Corporate accountability: tackling Big business
It is 20 years since the worst disaster caused by a multinational corporation. In Bhopal, India, the Union Carbide pesticides factory leaked toxic gas and killed 20,000 people. The company directors continue to evade justice for this atrocity.
The company behaved in the way that big businesses continue to behave all over the world: it chased profit in a competitive market by driving up production and slashing costs.
But cost-cutting means compromising wages, safety and the environment. Some companies recognise that accidents, under-paid workers and environmental pollution are not good for business. But the bottom-line for corporations is their duty to make profit for shareholders.
And corporations are politically more powerful than at any other time. Tony Blair’s New Labour is increasingly accountable to big business and to lobbyists, not to the electorate. At home, in Europe and internationally, Labour is happy to be a best pal to business, rather than to people and their communities.
Green MPs will work to:
- introduce a Corporate Liability Act, combining the need for more stringent environmental enforcement with the need for accountability of corporate entities on every aspect of production process and business practice;
- support the Corporate Responsibility Bill in Parliament as a step towards corporate accountability;
- empower workers, local communities and other affected parties to have a say in guiding businesses in a socially and environmentally just society.
“... the corporation can neither recognise nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others. Nothing in its legal makeup limits what it can do to others in pursuit of its selfish ends, and it is compelled to cause harm when the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs. Only pragmatic concern for its own interests and the laws of the land constrain the corporation’s predatory instincts, and often that is not enough to stop it from destroying lives, damaging communities, and endangering the planet as a whole.” – Joel Bakan, The Corporation