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international trade union confederation
Meet the 7 Corporations Doing the Most to Undermine Democracy Worldwide
"Unless we're organized and demanding responsive governments that actually meet the needs of people, it's corporate power that's going to set the agenda," one organizer said.
Sep 23, 2024
Big Tech, Big Oil, and private equity firms are among the leading companies that profit from controlling media and technology, accelerating the climate crisis, privatizing public goods and services, and violating human and workers' rights, the International Trade Union Confederation revealed on Monday.
The ITUC has labeled seven major companies as "corporate underminers of democracy" that lobby against government attempts to hold them accountable and are headed by super-rich individuals who fund right-wing political movements and leaders.
"This is about power, who has it, and who sets the agenda," Todd Brogan, director of campaigns and organizing at the ITUC, toldThe Guardian. "We know as trade unionists that unless we're organized, the boss sets the agenda in the workplace, and we know as citizens in our countries that unless we're organized and demanding responsive governments that actually meet the needs of people, it's corporate power that's going to set the agenda."
The "corporate underminers of democracy" are:
- Amazon.com, Inc.
- Blackstone Group
- ExxonMobil
- Glencore
- Meta
- Tesla
- The Vanguard Group
ITUC chose the seven companies based on preexisting reporting and research, as well as talks with allied groups like the Council of Global Unions and the Reactionary International Research Consortium. The seven companies were "emblematic" of a broader trend, and the confederation said it would continue to add "market-leading" companies to the list.
"While these seven corporations are among the most egregious underminers of democracy, they are hardly alone," ITUC said. "Whether state-owned enterprises in China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia; private sector military contractors; or regulation-busting tech startups, the ITUC and its partners will continue to identify and track corporate underminers of democracy and their links to the far-right."
Amazon topped the list due to its "union busting and low wages on multiple continents, monopoly in e-commerce, egregious carbon emissions through its AWS data centers, corporate tax evasion, and lobbying at national and international level," ITUC wrote.
In the U.S., for example, Amazon has responded to attempts to hold it accountable for labor violations by challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board. While its founder Jeff Bezos voices liberal opinions, Amazon's political donations have advanced the right by challenging women's rights and antitrust efforts.
"There is another force, one that is unelected and seeks to dominate global affairs."
Blackstone is the world's largest private equity firm and private real-estate owner whose CEO, Stephen Schwarzman, has given to right-wing politicians including former U.S. President Donald Trump's 2024 reelection campaign. It funds fossil fuel projects and the destruction of the Amazon and profited from speculating on the housing market after the 2008 financial crash.
The United Nations special papporteur on housing said the company used "its significant resources and political leverage to undermine domestic laws and policies that would in fact improve access to adequate housing."
ExxonMobil made the list largely for its history of funding climate denial and its ongoing lobbying against needed environmental regulations.
"Perhaps the greatest example of Exxon's disinterest in democratic deliberation was its corporate commitment of nearly four decades to conceal from the public its own internal evidence that climate change was real, accelerating, and driven by fossil fuel use while simultaneously financing far-right think tanks in the U.S. and Europe to inject climate scepticism and denialism into the public discourse," ITUC wrote.
Glencore is the world's largest commodities trader and the largest mining company when judged by revenue. Several civil society and Indigenous rights groups have launched campaigns against it over its anti-democratic policies. It has allegedly funded right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia and anti-protest vigilantes in Peru.
"The company's undermining of democracy is not in dispute, as it has in recent years pled guilty to committing bribery, corruption, and market manipulation in countries as varied as Venezuela, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Cote d'Ivoire, Nigeria, and South Sudan," ITUC said.
As the world's largest social media company, Meta's platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram have roughly as many users as everyone expected to vote in 2024 worldwide—almost 4 billion. Yet there are concerns about what its impact on those elections will be, as right-wing groups from the U.S. to Germany to India have used Facebook to recruit new members and target marginalized groups.
"Meta continues to aid right-wing political interests in weaponizing its algorithms to spread hate-filled propaganda around the world," ITUC wrote. "Increasingly, it has been engaged in dodging national regulation through the deployment of targeted lobbying campaigns."
Tesla made the list for its "belligerent" anti-union stance, as well as the vocal anti-worker and right-wing politics of its CEO, Elon Musk. Of Musk, ITUC observed:
As owner of the social networking platform X (formerly Twitter), he responded to one user's allegations about a coup in Bolivia–a country with lithium reserves considered highly valuable for electric vehicle manufacturers like Tesla–by saying, "We will coup whoever we want. Deal with it!" He has committed to donating $45 million per month to a political action committee to support the reelection campaign of Donald Trump, and sought to build close relationships with other far-right leaders, including Argentina's Javier Milei and India's Narendra Modi. Musk has also re-platformed and clearly expressed his support of white nationalist, antisemitic, and anti-LGBTQ+ accounts since taking ownership of X.
No. 7 on the list is The Vanguard Group, an institutional investor that funds many of the other companies on the list, including with billions in the stock held by workers' retirement plans.
"Effectively, Vanguard uses the deferred wages of workers to lend capital to the self-same companies complicit in undermining democracy at work and in societies globally," ITUC wrote.
ITUC is exposing these companies in part to advance its agenda for a "New Social Contract" that would ensure "a world where the economy serves humanity, rights are protected, and the planet is preserved for future generations."
It and other workers' organizations plan to push this agenda at international gatherings like the U.N. General Assembly and Summit of the Future in New York this week as well as the COP29 climate conference in Azerbaijan in November. Yet part of advancing this agenda means raising awareness about the opposition.
"There is another force, one that is unelected and seeks to dominate global affairs. It pushes a competing vision for the world that maintains inequalities and impunity for bad-faith actors, finances far-right political operatives, and values private profit over public and planetary good," ITUC wrote. "That force is corporate power."
However, Brogan told The Guardian that labor groups, when organized across borders, could fight back.
"Now is the time for international and multi-sectoral strategies, because these are, in many cases, multinational corporations that are more powerful than states, and they have no democratic accountability whatsoever, except for workers organized," Brogan said.
To that end, ITUC is gathering signatures for a petition for a global treaty holding corporate power in check.
"For international institutions like the United Nations to reflect the democratic will of workers, they must be willing to hold these corporate underminers of democracy accountable," the petition reads. "That is why we are calling on you to support a robust binding international treaty on business and human rights, one that addresses the impact of transnational corporations on the human rights of millions of working people."
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Stop the Attack on Democracy and Workers’ Rights
Across the world, in both high- and low-income countries, the 2023 Global Rights Index finds that governments have cracked down on the right to negotiate wage rises collectively and take strike action.
Jul 06, 2023
Before you can set out the solution to a problem, you need to know its scale. When it comes to attacks on workers’ rights, the 10th edition of the Global Rights Index published by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) shows clearly that the problem is big—and getting bigger. But the solution is also clear, embodied in a new social contract which can build a better world for working people.
The 2023 index provides shocking evidence that the foundations of democracy are under attack, with a clear link between the vindication of workers’ rights and the strength of any democracy. The erosion of one, conversely, amounts to degradation of the other.
No Longer a Bastion
Europe has long considered itself a bastion of democracy and workers’ rights. Its overall rating since the first index has however crumbled, from 1.84 in 2014 to 2.56 in 2023. (One is the best rating, five-plus the worst.) In the criteria of the index, this amounts to somewhere between repeated and regular violations of rights.
Workers in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Turkey face surveillance, imprisonment, and brutality from regimes that share autocratic traits. Working people even in the Netherlands and Belgium have seen a tightening of restrictions and refusal by governments and employers to negotiate with trade-union representatives.
In France, lawful protests demanding dialogue with trade unions on an alternative to the pensions reform pushed by the president, Emmanuel Macron, have met vicious police beatings, indiscriminate arrests, and tear gas. In the United Kingdom, union-busting, attempts to introduce legislation curtailing the right to strike and protest, and violations of collective-bargaining agreements have become endemic and led to the country’s rating dropping to four—systematic violations of rights.
Cracking Down
Across the world, in both high- and low-income countries, even though working people have faced a historic cost-of-living crisis and spiralling inflation driven by corporate greed, governments have cracked down on the right to negotiate wage rises collectively and take strike action.
According to the 2023 index, nine out of 10 countries violate the right to strike, with working people in Canada, Togo, Iran, Cambodia, and Spain facing criminal prosecution or dismissal. Eight out of 10 violate the right to collective bargaining.
A full 77% of countries exclude working people from the right to establish or join a trade union, with migrant, domestic, and temporary workers, those in the informal economy, platform workers, and workers in special economic zones denied the right to freedom of association. Burundi, Haiti, India, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates are among the countries excluding working people from union representation.
We see the line between autocracies and democracies blurring.
The right to free speech and assembly is restricted in 42% of countries, often resulting in protesting workers facing police brutality. In Iran, teachers have been arrested and beaten by the police for taking part in May Day demonstrations.
A total of 73% of countries impede the registration of unions or ban them, including Belarus, Myanmar, Hong Kong, the Central African Republic, and Guatemala. Workers have been arrested and detained in 69 countries and in 65% working people have no or restricted access to justice.
Workers have experienced violence in 44 countries. In the Asia-Pacific region, the incidence of violence against working people has risen from 43% of countries in 2022 to 48% in 2023 and from 42 to 53% in the Middle East and North Africa. Trade unionists have been killed in eight countries.
Worst for Workers
The 2023 index indicates that the 10 worst countries for working people are: Bangladesh, Belarus, Ecuador, Egypt, Eswatini, Guatemala, Myanmar, Tunisia, the Philippines, and Turkey. In Ecuador, mass protests calling for democracy and collective rights, organised by indigenous peoples’ organisations and trade unions, have been brutally repressed. In Tunisia, the president, Kais Saied, has undermined workers’ civil liberties and democratic institutions.
We see the line between autocracies and democracies blurring. When dialogue between states and citizens breaks down, when nations flirt with autocracy to pass unpopular laws, when parliaments are pushed aside and when governments deploy state forces to quell lawful resistance, then democracy is on the line and working people suffer the consequences.
To repair the fabric of our societies, to renew and establish democracy and to support working people we need a new social contract based on decent jobs, just wages, social protection, fundamental rights—including safe and secure work—and the assurance of equality and inclusion. That was the unanimous call of the ITUC’s Melbourne congress last November, and it is more crucial than ever to restore democracy, equality, and decency, and to give workers their fair share of economic growth.
Broken Trust
In many countries we see that trust in government is broken and the far right is stepping into the breach, to sow division and further threaten fundamental liberties. It is thus essential to rebuild trust and ensure our democracies are fit for purpose to meet the needs of working people and the demands of an uncertain future—a future where the climate crisis, technological change, challenges to public health, and geopolitical instability will continue to generate shocks.
Working people must be listened to and they must be at the center of government decisions. To articulate and advance this, workers’ unions in turn have never been more essential. The global trade union movement, led by the ITUC, will act in solidarity—an attack on one of us is an attack on all—and raise its voice loud and clear against any violations of workers’ rights.
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