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Law and Reality
Gérard Filoche, a Paris labor inspector, proved that a thief who steals a car radio gets a longer sentence than a businessman who causes the death of a worker through an avoidable workplace accident.
Filoche knows from experience that many French companies that evade health and safety regulations also lie about wages, hours, and seniority. “Employees have to keep their mouths shut,” he says, “because they live with the knife of unemployment at their throats.”
For every million violations found by labor inspectors in France, only thirteen thousand end in conviction. In nearly all those cases, the sentence is a tiny fine.
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The hunt for cheap labor no longer requires armies as it did during colonial times. That’s all taken care of by the misery that most of the planet suffers. What we have is the end of geography: capital crosses borders at the speed of light thanks to new communication and transportation technologies that make time and distance disappear. And when an economy anywhere on the planet catches a cold, economies around the world sneeze. At the end of 1997, a currency devaluation in Malaysia killed thousands of jobs in the shoe industry in southern Brazil.
Poor countries have put their heart, soul, and sombrero into a global good-behavior contest to see who can offer the barest of bare-bones wages and the most freedom to poison the environment. Countries compete furiously to seduce the big multinational companies. What’s best for companies is what’s worst for wage levels, working conditions, and the well-being of people and of nature. Throughout the world, workers’ rights are in a race to the bottom, while the pool of available labor grows as never before, even in the worst of times.
Globalization has winners and losers, warns a United Nations report. “A rising tide of wealth is supposed to lift all boats, but some are more seaworthy than others. The yachts and ocean liners are rising in response to new opportunities, but many rafts and rowboats are taking on water—and some are sinking.”
Countries tremble at the thought that money will not come or that it will flee. Shipwreck or the threat of it causes widespread panic. If you don’t behave yourselves, say the companies, we’re going to the Philippines or Thailand or Indonesia or China or Mars. To behave badly means to defend nature or whatever’s left of it, to recognize the right to form unions, to demand respect for international norms and local laws, to raise the minimum wage.
In 1995, the Gap sold shirts “made in El Salvador.” For every twenty-dollar shirt the Salvadoran workers got eighteen cents. The workers, most of them women and girls, spent fourteen hours a day breaking their backs in sweatshop hell. They organized a union. The contracting company fired 350 of them; the rest went on strike. There were police beatings, kidnappings, jailings. At the end of that year, the Gap announced that it was moving to Asia.
Thanks to the new global reality, the “informal sector” of the economy in Latin America has mushroomed. The “informal sector,” which translated into English means work outside the law, generates eighty-five of every hundred new jobs. Workers outside the law put in more hours, earn less, get no benefits, and are not covered by labor legislation won through long, hard years of union struggle. Not that the situation of legal workers is much better: “deregulation” and “liberalization” are the euphemisms used to describe a situation of every man for himself. The elderly Paraguayan woman who told me about her pension summed it up succinctly: “If this is the reward, imagine the punishment!”
Jorge Bermúdez has three children and three jobs. At dawn he heads out to scour the streets of Quito in an old Chevrolet that passes for a cab. From early in the afternoon he teaches English. He has been a public school teacher for sixteen years and earns $150 a month. When the day ends at the public school, it begins at a private school where he works until midnight. Jorge Bermúdez never gets a day off. For a long time he has suffered from stomach trouble, moodiness, and insomnia. A psychologist told him they were psychosomatic symptoms caused by working too hard and suggested he give up two of his three jobs. The psychologist did not explain how he could pay the bills.
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Exemplary Lives/3
The middle of 1998 unleashed a whirlwind of popular indignation against the dictatorship of General Suharto in Indonesia. So the International Monetary Fund thanked him for his services and the general retired.
His working life had begun in 1965 when he took power by killing half a million Communists or alleged Communists. In the end he had no choice but to leave the government, but he hung on to the savings he managed to set aside during his more than thirty years of labor: $16 billion, according to the July 28, 1997, issue of Forbes magazine.
A couple of months after Suharto’s retirement, his successor, President Habibie, made a televised speech: he called for fasting. The president said that if the Indonesian people refrained from eating two days a week, Mondays and Thursdays, the economic crisis could be overcome.
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In the upside-down world, education does not pay. Public school teachers in Latin America have been among the hardest-hit by the new labor regime. Teachers and professors earn praise: hackneyed speeches exalt the stoic efforts of the apostles of education who lovingly mold the clay of the next generation. And they earn salaries you can’t see without a magnifying glass. The World Bank calls education “an investment in human capital,” which, from their point of view, is homage. But in a recent report they suggested reducing teachers’ pay in countries where “the supply of teachers” would allow for it without lowering the level of instruction.
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By the Grace of God
At the end of 1993, I attended the funeral of a beautiful trade school that had existed for three years in Santiago, Chile. The students came from the poorest slums of the city, kids condemned to be delinquents, beggars, or whores. The school taught them trades like ironwork, carpentry, and gardening; above all, it taught them to love themselves and to love what they were doing. For the first time they heard people say that they were worth something and that doing what they were learning to do was worth something. The school depended on foreign financing. When the money ran out the teachers turned to the government. They went to the ministry and got nothing. They went to city hall and the mayor suggested, “Turn it into a business.”
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Reduce pay? What pay? “Poor but docent,” we say in Uruguay, or, “I’m hungrier than a schoolteacher.” University professors are in the same boat. In the middle of 1995 I saw a job posting in the papers for the School of Psychology at the university in Montevideo. They were looking for someone to teach ethics and were offering a hundred dollars a month. I could only think that you’d have to be a magician at ethics not to be corrupted by such a fortune.
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Advantages
At the end of 1997, Leonardo Moledo published an article defending the low salaries paid in Argentina’s universities. This professor argued that meager wages contribute to general culture, encourage diversity and the spread of knowledge, and help prevent the problem of overspecialization. Thanks to his puny salary, a professor who in the morning teaches brain surgery can enrich his own culture and the culture of everyone else by making photocopies in the afternoon and showing off his talent on the circus trapeze at night. A specialist in German literature has the stupendous opportunity to run a pizza oven and also be an usher at the Columbia theater. The dean of criminal law can enjoy the luxury of driving a delivery truck from Monday to Friday and working as a security guard on the weekends. And an adjunct in molecular biology can make use of his training by fixing plumbing and painting cars.
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Robbery is no less of a crime simply because it was committed in the name of laws or emperors.
—SENATOR JAMES ALEXANDER MCDOUGALL OF CALIFORNIA, 1861
MASTER CLASS ON IMPUNITY
■ Case Studies
■ Hunters of People
■ Exterminators of the Planet
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■ The Sacred Car
CASE STUDIES
There is no doubt about the educational value of these examples. Here we will examine the illuminating experience of the oil industry, whose love of nature is rivaled only by that of the Impressionist painters. We will recount episodes that illustrate the philanthropic vocation of the military and chemical industries. And we will reveal the keys to success that placed the industry of crime in the vanguard of the world economy.
THE HANGED WRITER
Shell and Chevron have destroyed the Niger River delta. Author Ken Saro-Wiwa, of the Ogoni people of Nigeria, wrote: “What Shell and Chevron have done to Ogoni people, land, streams, creeks and the atmosphere amounts to genocide. The soul of the Ogoni people is dying and I am witness to the fact.”
At the beginning of 1995, Shell’s general manager in Nigeria, Naemeka Achebe, explained why his company supported the military government: “For a commercial company trying to make investments, you need a stable environment.… Dictatorships can give you that.” A few months later, the dictatorship hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa along with eight other Ogonis for resisting the companies that were destroying their villages and turning their country into a vast wasteland. Many Ogonis had already been murdered for the same reason.
Saro-Wiwa’s prestige gave this crime a certain international resonance. The president of the United States announced that his country would suspend arms sales to Nigeria and the world applauded. The announcement wasn’t intended as a confession, but that’s what it was: the president acknowledged that his country had been selling weapons to the bloody regime of General Sani Abacha, responsible for executing a hundred people a year by firing squad or hanging in what had become public spectacles.
An international embargo blocked new arms deals with Nigeria, but the Abacha dictatorship continued adding to its arsenal thanks to “addenda” that appeared miraculously on previously signed contracts. After a dip in this convenient fountain of youth, those old contracts lived on forever.
The United States sells about half the weapons in the world and buys about half the oil it consumes. Its economy and lifestyle depend to a large degree on arms and oil. Nigeria, the African dictatorship with the largest military budget, is an oil country. The Anglo-Dutch consortium Shell takes half that oil, and the U.S. company Chevron takes most of the rest. Chevron operates in twenty-two countries, but more than a quarter of all the oil and gas it pumps comes from Nigeria.
THE PRICE OF POISON
Nnimmo Bassey visited the Americas in 1996, a year after his friend and companion in the Ogoni struggle was murdered. In his travel diary, he recounts some telling stories about the giant oil companies and their contribution to public well-being.
Curaçao is an island in the Caribbean, so named, they say, because its breezes cure the sick. Shell built a huge refinery there in 1918 and has been showering poison on that little island of health ever since. In 1983, local authorities ordered the refinery shut down. Experts calculated the company owed a minimum of $400 million in recompense for damages to the environment, not counting damages to the inhabitants.
Shell didn’t pay a cent. It bought impunity for a fairy-tale price: Shell sold the refinery to the government of Curaçao, for one dollar, in an agreement that freed the company from all responsibility for damages inflicted on the environment at any time throughout history.
THE BLUE BUTTERFLY
In 1994, Chevron, formerly Standard Oil of California, spent many millions of dollars on an advertising campaign praising its tireless efforts to protect the environment in the United States. The campaign focused on a sanctuary the company built for certain blue butterflies in danger of extinction. The sanctuary costs Chevron five thousand dollars a year. Every minute of the advertising blitz that congratulated the company for its ecological conscience cost eighty times that sum to produce and much more than that to actually flutter its blue wings across the TV screens of North America.
The butterfly spa was set up next to the El Segundo refinery on the sands south of Los Angeles. The refinery remains one of the worst sources of water, air, and land pollution in all of California.
THE BLUE STONE
Goiânia City, Brazil, September 1987: two ragpickers find a metal tube in an empty lot. They break it open and discover a stone of blue light, a magic stone that turns the air blue and makes everything it touches shine. The ragpickers break up that stone of light. They give pieces to their neighbors. Whoever rubs it on his skin shines in the night. The entire barrio is a lamp. The poor, suddenly rich in light, celebrate.
The next day the ragpickers start vomiting. They had eaten mango with coconut—that must be why. But the whole neighborhood is vomiting and swelling up and itching. The blue light burns and devours and kills, and it spreads, carried by wind, rain, flies, and birds.
It was one of the greatest nuclear catastrophes in history. Many people died and many more were maimed for life. In that shantytown on the edge of Goiânia, no one knew what the word “radioactivity” meant, and no one had ever heard of Cesium-137. Chernobyl, just the year before, resounded daily in the ears of the world. Of Goiânia, not a word. In 1992, Cuba took in the sick children of Goiânia and gave them free medical care. This event did not merit the slightest coverage either, even though the global factories of public opinion are always, as we know, very concerned about Cuba.
A month after the tragedy, the chief of the federal police in Goiás summed it up: “The situation is absurd. No one is responsible for the radioactive substances used in medicine.”
BUILDINGS WITHOUT FEET
Mexico City, September 1985: the earth trembles. A thousand houses and buildings tumble in less than three minutes.
It isn’t known, and never will be, how many people died in that moment of horror in the largest and most fragile city in the world. When they first started digging through the rubble, the Mexican government said five thousand. Later on it said nothing. The first bodies recovered carpeted an entire baseball stadium.
Old buildings withstood the earthquake, but new ones fell as if they had no foundations, because many of them had none or they had them only in the blueprints. Years have passed and those responsible remain untouched. The developers who built and sold those modern sand castles, the officials who issued permits for skyscrapers in the most sunken parts of the city, the engineers who lied murderously when calculating the foundations and the load, the inspectors who got rich by looking the other way—all of them remain untouched.
The rubble is gone, new buildings have arisen on the ruins, the city keeps on growing.
GREEN, I WANT YOU GREEN
The earth’s most successful companies have offices in hell and in heaven too. The more they sell in one, the better they do in the other. The Devil pays and God forgives.
According to World Bank projections, by the year 2000 the environmental industry will be making more money than the chemical industry, and it already makes a bundle. Saving the environment is turning out to be the most brilliant enterprise of the very companies that are destroying it.
In a recent book, The Corporate Planet, Joshua Karliner offers three telling examples, well worth studying:
• General Electric, which owns four of the companies that most poison the air, is the largest U.S. producer of equipment for air pollution control
• Du Pont Chemical Company, one of the largest producers of toxic waste in the world, has developed a lucrative line of specialized services for incineration and disposal of toxic waste
• and another multinational giant, Westinghouse, which earns its keep selling nuclear weapons, also sells millions of dollars’ worth of equipment to clean up its own radioactive waste.
SIN AND VIRTUE
There are over a hundred million antipersonnel mines spread throughout the world. These artifacts keep exploding years after wars are over. Some mines, shaped like dolls or butterflies or colorful trinkets, are designed to attract children. Of all the victims, half are children
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Paul Donovan, one of the promoters of the global campaign to ban land mines, points out that a new goose is laying golden eggs in the very same arms factories that made and sold mines. These companies now offer their expertise to clean up the vast terrains that have been mined, and it doesn’t take a genius to realize that no one knows the business as well as they do. What a deal: removing the mines turns out to be a hundred times more lucrative than placing them.
Until 1991, a company called CMS made mines for the U.S. Army. After the Gulf war it changed tack and has been making $160 million a year in de-mining ever since. CMS belongs to the German consortium Daimler-Benz, which makes missiles with the same enthusiasm that it makes cars, and it continues making mines through another of its affiliates, a company called Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm.
Also traveling the road to redemption is British Aerospace: one of its companies, Royal Ordnance, signed a $90 million contract to remove mines from Kuwait, placed there, coincidentally, by Royal Ordnance. Competing in this selfless task is a French company, Sofremi, which will earn $110 million de-mining Kuwait, while continuing to export weapons for wars throughout the world.