corporation giants. Over the past several weeks, I have been investigating corporations that are guilty of human rights abuses and environmental disasters for Global Exchange’s Top Ten Most Wanted Corporate Criminal List of 2014.

It was through this process that I realized these large corporations are not only forcing cheap or wage-free labor, but also seizing indigenous lands, destroying communities, causing species extinction, and killing people in devastating factory disasters, just to name a few offenses. Of course I had heard stories on the news about horrific disasters like the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse, but I, as do many others, had not truly understood how this connects to my daily life and my decisions. The fact is the companies that are exploiting human rights and the environment everyday are the same companies from which we consume everyday.

But this does not have to be the case, we are the consumers and fortunately we have the ability to decide what we purchase. There is a tremendous opportunity available for us, the consumers, to take a stand, boycott corporations violating human rights, and support institutions like Fair Trade.

This summer, the other interns and I embarked on a project to continue Global Exchange’s campaign pressuring San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Chocolate Company to go Fair Trade. We worked together to plan a virtual, online rally as well as an in-person rally at the San Francisco flagship store in Ghirardelli Square on July 24th. While preparing for our big day, we visited Fair Trade USA’s offices in Oakland and got an in-depth look at Fair Trade and how the certification process works. I learned that Fair Trade certified cocoa farms ensure that no child labor is used, farmers earn a fair, living wage, and a premium goes back to the community.

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Global Exchange interns at Ghirardelli rally

After doing our research and preparing our rally materials, we took to the streets and started talking to our fellow consumers. Many people were very interested in learning about Fair Trade and joined in to tell Ghirardelli to make the important switch. This experience, speaking with Ghirardelli’s consumers started to spread the word about the importance of purchasing power, and showed me that the general public really can make a difference. Corporations really do listen to their consumers, and it takes our voices to make our desires known. As consumers we can endorse Fair Trade through our purchases of commodities like chocolate, coffee, bananas, sugar, and even some jewelry and clothing.

As my research continued, we finalized the corporations for this year’s Corporate Criminals list, and I then connected with other non-profit organizations challenging these corporations. I learned that large corporations really care about their public image, and do not like to be publicly shamed. When people start to speak up and spread the word about a corporation’s abuses, the corporation has to start taking action. The more the people know about a corporation’s abuses, it is less able to continue these abuses in the public eye.

So which corporations made the list? There are 10 companies form a wide variety of industries. And the corporations are… Alpha Natural Resources, Bayer, Carnival Corporation, FIFA, Gap Inc., Ghirardelli, Glencore Xstrata, HSBC, Koch Industries, and PepsiCo. This year we also decided to include Monsanto as a “repeat offender,” as it has been featured on our list before. Now that you know the corporations, you may have expected a few, and are probably surprised by a few as well. I strongly encourage you to read the list, and discover the unfortunate truth about these corporations!

I hope that after reading through the list, you will reconsider these corporations and take action through what you purchase. Additionally, we have added a new element to the list this year, an opportunity for you to easily take action from home. Each featured corporation includes a link to take action by either emailing an executive or signing a petition. I encourage you to do so and to also connect with other organizations working on the issues.

Take-ActionThis is an opportunity for you to start conversation about human rights and environmental abuses in your own networks. Share the information with your family, friends, and co-workers. You can start by making small changes in your everyday life that will grow and become large positive changes for our world. It’s time to fight back against corporate power and give the rights back to the people. Use the list as an educational opportunity, and then take a stand to put people over profits!

The following blog post is written by Global Exchange summer intern, Linda Tenerowicz about her summer project researching corporate criminals for our Top Ten Most Wanted Corporate Criminals 2013 list. Thank you, Linda for all your help and hard work all summer!

MostWanted2013I’m Linda Tenerowicz, a 21-year-old college student, and shaped by global issues and social injustice.

I know that sweatshops have been in operation my entire life (but increased under NAFTA); that multi-national companies and governments work together to re-write rules behind closed doors without community input and engage in shady deals to increase profit and the global economy at the expense of human rights and the environment. But I felt powerless and wondered if people could seriously change the rules and put power back in the hands of people.

I wondered how much we could fight back and force corporations to change their policies.

Well, I do now and the news is good. For the past several weeks, I have been investigating corporations that are responsible for human rights abuses and environmental disasters for Global Exchange’s Most Wanted Corporate Criminals list for 2013. The annual ‘Top Ten’ list started to raise awareness about how familiar corporations were acting internationally, connect activists with organizations fighting back and standing in solidarity with impacted communities.

It’s an impressive list; past violator, Nestle has made the list again this year – and 9 new corporations have been added to the list including Shell, Nike, Ahava, Syngenta, Blackwater, Barrick Gold, Herakles Farms, Clear Channel, and SNC Lavalin. Each new corporation comes from a different industry, revealing that no matter where consumers do business it is important to be cautious of where we spend our money.

After researching the violations, I started to look up and get in touch with non-profit organizations that specifically target these corporations and challenge corporate power. What I have realized is that corporations are reliant on public perception and these campaigns matter. Most corporations don’t want to be labeled “unethical,” “immoral,” or “criminal.” However, once a corporation cuts corners via illegal activity, cheating workers, and destroying the environment, the drive for increasing ‘growth’ will continue until profits are hurt by public image.

As a consumer, I have to make my voice matter and that starts with becoming aware. I will be the first to admit that doing background checks on those new sneakers I bought is not the highest on my list of priorities, but lately, I’m thinking twice about my purchases. As global citizens it is important to show corporations that poor practices are not going ignored. This is not a task that can be done single-handedly of course. It takes a village, a town, a city, and entire countries to denounce the abuse.

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Shoppers endorsing Fair Trade at
the Global Exchange store

We have so many opportunities to endorse Fair Trade in our daily lives. We can purchase Fair Trade clothing, jewelry and some commodities (like chocolate, hurray!) and endorse local businesses, but our actions do not have to stop at the personal level. We can join greater movements and campaigns against unethical corporations and put more strain on them to change their ways. We can make anti-corporate activism a greater movement by educating others about economic injustice so that we may all stand against it. When we say YES to fair products we also say NO to bad corporate behavior. With numbers comes influence, and we hope that the Top Ten list will be a starting point for collective action.

This is why putting together the Top Ten Corporate Criminals list has been so fulfilling not only for myself, but for the people I am able to share this information with. Read, educate and then take action!

This summer, I had the pleasure of meeting Anu Mandavilli of the Mining Zone People’s Solidarity Group. She told us about corporate power shattering the lives of thousands of villagers in Orissa, India.

Since 2005, villagers have peacefully resisted the construction of a steel plant on their farmlands by POSCO, a Korean based steel manufacturing company. POSCO has had its sights set on areas throughout India to construct steel mines on the resource rich land. In efforts to prevent POSCO’s project, men, women, and children have physically laid on the ground to protect their lands from POSCO excavation. But villagers have been met with violent harassment, incarceration, and restricted access outside of their village to necessary medical attention and education due to POSCO’s coercion with the support of the Indian government that favors the project. Anu said that although steadfast in their struggle, the villagers of Orissa need the international community to stand in solidarity with them to condemn POSCO and defend the community’s rights.

This meeting with Anu compelled me to add POSCO on this year’s Most Wanted list as a “(dis)honorable mention”.

My hope is that you will utilize the entire list as an educational tool that will cause you to think twice before endorsing certain companies. I hope that the struggle of the Ogoni people of Nigeria come to mind when you pass a by Shell gas station, that when you see Ahava cosmetics on shelves you pass them up, taking a stand with Palestinian refugees and that the obsessive advertising by Nike to flog overpriced apparel evokes the plight of sweatshop laborers in your thoughts.

Take-ActionOnly then can we truly be in solidarity with the frontline communities. We need to ask ourselves where our commodities and luxuries come from. We have the ability to be ethical consumers and ensure that our goods don’t come at the price of other’s human rights and neglect of the environment.

TAKE ACTION: