Tuesday, March 30, 2010

What is the World's Worst Company to work for?

Good question. There are so many horrible choices to choose from. Companies that pay their workers slave wages. Companies that exploit "illegal" immigrants. Companies that cheat their workers out of pay, or overtime. Companies that destroy or endanger their workers' health by exposing them to dangerous substances, or unsafe working conditions. Companies that are just plain evil, involved with fascist death squads to murder workers trying to organize their fellow workers, for example. Companies that sell repressive technology and machinery to oppressive regimes. (Like western corporations selling surveillance equipment and software to China, companies that sell arms and "riot control" equipment to dictatorships, Caterpillar selling armored bulldozers to Israel to raze the homes of Palestinians, and murder the occasional activist like Rachel Corrie.)

So I guess Rio Tinto isn't the world's worst company to work for. But I sure wouldn't want to work for them. They just threw 4 employees to the wolves, abandoning them to a Chinese prison on trumped up charges. Even before the "conviction" in a bogus, secret "trial," the head of Rio Tinto was distancing his company from these expendable executives and sucking up to the Chinese rulers. Utterly disgusting. The instant they were "convicted," they were fired. Some people really do care only about money.

RT is an Australian company. One of the victims is an Australian citizen (but ethnically Chinese, which I think might be relevant in terms of the Aussie Government's attitude) and the other 3 are Chinese citizens. The Australian Government has been pretty feckless, making mealy-mouthed pleas for more "transparency" in the "trial." (The men were held virtually incommunicado for months preceding the "trial." Their lawyers had almost no input into the "process." ) It's reminiscent of the Australians' going along with the Indonesians' pathetic lies about murdering a group of Australian journalists during the invasion of East Timor back in the 1970s. Apparently caving in to thugs is an Aussie habit.

No comments: