 William T. Love undertook the construction of a Canal in western New York in the 1890’s. Although he never completed the project, the Love Canal found a use four decades later when the Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation used it as a dumping site for toxic chemicals. In 1953, Hooker Chemical sold its’ property to the Niagara Falls School Board and a neighborhood began to develop adjacent to the canal. In 1977 tests determined that the neighborhood’s water, air and soil were all contaminated with toxic chemicals. The federal government and President Carter took action to clean-up the hazardous material. President Carter declared two federal emergencies in Niagara Falls in 1980. The same year Congress established the Superfund Law. The law created a nation-wide clean-up program for waste sites and stipulated that those corporations responsible for the chemicals cover the clean-up costs. The Love Canal site was cleaned-up by the State of New York and the federal government and costs were initially covered by the government. Repercussions began in the early eighties for what was then Hooker Chemical, but is now the Occidental Chemical Corporation. The New York Supreme Court handed down a decision in 1983 ordering the company to pay twenty million dollars to the residents of Niagara Falls. In December of 1995, Occidental Chemical settled a Justice Department lawsuit (carried out under the Superfund Law) by agreeing to pay $129 million to cover the cost of clean up. The Love Canal case was one of the first toxic waste cases to draw nation-wide attention, and thus contributed to the creation of environmental standards. Under today’s standards, the Hooker/Occidental Corporation acted irresponsibly in disposing of chemical waste. In a speech June 2001, to the National Policy Association Conference, Alan Larson stated that “corporations have an interest in doing what they can to improve the environment in which they operate”. He listed examples of good corporate responsibility, including a company that “invested in environmental improvement” in Uruguay and a company in Brazil that “supported indigenous cultures”. Hooker Chemical disposed of toxic waste, covered up the canal and then sold the property. Such actions do not satisfy environmental principles laid out in The United Nations Global Compact. Principle eight gives recommendations to “undertake initiatives to promote greater environmental responsibility” . The compact cites reasons to take environmental responsibility, including “environmental pollution threatens human health” . Guidelines for Global Corporate Responsibility began to arise due the irresponsible actions of Corporations such as Hooker Chemical. Gabriel García Marquez, in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, takes up the cause of Colombian workers striking against the United Fruit Company. In the 1920’s, the United Fruit Company had a monopoly over the Colombian banana industry along with both economic and political power. The company, however, treated its workers poorly. In 1928, thirty-two thousand workers went on strike, demanding toilets and payment in cash as opposed to company scrip. Márquez describes the strike as a one sided affair: the courts side with the company officials to declare that the “workers did not exist” . When the strikers gathered one night to hold a demonstration, the Colombian government sent in troops. According to Márquez, the event turns into a massacre: a Major announces that he has “authorized the army to shoot to kill” because the strikers are a “bunch of hoodlums” . Although Márquez may have exaggerated the events, hundreds of strikers were killed on that day, while more disappeared months later. Eventually the government and the United Fruit Company came to deny that such an event ever took place. At the time any records of the shooting were struck from the history books. Márquez chronicles this fact in his novel: “Every time that Aureliano mentioned the [killing of the workers], not only the proprietress but some people older than she would repudiate the myth of the workers hemmed in at the station and the train with two hundred cars loaded with dead people, and they would even insist that, after all, everything had been set forth in judicial documents and in primary-school textbooks: that the banana company had never existed.” The Liberal Party of Colombia, in 1930, used the massacre as propaganda to win that election. Although the United Fruit Company was caught up in a struggle between strikers spurred on by Liberal leaders and a Conservative government, the company’s treatment of its workers was questionable. According to the labor standards set out in the United Nation Global Compact, workers should have the right to “employment contracts stating the terms and conditions of service” . The compact also discusses the benefits of a corporation working with their employees to “improve working conditions” . Demands by the 1928 strikers included a written contract, an eight-hour workday, a six-day workweek, payment in cash and the provision of certain necessities, such as toilets. The United Fruit Company did little to create a better working environment for their employees. As a result the strike was put down with force.
Works Cited
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