Employers and Sexual Harassment

The Harvey Weinstein scandal is bringing necessary attention to the problem of sexual harassment. But that problem is not limited to abusive behavior on the part of big-time movie producers and a few other powerful men. Women are confronted with sexual predators in a wide variety of workplaces.

Evidence of this can be found in the cases resolved by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In addition to enforcing anti-discrimination rules regarding hiring, pay levels, etc., the EEOC brings lawsuits (or joins existing ones) dealing with harassment.

In Violation Tracker I have collected data on a total of 1,393 resolved EEOC cases since the beginning of 2000 that together have resulted in about $1 billion in penalty payments by employers. Of these, about 300 involved sexual harassment (often in conjunction with other allegations). They have resulted in about $135 million in employer penalties. Here are some of the more significant cases:

In August, Ford Motor agreed to pay $10.1 million to resolve allegations that mangers at two plants retaliated against workers who complained that they were being subjected to sexual (and racial) harassment on the job.

In 2011, a telemarketing company called International Profit Associates agreed to pay $8 million to resolve allegations that some 82 female employees had been subjected to sexual harassment. It took nine years from the time the EEOC first filed the case to get to that resolution, with the agency attributing the delay to the filing of frivolous legal motions by the firm, whose top officials were alleged to have personally participated in the abusive behavior.

In 2010 ABM Industries, a major provider of janitorial services, agreed to pay $5.8 million to resolve allegations that more than 20 female workers were subjected to repeated sexual harassment by co-workers and supervisors. An EEOC press release stated: “Some of the harassers allegedly often exposed themselves, groped female employees’ private parts from behind, and even raped at least one of the victims.”

Predatory behavior can also occur at non-profit workplaces. In 2003 Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York agreed to pay $5.4 million to resolve allegations that female workers were subjected to inappropriate touching during employment-related medical examinations conducted by a hospital physician who also asked intrusive questions about their sexual practices.

In 2005 Carrols Corporation, a major Burger King franchisee, agreed to pay $2.5 million to resolve EEOC allegations that 89 female workers, many of them teenagers, were subjected to egregious sexual harassment at many of the company’s locations. The EEOC alleged that the abuse “ranged from obscene comments, jokes, and propositions to unwanted touching, exposure of genitalia, strip searches, stalking, and even rape” and that it was “perpetrated by managers in the majority of cases.”

In a case involving retailer Fry’s Electronics, a supervisor was said to have been fired for supporting a subordinate who complained about sexual harassment The supervisor had told the company’s legal department that the worker reported receiving repeated sexually charged text messages from an assistant store manager. Fry’s paid $2.3 million to resolve the EEOC’s allegations.

Whether in the Weinstein case or these other situations, what starts out as the depraved behavior of individuals is compounded by the efforts of employers to conceal the abuse and punish those victims who dare to report it. Whether the targets are famous actresses or janitors and fast food workers, corporate America needs to do more to stop the sexual predators on its payrolls.

The Corporate Death Penalty for Wells Fargo?

Wells Fargo’s seemingly endless transgressions have reached the point that there is growing discussion of a possibility rarely considered even in some of the most egregious corporate scandals: putting it out of business.

Rep. Maxine Waters, the top ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, recently issued a report that recounted the banks sins (including a reference to the $11 billion Violation Tracker tally of its penalties), saying that Wells has “demonstrated a pattern of egregiously harming its customers.”

Such statements have been heard frequently since the Wells bogus account scandal came to light last year. But Waters goes on to argue: “When a megabank has engaged in a pattern of extensive violations of law that harms millions of consumers, like Wells Fargo has, it should not be allowed to continue to operate within our nation’s banking system, and avail itself of all of the associated privileges afforded to it.”

A similar sentiment is expressed in a letter just submitted to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency by the AFL-CIO, Americans for Financial Reform and five other groups. The letter asks the OCC to consider whether, “in light of the bank’s pattern of law breaking,” the bank “should forfeit its national banking charter.”

The issue was even brought up in a recent Congressional hearing in which Wells CEO Tim Sloan was being grilled by members of the Senate Banking Committee. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that Sloan should be fired, while Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii went further by asking Sloan: “Why shouldn’t the OCC revoke your charter?”

“We serve one out of every three Americans, we have 270,000 team members,” Sloan responded before Schatz cut him off, saying: “So, you’re too big.”

Those comments encapsulate how a debate about the possible shutdown of a bank or other company as large as Wells Fargo would play out. The corporation would emphasize the disruptive effect on its customers and employees, suggesting they would be the unintended victims. Of course, in the case of Wells it was the bank itself that victimized customers and staff.

Schatz’s comment points to the direction any serious effort to penalize a rogue corporation should take: the emphasis should not be a precipitous shutdown but rather a breakup into smaller entities that would be subjected to rigorous regulation and scrutiny. Care should be taken in the process to protect the interests of customers and employees, though upper level executives should be shown the door.

Discussions of the corporate death penalty have come and gone over the years. The need to deal with a brazen recidivist such as Wells may finally bring more serious consideration to a tool that could be more effective than billions in penalties in ending the ongoing corporate crime wave.

A Strange Way of Helping Workers

The Trump Administration would have us believe it is all about helping workers. Yet it has a strange way of showing it. Policies that directly assist workers are under attack, and all the emphasis is on initiatives that purportedly aid workers indirectly by boosting their employers.

That dubious approach is on full display now in a tax proposal that is being sold as pro-worker even though its main effect will be to make the rich even richer with the trickle-down hope they decide to use some of their additional wealth to create jobs and boost wages.

The same goes with regulation, a topic Trump is expected to return to in a speech next week. The dismantling of safeguards vital to the well-being of workers and consumers is packaged as the key to unleashing Corporate America’s job-creation mojo.

To a great extent these arguments are nothing more than chicanery. If there is any shred of sincerity, it is based on the idea that corporations, with fewer tax and regulatory burdens, will act in a socially beneficial way.

Corporations themselves, including ones that have lately been critical of the Trump Administration on issues such as race relations and climate change, help to promote the notion of business civic virtue. In fact, they and their apologists don’t restrain themselves in claiming the moral high ground.

A prime example of this appears in a recent issue of Fortune, which contains the magazine’s latest list of what it calls Change the World companies. These are the corporations whose operations supposedly have the greatest positive social impact.

Perhaps I have a jaded view, but I was astounded to see many of the companies on the list. Not only are they not paragons of virtue — in some cases they are leading corporate miscreants.

Take No. 1 on the list: JPMorgan Chase. In Violation Tracker the bank shows up with more than $29 billion in fines and settlements since 2000, making it the second most penalized company in the United States (after Bank of America). A big part of its total comes from toxic securities cases and mortgage abuses in the period leading to the financial meltdown, but there is much more. For example, it had to pay $1.7 billion to resolve a deferred prosecution criminal case relating to its role as the banker for Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme; $550 million for its role in a conspiracy to manipulate the foreign exchange market; $329 million for illegal credit card practices; and so on.

No. 9 on the Fortune list is Johnson & Johnson, which long cultivated a lily-white image as a producer of baby powder and other wholesome items, but in recent years has gotten itself embroiled in a series of scandals. Its Violation Tracker tally comes mainly from a 2013 civil and criminal case in which it had to pay $2.2 billion to resolve allegations of promoting three prescription drugs for uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Among the companies on the top tier of the Fortune list are some with terrible employment records, including Walmart, which has long fought efforts of its U.S. workers to form unions and bargain for better pay, and Apple, which grew rich from the toil of the underpaid overseas workers producing its overpriced devices.

The Fortune lists contains some smaller and less notorious companies, but the presence of those leading corporate culprits taints the whole project.

A similar taint can be found in the Trump tax and deregulatory initiatives. If you want to help workers, help them directly — don’t give away the store to their employers.

Identifying Repeat Corporate Offenders

When a new corporate scandal arises, there is a tendency on the part of many observers to treat it as a complete surprise — as something that could not have been anticipated.

The truth is that large companies are rarely first time offenders. If you look into their background, you are likely to see evidence of past behavior that presaged the recent misconduct.

It is now easier than ever to research that track record thanks to a major expansion of Violation Tracker my colleagues and I just rolled out. We posted an additional ten years of data, extending coverage back to 2000 and in the process nearly doubling the size of the database to 300,000 entries. Together, these account for $394 billion in fines and settlements — 95 percent of which was assessed against 2,800 large parent companies and their subsidiaries.

Take the example of Equifax, which is at the center of a growing scandal over its apparent negligence in protecting personal information and its delay in reporting a major hack. Violation Tracker shows that early this year the company was fined $2.5 million by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for using deceptive means to lure people into purchasing costly credit-protection services. The company was also ordered to provide $3.8 million in restitution to affected customers. Over the previous two decades, Equifax was fined three times by the Federal Trade Commission.

The announcement by the CFPB last year that it was fining Wells Fargo $100 million for creating bogus customer accounts — a scandal that has subsequently mushroomed — was far from the first time the bank had gotten into trouble for questionable practices. Violation Tracker documents prior penalties totaling some $11 billion going back to 2000 for offense such as mortgage abuses, toxic securities abuses, and discriminatory practices.

Sometimes the prior offense is indistinguishable from the current one. In 2005, a decade before it was revealed to be engaged in a massive scheme to deceive regulators about emissions levels, Volkswagen was compelled to pay a fine of $1.1 million and spend $26 million on a recall to settle allegations that it failed to correct a defective pollution-control sensor.

Of the 2,800 companies in the Violation Tracker universe, more than 80 were penalized for something or other by federal agencies or the Justice Department every year from 2000 through 2016. The company that has the dubious distinction of leading by this measure is oil giant BP, which has paid out an average of some $1.6 billion in fines and settlements each year during the 17-year period.

No other company comes close. In second place is Verizon Communications, whose average annual penalty was $72 million, followed by FirstEnergy ($71 million), Valero Energy ($58 million), Marathon Petroleum ($54 million), Alcoa ($43 million), Exxon Mobil ($42 million), Koch Industries ($39 million) and Chevron ($34 million).

While they may not have gotten penalized every single year, there are hundreds of other parent companies that have been penalized in multiple years, and in many cases multiple times in a given year. In other words, just about every large company is a recidivist.

Who knows: maybe regulators and prosecutors will start consulting Violation Tracker to identify prior bad acts and take them into account when deciding how to penalize companies for their current sins.

Recalling the Corporate Culprits of Yesteryear

Corporate crime has been happening as long as there have been corporations. But if you wanted to choose an event that marked the emergence of what we think of as modern big business misconduct it would be the admission by Enron in November 2001 that it had overstated profits by $600 million. Within months, the high-flying energy trader collapsed amid growing evidence that the company was one big scam. Enron’s lenders, investors, auditors and others were all pulled into the morass.

Enron turned out to be just one of a rash of accounting scandals that rocked the corporate world and severely damaged the legitimacy of American capitalism. The Bush Administration felt compelled to create a President’s Corporate Fraud Task Force headed by none other than James Comey.

I bring up this history because the Corporate Research Project is about to release a major expansion of Violation Tracker that will extend coverage to this period. We are adding ten more years of data, bringing the starting point back to January 2000. The expansion will nearly double the size of the database to 300,000 entries with more than $394 billion in fines and settlements.

More than 95 percent of that penalty amount comes from our universe of large parent companies, which is being increased to about 2,800. These include ones that are publicly traded and privately held, for-profit and non-profit, domestic as well as foreign-based.

Now the universe also includes a bunch of companies like Enron that are defunct but which are kept on the list for historical purposes. Here are some of those zombies. Note that Violation Tracker does not yet include entries relating to private litigation.

The largest penalty total comes from Adelphia Communications, a cable television provider that was riddled with corruption. In 2004 the Justice Department arranged for $715 million of what remained of the company to be handed over to a fund set up to compensate victims of Adelphia.

In 2002 WorldCom, another telecommunications company, filed what was then the largest bankruptcy ever in the wake of a massive accounting scandal. In 2002 the Securities and Exchange Commission reached a $500 million settlement with the company after originally seeking $1.5 billion in penalties. Since WorldCom was taken over by Verizon rather than being dismantled, its entries in Violation Tracker are listed under Verizon.

Enron shows up in nine entries with a penalty total of $446 million, the largest of which was a 2006 agreement with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission giving the agency a $400 million claim in the company’s bankruptcy proceeding stemming from Enron’s misconduct during the 2000-2001 Western energy crisis.

We also list Arthur Andersen, which had served as Enron’s auditor and was convicted of obstruction of justice for shredding documents relating to that client. The conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court (and thus is not listed in Violation Tracker) but the firm never recovered from the scandal. We list a $7 million penalty imposed on Andersen by the SEC in 2002 in connection with its audits of Waste Management in the 1990s.

The corporate scandals of the early 2000s shook up the country and in some ways prompted even more aggressive remedial actions than are seen with more recent cases. There were many more criminal prosecutions of individual executives than occurred with the cases stemming from the financial meltdown, though the dollar amounts of penalties have grown larger.

One thing that has not changed is the persistence of wrongdoing by so many large corporations.

Note: The Violation Tracker expansion will officially launch on September 19.  

Federal Watchdog Agencies Still On Guard

Donald Trump likes to give the impression that he has made great strides in dismantling regulation. While there is no doubt that his administration and Republican allies in Congress are targeting many important safeguards for consumers and workers, the good news is that those protections in many respects are still alive and well.

This conclusion emerges from the data I have been collecting for an update of Violation Tracker that will be posted later this month. As a preview of that update, here are some examples of federal agencies that are still vigorously pursuing their mission of protecting the public.

Federal Trade Commission. In June the FTC, with the help of the Justice Department, prevailed in litigation against Dish Network over millions of illegal sales calls made to consumers in violation of Do Not Call regulations. The satellite TV provider was hit with $280 million in penalties.

Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA is a regulatory entity as well as a law enforcement agency. In July it announced that Mallinckrodt, one of the largest manufacturers of generic oxycodone, had agreed to pay $35 million to settle allegations that it violated the Controlled Substances Act by failing to detect and report suspicious bulk orders of the drug.

Federal Reserve. The Fed continues to take action against both domestic and foreign banks that fail to exercise adequate controls over their foreign exchange trading, in the wake of a series of scandals about manipulation of that market. The Fed imposed a fine of $136 million on Germany’s Deutsche Bank and $246 million on France’s BNP Paribas.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Last month the beleaguered CFPB ordered American Express to pay $95 million in redress to cardholders in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands for discriminatory practices against certain consumers with Spanish-language preferences.

Securities and Exchange Commission. In May the SEC announced that Barclays Capital would pay $97 million in reimbursements to customers who had been overcharged on mutual fund fees.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC announced that the Texas Roadhouse restaurant chain would pay $12 million to settle allegations that it discriminated against older employees by denying them front-of-the-house positions such as hosts, servers and bartenders.

Justice Department Antitrust Division. The DOJ announced that Nichicon Corporation would pay $42 million to resolve criminal price-fixing charges involving electrolytic capacitors.

Federal agencies are also finishing up cases dating back to the financial meltdown. For example, in July the Federal Housing Finance Agency said that it had reached a settlement under which the Royal Bank of Scotland will pay $5.5 billion to settle litigation relating to the sale of toxic securities to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And the National Credit Union Administration said that UBS would pay $445 million to resolve a similar case.

It remains to be seen whether federal watchdogs can continue to pursue these kinds of cases, but for now they are not letting talk of deregulation prevent them from doing their job.

Note: The new version of Violation Tracker will also include an additional ten years of coverage back to 2000.

Should Taxpayers Foot the Bill for Rebuilding the Gulf Coast’s Petrochemical Industry?

Much of the Gulf region remains flooded, people are still being rescued, and the full magnitude of the damage is not yet known. But soon the center of attention will be the rebuilding effort and how to pay for it.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is talking about the need for a federal aid package well in excess of $100 billion. Whatever the amount turns out to be, the critical issue will be how the money is distributed.

It’s already clear that the petrochemical facilities clustered in southeastern Texas have been hard hit by the flooding, and there will no doubt be calls to use both federal and state financial resources to help repair these plants.

While there should be no hesitation about using public funds to help the people of the Gulf rebuild their lives, we shouldn’t automatically do the same for the petro giants.

The first reason is that these companies can well afford to rebuild on their own dime. Exxon Mobil, which owns the giant refinery in Baytown, earned more than $130 billion in profits during the past five years. The Motiva refinery in Port Arthur, another massive facility, is owned by Aramco, which in turn is owned by the fabulously wealthy government of Saudi Arabia.

Second, taxpayers made enormous financial contributions to the construction and operation of these facilities. As shown in Subsidy Tracker, the Motiva refinery was awarded a $257 million state and local subsidy package in 2006 to help underwrite its expansion. Earlier this year, Exxon and SABIC, another Saudi company, were granted a $460 million package to jointly build a petrochemical plant near Corpus Christi.

Apart from being subsidized, many of the Gulf region’s petrochemical plants have horrible compliance records regarding toxic emissions and worker safety. The most notorious example is the refinery in Texas City between Houston and Galveston that was previously owned by BP and subsequently sold to Marathon Petroleum. In the wake of a 2005 explosion at the facility that killed 15 workers, BP was fined a then record amount of $21 million by OSHA for a pattern of egregious safety violations in Texas City. The company failed to make the necessary corrections and was later hit with an even larger penalty. BP also had to pay nearly $180 million to settle a federal environmental case involving the refinery.

As shown in Violation Tracker, in 2013 Shell Oil had to pay more than $117 million to resolve Clean Air Act violations at its Deer Park refinery outside Houston. The chemical plant in Crosby, Texas owned by the French company Arkema, where flooding has caused explosions, was fined $107,918 earlier this year by OSHA for serious safety violations (company later negotiated a reduction down to $91,724).

Providing more subsidies for these facilities would in effect negate the impact of the penalties the corporations paid for their negligence.

Finally, there is the difficult question of whether all these facilities should be rebuilt at all, especially if taxpayer funds are involved. The Gulf refineries play a significant role in an energy system that exacerbates the climate crisis, which likely contributed to the intensity of Harvey. We may not be free of fossil fuels yet, but does it make sense to use public resources to prolong the life of facilities linked to extreme weather events that threaten our future?

Corporate America Doesn’t Qualify for Moral Leadership Either

It may turn out that Donald Trump’s greatest contribution to American business is allowing the chief executives of tainted corporations to take a morally superior posture toward a presidency that seems to be completely devoid of principle. Their brands are boosted as his becomes increasingly toxic.

It is a good thing that big business is taking steps to separate itself from Trump. The collapse of the two advisory councils is not only a rebuke to Trump’s offensive comments on the events in Charlottesville but also an overdue retreat from entities that were set up mainly to foster the illusion that this administration is taking serious steps to reform the economy.

Yet it is dismaying that the moral vacuum created by Trump is being filled by the likes of Walmart chief executive Douglas McMillon, who got himself featured on the front page of the New York Times for a statement criticizing Trump.

For years the giant retailer was a national symbol of discriminatory practices. In 2009 it had to pay $17.5 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that it discriminated against African-Americans in the recruitment and hiring of truck drivers. The company was also widely accusing of gender discrimination. In 2010 the company was required to pay $11.7 million to settle a case brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and it was facing potential damages in the billions from a class action suit brought on behalf of more than 1 million female employees until the Supreme Court came to its rescue and threw out the case for what amounted to technical reasons.

In addition to discrimination, Walmart has been at the center of countless controversies involved wage theft, union-busting, tax avoidance, bribery and much more.

After Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier led the way among business critics of Trump’s embrace of white nationalism, the president struck back with a tweet referring to “ripoff drug prices.” While Trump was just being vindictive, it’s true that Merck’s reputation is far from untarnished.

In 2011 the drugmaker agreed to pay a $321 million criminal fine and a $628 million civil settlement to resolve allegations that it illegally promoted and marketed the painkiller Vioxx. This came after Merck had to remove the drug from the market in the wake of reports that the company for years covered up evidence of serious safety issues surrounding its blockbuster product. This is just one of a long list of its cases involving illegal marketing, overbilling, false claims and anti-competitive practices.

Another of the CEOs who spoke out in response to Trump’s comments was JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon. Earlier this year, the bank had to pay $53 million to settle a case brought by the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan accusing it of engaging in discrimination on the basis of race and national origin in its mortgage business.

JPMorgan Chase was one of the parties that helped bring about the financial collapse of a decade ago, and in 2013 it agreed to a $13 billion settlement of federal and state allegations relating to the packaging and sale of toxic mortgage-backed securities.

In 2015 JPMorgan had to pay a $550 million criminal fine to resolve federal charges that it and other large banks conspired to manipulate foreign exchange markets. There are many more entries in the corporate rap sheet of this company, which since the beginning of 2010 has had to pay out more than $28 billion in fines and settlements.

It would be difficult to find any members of the disbanded advisory councils whose companies have not engaged in serious misconduct of one sort or another.

Such is the peril of looking for paradigms of virtue in the business world. Corporate executives should, along with many others, speak out against Trump’s reprehensible comments, but they cannot lay claim to moral leadership.

Foreign Investment and America First

Donald Trump has built an image as a champion of workers by fomenting fear of immigrants. Get rid of the foreign-born, he vows, and native workers will prosper.

What’s odd is that this misguided notion is coupled with an embrace of foreign corporations. The administration’s America First economic policy relies to a substantial degree on promoting investment from abroad.

Many of Trump’s supposed job creation achievements have involved Asian companies. Soon after the election Trump claimed that Japan’s SoftBank had promised to invest $50 billion in the United States and create 50,000 jobs. Soon thereafter, Trump and Chinese mogul Jack Ma vowed that the latter’s Alibaba e-commerce empire would create 1 million U.S. jobs. In June, Samsung said it would open an appliance plant in South Carolina.

More recently, Japanese automakers Toyota and Mazda said they would jointly build a $1.6 billion U.S. assembly plant with 4,000 jobs. With the blessing of the White House, Taiwan’s Foxconn announced plans for a $10 billion flat-screen plant in Wisconsin (probably in the Congressional district of Speaker Paul Ryan) that would purportedly employ up to 13,000 people. Foxconn is reported to be considering another plant in Michigan.

While these announcements are presented as a boon to American workers, there are reasons to be cautious. Companies such as Foxconn have made big promises in the U.S. before and failed to deliver. It and SoftBank and Alibaba may be simply currying favor with Trump and will be unable to make good on their extravagant job-creation projections. Their main aim may be to discourage some of Trump’s more aggressive protectionist tendencies.

And even if Foxconn’s projects do materialize this time, there are questions about the quality of the jobs it may create. Foxconn has a long reputation for abusive labor practices in China, where it has been a leading contractor for Apple.

Concerns about the U.S. labor practices of foreign companies are not just a matter of conjecture. In fact, while Foxconn’s plans have been all over the news, less coverage was given to what happened at the Nissan assembly plant in Canton, Mississippi: an organizing drive by the United Auto Workers was soundly defeated, with the union blaming the outcome on an aggressive management campaign of scare tactics, intimidation and misinformation.

What happened in Canton is nothing new. For the past three decades, Asian and European automakers have been opening U.S. assembly plants, focusing on states with low union density and a political climate hostile to labor organizing. Taking advantage of their non-union status, they have made excessive use of contingent labor and weakened the ability of workers to act collectively to improve their conditions.

Trump, of course, launched no tweet storms against Nissan and expressed no support for the workers in Canton. On the contrary, for a supposedly populist president, Trump has promoted a series of anti-worker policies. These include moves to shift the National Labor Relations Board in a pro-employer direction, reverse the overtime pay reforms adopted by the Obama Labor Department and weaken workplace safety and health rules.

In Trump’s worldview, workers are supposed to express solidarity not with each other but rather with their employers and their President. That’s a strange sort of populism.

Pitting Jobs Against the Environment Again

Jobs versus the environment: The notion that the interests of workers were inherently anti-ecological was widely held in the 1980s. Much of the world now accepts that employment and environmental protection can go hand in hand, but the Trump Administration is trying hard to turn back the clock. Dismantling safeguards is presented as the key to job creation.

That same misguided approach can be seen in the terms of the deal that Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker is offering the Taiwanese electronics firm Foxconn in exchange for a commitment to build a $10 billion flat-screen plant that will supposedly create up to 13,000 jobs.

The plan — which Walker announced at the White House along with Trump, Vice President Pence and  Speaker Paul Ryan, whose district is expected to be the site of the facility — is generating a great deal of controversy in Wisconsin over the $3 billion subsidy package the governor wants to offer the company.

Yet those special tax breaks are not the only incentive being dangled in front of Foxconn. The draft bill being considered by the state legislature would also free the company from having to file an environmental impact statement and exempt it from a variety of state environmental rules. It would also ease regulations for utilities that build facilities inside the special zone that would be created for Foxconn.

Environmental groups in the Badger State are sounding the alarm, but there is no indication that their concerns are having much of an impact on Walker, who has said that critics of the Foxconn deal can go “suck lemons.”

The special regulatory breaks Wisconsin has cooked up would be troubling in any project, but they are especially worrisome in this deal, given the company involved. It’s widely known that Foxconn has a lousy record on labor rights in Asia, but it also has a troubled history when it comes to the environment.

In 2011 a coalition of Chinese environmental groups published a report listing Foxconn as one of several Apple contractors whose operations were causing serious environmental damage. Two years later, the watchdogs released a film with footage they said showed Foxconn releasing water with high levels of heavy metals into a river feeding Shanghai’s Huangpu River.

Foxconn was also said to be lax when it came to workplace safety. An explosion at its iPad plant in Chengdu that killed three workers and injured 15 others was attributed to the accumulation of combustible dust.

As with its record of abusive labor practices, Foxconn has claimed that it has cleaned up its act on environmental matters. Maybe so, but any plant of the size that the company is promising will have an enormous impact on water and air quality in Wisconsin. Rather than weakening environmental safeguards, the state should be tightening them for this project.

Walker, who has a terrible track record on environmental issues, may be treating the Foxconn deal as an experiment in deregulation. Letting Walker — and by extension Trump, Pence and Ryan — use the Foxconn deal to bring back the bad old days of jobs-versus-the-environment would do no one any good.