How many times...

...can a corporation betray us before we question its right to exist?

That was the heading for a very well-done page in the last issue of Adbusters, and it really got me thinking. If you look at the track record of any major American corporation (and I don't care how socially conscious it claims to be) you're going to find some pretty evil shit buried beneath the smiling pictures of their "diverse" group of employees.

We, the Socially Conscious Youth of America, know large corporations are bad. We know they're owned by Satan. We sit around and discuss this in Starbucks coffee stores wearing shirts we bought at Target with Nike shoes. We believe this to be true, but we rarely act. And that, to me, is the single biggest failure in youth activism today. Too few people are willing to walk the walk.

Let's look at some of these companies. Starbucks, which seems to be regarded as the not-so-evil corporation based on the numbers of young, hip people I see there all the time, definitely has some labor issues. For one, although they claim to support third world producers, only 6% of the coffee they buy is fair-trade certified, and fair trade in itself doesn't guarantee a fair or even a better deal for third world coffee growers. (Fair trade also puts a cap on business growth, doesn't allow growers to roast their own coffee, and defines a fair wage as the minimum wage for the country of origin for the coffee.) Starbucks is noted for providing part-time employees with health insurance and other benefits. Good, right? Sure, except that the cut-off for part time employment is 20 hours a week, so Starbucks gets around this by having a lot of employees who work 19.75 hours a week and are denied benefits. So much more cost effective.

Then there's American Apparel. Yes, their average wage is $12 USD/hour. But they're definitely not a union-friendly company. They were accused of union busting in 2003 and since then have refused to disclose information about worker unions at the company. Three sexual harassment lawsuits have also been filed by former employees against Dov Charney, the CEO. And socially progressive as they brag to be, with their "never retouched models", I don't see them promoting any new or different beauty standards from the rest of the fashion industry.

And of course, where would we be without hating on some oil companies? Exxon-Mobile has three lovely black marks against it (that I'm aware of; I'm sure there are many more). Number one: In the 1980s, the company, along with several other oil and gas companies, gave money to a Christian missionary organization working in Columbia. The deal? The missionaries would convince the indigenous people they were working with to move off their land onto reservations and become "civilized"; in return, Exxon and the other companies had first rights to the petroleum-rich land the people had been living on. Number two: I'm sure we all remember hearing about the disastrous Exxon-Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989--the one that spilled 10.8 million gallons of oil, the one that environmental scientists in the area predicted would take approximately 30 years for the ecosystem to recover from. The official cause? The skipper was drunk and hit a reef, causing the tanker to spill its oil. The real story? Exxon had been faking safety reports and did not have proper safety equipment turned on--equipment that would have allowed the ship to see and avoid the reef. The reason? The system was determined too expensive to operate. And then number 3: Exxon has also been behind some of the organizations that have been turning up "scientific" studies denouncing global warming. They pay scientists to say that it's fake, the scientists do so, and we get more bullshit studies calling the single largest threat this planet has ever faced a fraud.

Pepsi and Coke each have their own issues--both have been accused of contaminating local water supplies in India with DDT, pesticides, and other carcinogens. Coca-Cola admitted to killing and intimidating workers in Columbia to prevent a union from forming, and they've also been accused of human rights violations with workers in Guatemala. And both of them are such large companies--PepsiCo owns Frito-Lay, which makes just about every major brand of chips. Also on the large-companies-who-own-hella-stuff front, you have ConAgra, which owns dozens of smaller food companies and is the largest manufacturer of processed food in the country. They also have a beef processing plant in Greely, Colorado which has been investigated numerous times amidst allegations of safety violations, workers rights violations and employing illegal immigrants. And they're one of the big guys that's contributing to industrialized agribusiness that's making the smaller farmers go out of work.

I would also like to point out that although Nike has been accused of workers rights violations and running sweatshops, a) they have improved dramatically since these charges were first leveled, and b) Adidas and Reebok both have much lower scores in terms of social responsibility and working conditions.

Fortunately, this isn't black and white. You're not either with us or with the capitalists. You can't boycott every business on the evil list, and you probably don't want to. So start small. Maybe cut one or two coffees a week. Get your next pair of pants used. And most importantly, know what you're buying. Be educated. Know your facts. Only when the majority of people are aware of things like this will real change ever occur.