Corporate Accountability International (CAI) is now accepting votes for its 2008 Corporate Hall of Shame, you can vote for the top three worst corporations on their site. To help inform your decisions, CAI has compiled company profiles that detail the latest abuses of the companies in question.
Here are the companies from CAI that Crocodyl has completed dossiers on:
The following are company profiles from CAI. You can contribute to Crocodyl by creating a company profile on any of these, building off of the work that CAI has done and providing links back to the original:
In addition, Multinational Monitor compiles an excellent list of scofflaw corporations. From their "10 Worst Corporations of 2007" Crocodyl only has a profile on Blackwater. We can use Multinational Monitor's work as a building block for our company profiles, and hopefully add value. See our Editorial Policy for more details on how to contribute. Here are the companies on their list that Crocodyl can build upon:
Feel free to jump in and create a company profile, we will work with you on making edits and helping you find more sources. Contact the project manger if you are interested in contributing and want assistance getting started.
The next company of the week will be 3M. From the snapshot:
"3M is a leading manufacturer of adhesives, tapes, and a variety of industrial and medical products. There are six divisions: consumer and office supplies; industrial and transportation, electro and communications (connecting, splicing, and insulating products); display and graphics (specialty film, traffic control materials); health care (dental and medical supplies, and health IT); and safety, security, and protection (commercial care, occupational health and safety products)."
Also, a hearty thanks to Wal-Mart Watch, which has been updating the Wal-Mart company profile with many valuable insights into the company's behavior.
Turning the head of the Croc towards the real estate market this week, we have the Lennar Corporation. The EDGAR 10-k filings reveal a lot, including some corporate anxiety about various "slow growth" initiatives across the US hurting the bottom line, so alert your friends working on those campaigns that they have found a pressure point.
Also, there has been a lot of press coverage in the Bay Area by the SF Bay Guardian regarding extortion, problems with asbestos and retaliation against whistleblowers.
A very interesting company, things keep turning up. If you want to cover the environmental record, labor rights history or other aspects of this company's operations, get in touch with the Project Manager so we can coordinate efforts. The Wikipedia page on Lennar is lacking at the moment, so it is likely that this profile will get some attention.
Greenpeace recently launched a website called Greenpeace Investigations that they will be using to archive their source materials from past research projects. The site includes scanned Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, fact sheets, reports and materials contributed by whistleblowers. They are currently scanning all of the Greenpeace magazines between 1980-1990 to add to the archive, which will be a great resource for people researching all types of corporations.
Each item has an HTML text version on its resource page, presumably for better searchability via search engines. They also offer the original PDF, which is great from a journalistic perspective, considering the need for source materials in any type of news writing. The website is ordered by "collections" so you can look at all of the relevant documents that relate to a specific investigation that Greenpeace has done.
I anticipate that this body of work will expose many more corporate crimes by bolstering existing corporate accountability research, allowing citizen journalists to mine these sources, creating follow up investigations and teasing out more details from the great work that Greenpeace has done, if it delivers on its promise:
"Greenpeace Investigations is a searchable library that contains investigative campaign research conducted by Greenpeace worldwide. It consists of thousands of documents that were obtained through our campaign efforts, FOIA requests, legal proceedings and whistleblowers. We believe that our investigative efforts and campaign documents should be made public as part of our ongoing effort to expose environmental crimes and their perpetrators."
The next company of the week is Dole Food. From the snapshot:
"Dole Food Company, Inc. is the world's largest producer of fruits and vegetables such as bananas and pineapples, and also produces cut flowersand nuts. Dole has a history of operating plantations in the US across the globe, often creating poor working conditions and unsafeenvironmental conditions such as pesticide use, soil erosion anddeforestation."
A lot of great research has been done by many nonprofit and publicinterest groups on Dole, so I am sure lots of interesting things willturn up this week.
We have completely recovered the website from the database corruption that happened last week, so we are celebrating here in the offices that no data was lost. However, if you do come across a page that doesn't seem right for any reason, it would be a great help if you could notify us. Add the page to our list of pages that contain errors, which the team is subscribed to and monitors closely. We will take a look at the page when you add it to that list and correct any errors. Thanks!
