Phil Mattera

Violation Tracker UK has Arrived

The United Kingdom, which holds the presidency of this year’s United Nations climate conference, made the wise decision to bar fossil fuel companies from being corporate sponsors of the event. This is not to say, however, that the UK is generally tough on industries that harm the environment.

That’s one of the findings from the data collected in Violation Tracker UK, a database of business misconduct my colleagues and I at the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First have just launched. We assembled 63,000 cases dating back to 2010 from more than 40 regulatory agencies. Among those are the Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, and the Northern Ireland Environment Agency.

Altogether, we identified nearly 6,000 cases in which a company was found to have committed an environmental offense. Yet in more than half of these, the culprits were not required to pay any sort of monetary penalty and instead were let off with a caution.

Among those environmental cases with a fine or settlement, the aggregate penalties were just £312 million. The penalties exceeded £1 million in just a dozen cases; in only 135 instances were they above £100,000. Many of the larger environmental penalties involved privatized water companies, which should be fined even more heavily, given the frequency with which they break the rules.

These numbers stand in stark contrast to the totals for competition-related offenses and financial offenses. There are fewer cases in those categories—a total of about 2,200—but the penalties have been substantially higher, totaling £5.2 billion for competition cases and £2.8 billion for financial ones. In those categories combined there have been 285 penalties of £1 million or more, and 716 above £100,000.

The UK’s use of monetary penalties also lags when it comes to safety-related offenses, including workplace safety as well as product, healthcare and transportation safety. This category accounts for just £413 million in penalties. The aggregate fines and settlements for environmental and safety offenses combined is only one-tenth that of competition and financial offenses. The other categories covered by Violation Tracker UK—employment-related offenses and consumer protection cases—fall in between.

Like the U.S. Violation Tracker on which it is modeled, Violation Tracker UK identifies which of the entities named in the individual cases are linked to larger parent companies. The UK parent universe numbers more than 650, both publicly traded and privately held. The parents are headquartered in more than 30 countries. After the UK, parents based in the United States account for the largest number of cases and the highest penalty total.

As in the United States, the list of companies with the highest penalty totals in Violation Tracker UK contains numerous big banks, both domestic and foreign. Three of those banks are the only corporations to appear among the ten most penalized companies on both trackers: JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and UBS. Other types of large, publicly traded corporations also feature prominently in the UK rankings. Companies in the FTSE 100 account for more than one-quarter of the Violation Tracker UK monetary penalty total.

Big business does not behave any better in Britain than it does in the United States.

Fronting for Rogue Corporations

Only days before the world gathers in Glasgow to discuss the climate crisis, Greenpeace has leaked a trove of documents suggesting that some countries are coming to that gathering with sinister motives. According to the environmental group, several leading coal, oil, beef and animal feed-producing nations are trying to water down the International Panel on Climate Change’s findings to protect their domestic industries.

Among the countries said to be involved are Saudi Arabia, Australia and Brazil. It seems clear these efforts reflect not only the inclinations of their political leaders but also the interests of major corporations headquartered in those nations.

Saudi Arabia is, of course, the home to the Saudi Aramco—one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers and thus one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Australia is the home to mining companies such as BHP Group, the world’s largest producer of coal. Brazil is the headquarters of meat-producing giant JBS.

Along with their outsized role in CO2 emissions, these companies damage the environment in other ways and have run afoul of regulatory requirements. Take the case of Saudi Aramco. As documented in Violation Tracker, its U.S. subsidiary Motiva Enterprises has racked up more than $170 million in penalties over the past two decades for violations of the Clean Air Act and other environmental laws. In addition to cases brought by the EPA, Motiva has been the target of lawsuits and enforcement actions by attorneys general and environmental regulatory agencies in states such as Texas and Louisiana.

In its U.S. operations, BHP has been cited for violations both by the EPA and by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, the federal agency that oversees offshore oil and gas drilling. It has also paid fines to environmental agencies in Louisiana and Arkansas.

JBS, which has taken over several major beef and poultry producers in the United States, has been cited 59 times for environmental violations, paying a total of $5.6 million in penalties. Earlier this year, its Pilgrim’s Pride poultry subsidiary pleaded guilty and was been sentenced to pay approximately $107 million in criminal fines for its participation in a conspiracy to fix prices and rig bids for broiler chicken products.

JBS will also show up in Violation Tracker UK, which will be launched next week. Its Moy Park Limited subsidiary has been fined over £1.2 million since 2010, most of which came from workplace safety violations but also included £82,000 in nine environmental cases.

These examples suggest that the behind-the-scenes efforts of Saudi Arabia, Australia and Brazil are not just a matter of differences in climate policy. By resisting stronger controls on greenhouse gas emissions, these countries are serving the interests of corporations that repeatedly violate environmental regulations and other laws that serve the public good.

Note: Violation Tracker UK will go public on October 26. It will contain information on more than 60,000 cases brought by over 40 UK regulators such as the Environment Agency and the Health and Safety Executive. The database aggregates cases linked to more than 650 parent corporations based in the UK and over 30 other countries.

Trans-Atlantic Corporate Misconduct

It seems likely there is more corporate crime and misconduct in the United States than in any other country on earth. After all, Violation Tracker now documents 496,000 cases over the past two decades with total penalties of more than $724 billion. That’s a tough amount to beat, especially if you put aside kleptocracies such as Russia and look only at larger market economies with functional regulatory systems.

We will soon be able to make better comparisons between the U.S. and one of those economies—that of the United Kingdom. On October 26 the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First will release Violation Tracker UK. Like its U.S. namesake, VT UK will provide easy access to regulatory records covering a wide range of issues, including employment practices, environmental compliance, consumer protection, financial conduct and much more.

My colleagues and I are still finalizing the data, so I will not provide any actual penalty totals here. Yet there is one finding I can confidently share now: many of the same large corporations that feature prominently in the U.S. Violation Tracker will do so in the UK data as well. More than half of the 100 most penalized UK parents have also paid fines and settlements in the U.S.

The overlap between the penalty “leaders” in the two countries is concentrated in the financial services sector. I’ve noted numerous times that large UK banks such as NatWest (formerly Royal Bank of Scotland), HSBC and Barclays have behaved badly in the U.S. and have paid out billions of dollars in penalties for offenses such as interest-rate manipulation and violations of international economic sanctions.

It will come as no surprise that these same banks have been cited for some of the same sins at home. In fact, some of the U.S. cases resulted from investigations carried out in cooperation with UK regulators such as the Financial Conduct Authority and the Serious Fraud Office.

At the same time, giant U.S. banks have gotten into trouble in the United Kingdom. The VT UK list of most penalized corporations will include the likes of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.

Banks headquartered in countries such as Switzerland and Germany also show up with large penalty totals in the UK as well as the U.S. Among these are UBS and Deutsche Bank.

Other portions of the financial services sector also engage in misconduct on both sides of the Atlantic. These include the accounting and auditing giants such as KPMG and Deloitte, which have gotten into trouble not only with the SEC and the Justice Department but also with Britain’s Financial Reporting Council.

Not all of the culprits that will appear in VT UK are multinational players. The database will include many homegrown offenders with little or no overseas presence. You will be able to check out the track records of offenders large and small when VT UK launches on October 26.

Corruption Galore

For those convinced of the depravity of large corporations and the super-wealthy, recent days have provided an abundance of vindication. Thanks to the whistleblower at Facebook and an anonymous leaker of a vast collection of confidential financial documents dubbed the Pandora Papers, we have amazing new evidence of corruption and anti-social behavior.

Frances Haugen’s release of internal research paints a picture of Facebook as prioritizing profits ahead of taking steps to address evidence that its algorithms promote social animosity and that its products such as Instagram exacerbate mental health problems among teenage users.

The financial documents revealed in the Pandora Papers depict numerous billionaires and government leaders around the world as brazen tax cheats who are accumulating immense amounts of illegal assets in the form of high-end real estate, yachts and secret bank accounts.

Of course, none of this comes as a surprise. In fact, this is not the first large-scale leak of private financial records showing misappropriation, money laundering and tax evasion among the global elite. We already knew that Facebook is basically unconcerned about the damage caused by its services.

As is always the case after major revelations like these, the main question is whether policymakers will do anything to address the problems. The odds that the Pandora Papers will prompt Congress to act are reduced somewhat by the fact that the disclosures do not include much about members of the U.S. elite. Major controversies have erupted in countries such as Jordan, Kenya and the Czech Republic, whose leaders are among those implicated in the documents. U.S. individuals consist mainly of lesser-known billionaires and art dealers.

Perhaps the most salient U.S. angle in the Pandora Papers is the increasingly important role played by states such as South Dakota as tax havens for elites seeking to shield illicit assets. To some extent this is an issue for state legislatures, though a bill has been introduced in Congress that would require trust companies and others to screen foreign clients seeking to move assets through the U.S. financial system.

There may be more policy momentum when it comes to Facebook. It and the other tech giants have been receiving criticism, for varying reasons, from members of Congress across the political spectrum. Along with the issues raised by the whistleblower, there are increasing concerns about the concentration of ownership within the tech sector. Among other things, Facebook is the subject of a new antitrust complaint by the Federal Trade Commission.

An article in the Washington Post quotes lawmakers suggesting that this may be tech’s “Big Tobacco moment,” a reference to the time in the late 1990s when the major cigarette manufacturers lost their stranglehold over public policy and ended up having to accept stronger federal regulation and paying out tens of billions of dollars in class action settlements.

It is good to hear that legislators are thinking in those terms, but they will have to turn up the heat much higher on Facebook, which so far is not admitting any culpability and whose CEO is too young to remember much about the 1990s.

Targeting Polluters in the Courts

When it comes to dealing with egregious corporate polluters, we tend to think first about what the EPA and the Justice Department are doing to address the problem. Yet there is another way in which environmental miscreants can be called to account: private litigation.

For the past half century, a series of major lawsuits have served as the means by which large corporations have been compelled to change many of their worst environmental practices and compensate victims of those abuses.

Some of these cases have become legendary and have inspired Hollywood movies. The 2000 film Erin Brockovich told the story of a legal clerk who was central to a successful lawsuit against the utility Pacific Gas & Electric for contaminating the water supply of a California town with the carcinogen hexavalent chromium. The 2019 movie Dark Waters dramatized the efforts of attorney Robert Bilott to get DuPont to take responsibility for exposing residents of a West Virginia community to highly toxic chemicals called PFOAs.

The latest expansion of Violation Tracker includes entries on the PG&E and DuPont cases as well as 100 other lawsuits resolved over the past two decades. As a result of these actions, dozens of major corporations have paid out a total of more than $15 billion in settlements around the country.

These are all group actions in which multiple plaintiffs sued the companies for widespread harm. Initially, major environmental lawsuits were brought as class actions. In the 1990s the U.S. Supreme Court put significant restrictions on such lawsuits, but trial lawyers have been able to achieve substantial settlements through the system of multi-district litigation in which cases from various jurisdictions are transferred to a single federal court with the aim of reaching a global settlement. MDLs are even more common in product liability cases (which Violation Tracker will tackle next).

Among the 104 environmental cases just added to the database, there are class actions and MDLs as well as suits brought by environmental organizations on behalf of communities.

Topping the list of settlement amounts are the cases brought in connection with the 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. BP agreed to a $7 billion in 2012 settlement, which was separate from the more than $20 billion it later paid out to federal and state governments. Halliburton, also implicated in the disaster, paid a $1 billion private settlement. The other giant case was the $1.6 billion settlement Volkswagen reached with its dealerships affected by the automaker’s emissions cheating scandal. Like BP, VW also paid billions more in government settlements.

The company with the next highest total is Exxon Mobil, which has paid out more than $590 million in six different private environmental actions. Most of this amount came from a long-running lawsuit stemming from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska. The company was originally hit with a $5 billion punitive damages award, but it appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 2008 slashed the amount to $507 million.

Four of Exxon’s other cases involved the gasoline additive MTBE. Communities and governments in various parts of the country have sued numerous oil companies to hold them responsible for MTBE contamination of water supplies from leaking underground oil tanks.

Another issue involving multiple companies is that of the PFOAs mentioned above in connection with DuPont. A variety of corporations have been sued for contaminating water supplies with these hazardous substances, also known as PFAs or forever chemicals because they do not break down in the body or the environment. DuPont and its spinoffs Chemours and Corteva have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in these cases, while firms such as 3M and Georgia-Pacific have paid smaller amounts. Other suits are pending.

The dozens of other environmental cases have involved a wide range of toxic substances such as PCBs, dioxin, arsenic, TCE and vinyl chloride. The average of the 104 settlements is $150 million. Sixteen corporations have settlement totals above $100 million.

Missing from the list are major cases involving the role of corporations in exacerbating the climate crisis. Various suits have been brought, often by state and local governments and framed as shareholder actions, but so far none have resulted in significant monetary settlements. That is likely to change as the crisis grows worse and corporations are held culpable. When that happens, Violation Tracker will document the results.

Note: I would like to thank Suzanne Katzenstein and a group of her students at the Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy, who helped identify some of the environmental lawsuits discussed above.

States vs. Big Business

Twenty twenty-one is turning out to be a banner year for state government prosecution of corporate crime and misconduct. The biggest events are, of course, the settlements with pharmaceutical companies Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson along with the three big drug distributors—Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen and McKesson—for their role in creating and prolonging the opioid epidemic.

While some argue that the amounts are not sufficient, those cases will result in billions of dollars in payments to state governments from the corporations and the family, the Sacklers, who controlled the now bankrupt Purdue and grew enormously wealthy from its operations.

In all, the states will rack up more than $30 billion in 2021, which would be the largest amount since 2008, when the states received about $53 billion in payments, largely as the result of a series of billion-dollar-plus settlements with the likes of Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to resolve allegations that the Wall Street banks misled investors in the marketing of auction-rate securities.

This year’s total is not entirely the result of the opioid litigation. There have also been numerous other cases resolved by state attorneys general that may not involve billions but are still quite significant. Here are some examples.

In July, the New York AG announced that TIAA-CREF, a subsidiary of retirement-services giant TIAA, had agreed to pay $97 million to resolve allegations that it fraudulently misled tens of thousands of customers into moving their retirement investments into higher-fee accounts offered by the company.

Also in July, the Oregon AG announced that L Brands, the owner of Victoria’s Secret and other retail chains, had agreed to commit $90 million of company funds to protect employees from sexual harassment and discrimination and require accountability from executives when misconduct occurs. The settlement came in the wake of allegations by the Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund and other shareholders that the company’s board of directors failed to investigate former CEO and Chairman Emeritus Leslie Wexner’s close personal ties with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and ignored a widespread and pervasive culture of sexual harassment at the company.

In June, the Ohio AG announced that Centene Corp. agreed to pay $88 million to resolve allegations of overcharging Medicaid by charging more than the capped industry-standard prices for drugs while acting as a pharmacy benefit manager. Centene paid $55 million to settle a similar case with the state of Mississippi, while Bristol Myers Squibb paid $75 million in an overcharging settlement with a group of states.

Also in June, the North Carolina AG announced that JUUL Labs would pay $40 million and change its practices to resolve allegations that it was responsible for misleading teenagers into becoming addicted to nicotine-based vaping products.

Last month, the Pennsylvania AG announced that Glenn O. Hawbaker, Inc. would pay more than $20 million to resolve criminal charges that it misdirected retirement contributions meant specifically for employees working on prevailing-wage projects into a company-wide plan that covered executives and owners of the firm.

Also in August, the Georgia AG announced that Turtle Creek Assets, Ltd would pay more than $19 million to resolve allegations that the company committed multiple violations of the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the Georgia Fair Business Practices Act.

What this sampling of cases shows is that amid all the controversy over their policies on issues such as voting rights and abortion, many states of varying ideological orientation continue to carry out their responsibility to protect citizens from irresponsible corporate behavior.

Note: These cases will appear in an update of Violation Tracker that will be posted later this month.

Is Big Business an Agent of Social Change?

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020, Corporate America pledged to spend billions of dollars to address systemic racism. A new analysis by the Washington Post raises questions both about those commitments and the entire idea of relying on big business to address social problems.

Surveying the 50 U.S. largest companies (based on stock market valuation), the Post found that 44 of them pledged a total of $4.2 billion in donations and committed another $45.2 billion in loans, investments and other initiatives. More than one year later, the companies reported disbursing only $1.7 billion.

The slow movement of the funds should not be taken as an indication that the commitments were a burden on the firms. As the Post points out, the $4 billion cash portion represented less than one percent of the aggregate annual profits of the 50 companies.

Much of the $45 billion in other commitments, 90 percent of which came from Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, represented loans and investments on which the companies would make a profit. Moreover, providing home mortgages and other financial services in Black and Latino neighborhoods is something the banks were already supposed to be doing under federal laws such as the Community Reinvestment Act.

All this goes to show that the companies were not sacrificing very much in their racial justice commitments. Yet many of them have still dawdled in writing the checks. For example, the Post notes that Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco Systems, tweeted in June 2020 that his company would be contributing $5 million to a handful of groups such as Black Lives Matter. The newspaper found that Black Lives Matter has not yet received any money.

It remains unclear whether Cisco and the other companies ever intend to make good on their pledges, even though they have already reaped the public relations benefits from the commitments.

Apart from the matter of reliability is the question of whether it makes sense to call on large corporations to help deal with matters such as systemic racism. Typically, this is framed as a debate between those who see big business as a potential force for positive change and those who argue that corporations should focus solely on creating value for shareholders.

There are problems with both those positions. The notion that the business of business is solely to generate profits, long popularized by the rightwing economist Milton Friedman, is not only amoral but simplistic. Corporations may find it beneficial to spend money on things such as charitable contributions or lobbying even if the immediate effect is to reduce profits a bit. Those expenses may very well lead to higher profits in the longer term by generating good will or changing public policy.

Some corporations, in fact, may seek to project an image of social or environmental responsibility as part of their brand—think Ben & Jerry’s, Patagonia, etc. When they make contributions to progressive causes, they are really engaged in nothing more than marketing.

Yet perhaps the biggest misconception in most discussions of the role of corporations is the assumption that big business is somehow part of the antidote to social and environmental ills. The truth is often that companies are a cause of those ills.

For example, when it comes to systemic racism, large corporations are hardly innocent bystanders. Many of them have decades-long track records of racial discrimination in the treatment of both employees and customers.

Many of these cases are documented in Violation Tracker. The database contains more than 3,000 entries on employment discrimination (of all kinds) with total penalties of more than $4 billion. These include actions by agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as well as class action lawsuits. Among the latter are multi-million-dollar settlements paid by major companies such as Coca-Cola, Federal Express, and Eastman Kodak.

Violation Tracker also has more than 200 cases in which companies were accused of bias in their dealings with customers—such as charging African-American borrowers higher interest rates than their white counterparts. These cases have resulted in more than $1 billion in fines and settlements. Among the companies involved in these matters have been MetLife, JPMorgan Chase, and Toyota.

All of this is to say that many corporations have much work to do to eliminate systemic racism under their own roof before being called on to help address the problem at a national level. When it comes to social change, big business often remains part of the problem rather than the solution.

Targeting Gunmakers in the Courts

Among the scores of industries covered in Violation Tracker, one of the most under-represented is the business of producing firearms. That’s not because gunmakers are particularly virtuous, but rather because there are few laws and regulations for them to violate.

Federal oversight of the industry is pretty much non-existent. The few penalties that have been imposed on companies such as Remington, Beretta, Colt’s Manufacturing, Smith & Wesson, and Sturm, Ruger have had nothing to do with their specific activity. Instead, they have been imposed by agencies such as OSHA that oversee companies of all kinds. The penalty total for each of these firms is no more than a few hundred thousand dollars—a trivial amount for an industry whose products do so much harm.

The other arena in which the industry has enjoyed near impunity is the court system. That’s largely due to the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which prevents dealers and manufacturers from liability when guns are used in shootings and other criminal activities.

Ironically, gun companies are still considered liable when their products are defective. For example, in 2016 the Brazilian gunmaker Forjas Taurus agreed to pay $239 million to settle a class action brought in federal court in Florida. The plaintiffs had alleged that its guns fired unintentionally when dropped.

Various attempts have been made to get around the industry’s liability shield. A lawsuit brought against Remington by the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre in Connecticut was able to proceed by using the state unfair trade practices law. The case still dragged on for years, though it was recently reported that Remington is offering to settle the matter for $33 million. That’s not much, but it could serve as a stepping stone to more appropriate damages in other cases.

Another novel approach is being taken in a lawsuit recently filed in federal court in Massachusetts by the government of Mexico against ten U.S. gunmakers. The suit accuses the companies of facilitating the flow of weapons to the drug cartels causing so much havoc in Mexico. It argues that the federal liability shield does not apply, since the harm took place in another country.

The lawsuit is considered a long shot, but if nothing else the case may expose more details about the questionable practices of the industry. The complaint has already highlighted the brazen practice by one gunmaker of engraving the image of Emilio Zapata on one of its models to appeal to Mexican buyers. One of those pistols was used to kill a Mexican investigative reporter.

There are signs that the real purpose of the lawsuit is to pressure the U.S. government to put restrictions on the firearms trade. The suit seeks to do this by equating cross-border gun trafficking from the U.S. to the drug trafficking from Mexico that American officials frequently decry. Significant change is not likely to happen any time soon, but meanwhile any challenge to the gun’s industry’s impunity is welcome.

Corporate Contamination

The infrastructure bill making its way through the Senate is said to include $55 billion for water systems, including funding to replace lead pipes throughout the country. That will be a relief for many localities, but other communities face water problems caused not by aging pipes but by corporate negligence.

One example is the town of Hoosick Falls in upstate New York, which discovered in 2014 that its water supply had been contaminated by perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, a toxic chemical linked to a range of ailments, including cancer. PFOA is one of a group of substances known as PFAS, also called “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the body or in the environment.

The source of the contamination in Hoosick Falls was a plastics plant that produced electronic components treated with PFOA, which was originally developed by DuPont for its Teflon non-stick coating for cookware. DuPont has been embroiled in a long-running dispute over the impact of PFOA on residents living near the plant in West Virginia where it produced the dangerous chemical.

It is now in a similar controversy with regard to Hoosick Falls, together with the French company Saint-Gobain, which purchased the plant in 1999, and other companies that operated it before that. Residents filed a class action lawsuit against the companies and recently reached a tentative $65 million settlement with most of the defendants.

DuPont is not part of that deal and is challenging it in court, claiming that it will hinder its ability to get a fair deal in its ongoing negotiations with the plaintiffs. A federal judge just rebuffed the company and gave preliminary approval to the settlement.

It is difficult to feel any sympathy for DuPont, whose response to the PFOA problem over the years has left a lot to be desired. As dramatized in the 2019 film Dark Waters, it took a crusading lawyer named Robert Bilott to break through the attempt by the company and its outside attorneys to cover up the pattern of cancers and birth defects experienced by residents of Parkersburg, West Virginia exposed to PFOA.

Yet DuPont is not the only corporation responsible for causing harm to water quality. For example, poultry producer Mountaire Farms recently agreed to pay a total of $205 million to settle a class action lawsuit and a case brought by the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control in connection with groundwater contamination caused by its processing plants.

I am now in the process of documenting these and dozens of other major environmental lawsuits—also known as toxic torts—for the next expansion of Violation Tracker scheduled for September. These cases, pushed by community activists as well as lawyers, are a reminder that the civil justice system is often a necessary supplement to government regulatory action in addressing corporate misconduct.

More Competition Is Only Part of the Solution

The executive order on competition issued by the Biden Administration earlier this month gave rise to headlines suggesting it was a direct assault on corporate power. The New York Times said the administration was stepping up its “mission to rein big business in.” The Wall Street Journal said the order “targets big business.”

There is no doubt that the order lays out an ambitious agenda to address anti-competitive practices in numerous areas of the economy. Coupled with the nomination of aggressive advocates to head the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, it creates momentum in dealing with the increasing dominance of large corporations over major portions of the economy.

Yet there are risks in relying too much on the idea of competition as the way to deal with all the harmful effects of modern capitalism. There are some areas in which we need less rather than more competition. After all, for example, the basic mission of the labor movement is to take wages out of competition.

Moreover, unions have traditionally had more organizing success among larger companies than smaller ones. Union density is higher at utilities, which are often monopolies, than any other industry. Utility workers are also better paid than most other blue-collar workers.

This is not, of course, true across the board. Giant corporations such as Walmart and Amazon have adamantly resisted unions and have thus been able to suppress wages. Some smaller firms have learned to live with unions.

There are also complications when it come to areas such as consumer protection. Some large companies use their market domination to keep prices high (example: cable TV providers), while others use theirs to drive their competitors out of business by keeping prices artificially low.

And if we look at employment and consumer issues at the same time, we’re confronted with the fact that large corporations may use the lack of competition to benefit customers at the expense of workers, or vice versa.

One thing I have learned in the course of gathering data for Violation Tracker is that corporate misconduct can be found in companies of all sizes. The database now contains more than 490,000 entries with total penalties of $669 billion. Of those cases, about one-fifth involve units and subsidiaries of large corporations. That leaves several hundred thousand smaller companies that have been implicated in abuses such as wage theft, employment discrimination, government contracting fraud, predatory lending, nursing home negligence, and toxic dumping.

The larger companies pay vastly much more in total fines and settlements, but it remains unclear whether in the aggregate they or smaller firms do more harm to workers, consumers and communities.

All of this is to say that more competition, while in many respects desirable, would not necessarily address all the ills of private enterprise. What we need are not just more players in the market, but better controls on all the players, whether they are mammoth corporations or more modest-sized operations.