Turning the tables on big corporations

With religious extremism being blamed for much of the global strife we seem to see daily, it is refreshing when stories of religious parties, working for the common good, surface. As an activist for those who can’t find their own voice, I must say that the cracker and grape juice routine leaves me unimpressed. That said I was highly impressed by the action of The Interfaith Centre for Corporate Responsibility.

Composed of some 200 religious denominations, they recently passed some 198 resolutions to press for corporate accountability in the areas of the environment, treatment of workers, and sustainable fair trade. Usually such resolutions fall on deaf ears or are treated as a joke, at best. Anything that forms a barrier to unregulated free trade or draws on the bottom line is just not tolerated by the corporate mind set.

Now religious groups have pension plans and as such have access to shareholders’ meetings. We don’t usually think of Benedictine Nuns as capitalists. In order to protect their pension investments, however, they are forced to educate themselves in such worldly pursuits. So the Benedictine Sisters filed a resolution with Alcoa requesting that the company pay its Mexican workforce a fair and living wage. As a result the CEO, Paul O’Neil, was forced to meet with two of his workers who filled him in on the atrocious working conditions -- conditions that were affecting their health and safety as well as poor pay.

The good news is, that an initially reluctant O’Neil took steps to improve conditions and increased wages by 20 per cent. Whether divine help intervened I will not surmise.

Also in recent days, the United Church of Canada had a big powwow at which the question of privatizing water was discussed. There are trans-national corporations in all of the developed western countries who would like nothing better than to see the privatization of water as a universal corporate right, globally unregulated. International water companies have persuaded certain poorer countries that privatization of water would be cheaper, more convenient, safer, always available, and benefit rich and poor alike. In Latin America, Africa, and South East Asia, there are many cases where such promises have proven false. The poor were unable to pay the exorbitant charges levied and the government officials were hoodwinked into contracts that they didn’t fully understand. The result was civil unrest.

So far, Canada has resisted globalized water sales but the steady drumbeat of free trade, de-regulation, harmonization downwards, and unfettered global business activity, is getting ever louder. The soft drink multi-nationals are already selling you bottled water and it’s more expensive than gasoline. However, the cross-border sale of water is not yet allowed.

The United Church spokespeople who brought up the issue offered the premise that drinking water should not be privatized. Their contention was that water is freely provided by nature and should therefore be freely available to all as a human right. Good news.

I applaud the United Church staff for taking that stand and their sensible reasoning for making it. We need more such voices demanding that the needs and rights of local communities trump corporate welfare every time.