Face the Facts! 11 - "Double Standards" of Multinational Corporations Hurt the Public at Home and Abroad
How the Global Economy Harms People and the Environment
#11,Wednesday May 19,1999
"Double Standards" of Multinational Corporations Hurt the Public at Home and Abroad
- U.S. based multinational corporations are the world’s biggest foreign investors. In 1997, U.S. corporations spent $115 billion on direct investments abroad.*1
- These corporations sometimes apply "double standards" in their overseas operations; that is, following weaker environmental, labor or other standards than they use in the U.S.
- For twenty years, U.S. oil giant Texaco discharged an estimated 4.3 million gallons of highly toxic "produced water" per day into open, unlined pits in the rain forests of Ecuador, despite industry standards that call for reinjecting the wastes back into the ground. *2 The environmental contamination is so severe that indigenous communities have taken the unusual step of suing Texaco in U.S. courts.
- Double standards also hurt communities and workers in the U.S. by giving companies a financial incentive to relocate abroad to avoid the costs of complying with protective legislation. *2
- According to a study of corporations’ use of relocations or the threat of relocation to discourage union organizing, in more than 10 percent of the cases in which a threat was made, the employer directly threatened to move to Mexico.*3
*1 United Nations Center on Trade and Development, World Investment Report 1998
*2 Eyal Press, Texaco on Trial, The Nation, May 31, 1999
*3 Kate Bronfenbrenner, Cornell University, The Effects of Plant Closing or Threat of Plant Closing on the Right of Workers to Organize, Submitted to the Labor Secretariat of the North American Commission for Labor Cooperation, 1997
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