July 2021 Archives

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.

Striking Back

The media these days is full of what amounts to employer propaganda. The setbacks in the organizing drives at Amazon are called signs that unions are obsolete. The difficulties that low-wage companies are having in refilling positions are presented as justification for terminating enhanced unemployment compensation. The long-overdue upward movement in wages is depicted as part of a dangerous trend toward inflation.

The Washington Post has just bucked this trend by publishing an account of a labor conflict in Kansas that reminds us that certain unpleasant realities persist in the workplace and that some old-fashioned ways of responding to them are still suitable.

Hundreds of workers at a Frito-Lay snack food plant in Topeka went on strike earlier this month to protest work schedules that sound like something out of the 19^th Century. Many of the employees were being forced to work seven days a week and up to 12 hours per shift, creating workweeks that could reach 84 hours.

The reason for this is that demand for Cheetos and Doritos has been robust, and Frito-Lay wants to make the most of it. Fortunately, the workers are represented by the Bakery union (BCTGM), so they are not completely at the mercy of management. Yet the company is said to have rebuffed calls from the union to hire more workers and is taking a hard line in contract renewal negotiations.

Frito-Lay’s retrograde management style started long before the current dispute. The company, a division of the soft drink giant PepsiCo, has a record of workplace abuses dating back at least two decades. This can be seen in Violation Tracker, which documents 29 cases since 2000.

These include seven cases in which Frito-Lay had to provide back-pay to workers to settle unfair labor practice charges as well as 13 cases in which it was penalized by OSHA for health and safety violations.

But perhaps what is most remarkable about Frito-Lay is that it has been sued repeatedly for wage and hour abuses and has paid out more than $23 million to settle five different collective action lawsuits. The largest of these was an $11.9 million settlement back in 2001 involving driver-salespersons. In 2018 the company paid $6.5 million to settle allegations that it did not provide proper pay to long-haul drivers, including a failure to comply with California law concerning meal and rest breaks.

Frito-Lay’s workplace practices are in keeping with those of its parent. PepsiCo has paid millions more to settle similar lawsuits relating to its Pepsi operations. These include a $5 million settlement in 2018 and a $3 million settlement in 2015. It has also paid fines to the U.S. Labor Department for Fair Labor Standards Act violations.

While some of the circumstances of the Kansas strike stem from the current economy, at its core is the age-old struggle by workers to be treated fairly. Let’s hope that the time-honored tactic of withholding labor is sufficient to get Frito-Lay to do the right thing.

Attacking Corporate Concentration on Multiple Fronts

Big Tech breathed a sigh of relief in late June when a federal judge dismissed antitrust complaints that had been filed against Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of state attorneys general.

That respite is proving short-lived. Although some of its enforcement powers were curtailed by the Supreme Court earlier this year, the FTC under its new chair Lina Khan is mapping out an aggressive approach. The commission, for example, recently voted to make greater use of techniques such as subpoenas to compel companies to provide evidence. It also voted to prioritize investigations into technology platforms and health businesses, two areas in which large corporations have too much power.

At the same time, the dismissal of the Facebook actions has given more impetus to moves in Congress to modernize and strengthen federal antitrust laws, most of which are now well over a century old. Bills are pending that would address Big Tech practices such as buying up smaller competitors and giving preference to their own services on the platforms they control.

A third front is at the state level, where attorneys general have shown no sign of being deterred by the Facebook setback. A group of 37 AGs just filed an antitrust suit against Google, alleging that it effectively forces users of Android mobile devices to purchase apps through its Play Store and collects extravagant commissions in the process.

This is just the latest in a series of antitrust actions filed against Google by the states and the U.S. Justice Department. The state actions are of particular interest because they involve AGs from across the political spectrum. Those bringing the new Google suit come not only from unsurprising states such as New York and California but also the likes of Florida, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. In fact, the lead states include Utah and Tennessee.

At a time when partisan gridlock dooms many policy initiatives in Washington, it is encouraging to see states of very different political stripes find common ground in addressing corporate abuses.

This is not an entirely new phenomenon. As my colleagues and I at the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First pointed out in a 2019 report, state AGs have banded together hundreds of times to bring multistate actions against a variety of abuses. In Violation Tracker, we document more than 600 successful cases of this type, which have resulted in penalties of over $112 billion.

These include more than 100 cases involving anti-competitive practices. Yet many of these concerned outright price-fixing, which is a serious offense but one that is often not relevant to tech companies that abuse their power in other ways.

Addressing monopoly control and other abuses related to concentration of power is supposed to be the purview of federal regulators, whose enforcement approaches have failed to keep up with changes in the economy.

We can still hope the FTC and the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division will reinvigorate themselves, but for now it is good to see the states step in to address corporate concentration.