Abus. Fundamental evangelical Christians who think women’s rights are optional, used forced labor from concentration camps during WW2.
The company that makes locks?
Yup, that one. EDIT: also other stuff like bike helmets; they’ve acquired a range of other companies to broaden their portfolio. But yeah, I would say they’re best known for locks.
Pharmaceutical company Bayer. Sold HIV infected blood to poorer countries because they didn’t want to lose the investment they had in the blood.
Basically the blood was tested, found out it was HIV contaminated, went to a part of the world where they didn’t test as well. Messed with the results of the tests, and infected thousands of people with it, and eventually AIDS. All because the financial loss they would have taken from destroying the blood was considered too much.
I think the question already contains a sort of ideological trap: it assumes that a specific company can be uniquely evil, as if morality were some trait that varies between company to company.
I’m sure everyone’s heard this before:
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
It’s not just a slogan. It gives us insight into the very structure of capitalism. That doesn’t mean every individual act is equally bad, but the system demands a sort of baseline complicity.
CEOs and executives are legally required to maximize shareholder profits. Not just encouraged— legally obligated. So when Coca-Cola, for example, hires paramilitary death squads to kill labor leaders in Colombia, it’s not because it is uniquely monstrous. Replace Coca-Cola with Pepsi, or Nestle, or Amazon, or Raytheon… whatever. The logic of the system would produce the same result. If I gave the same chess position to 30 different Grandmasters… if there is a best move they will all see it and choose that best move.
Think of an ant colony. An ant colony doesn’t decide to be cruel; it expands, consumes, protects its territory, destroys threats. Is it evil when some colony wipes out another for resources? A colony committing what we could term ant genocide? No it’s not. The colony is simply acting in its nature. Much like a slime mold would expand in a radius looking for food in a petri dish.
Large corporations are like ant colonies. Complex emergent behavior resulting from a large number of individual units acting by a set of rules. The intelligence or perspective of the individual does not actually matter for the organism as a whole. As long as the individual units follow a set of rules it creates a sort of “hive-mind” pseudo-intelligence that acts in its own interests and has an almost Darwinist natural selection process.
So this is all to say that I reject the question. I don’t believe in uniquely evil companies. The horror is precisely that they’re all, in a sense, innocent. They act not out of hatred or sadism or cruelty, but because the system itself has carved out the pathways where the ball inevitably rolls down the hill following the path of least resistance.
I think we’d compile a shorter list if we tried to name wholesome, respectable companies.
Nah, we have loads of great companies here in the UK.
Didn’t the UK develop the first large evil corporation?
It sure did!
among more brutality around the world, yes
The POM Wonderful company
Along with Fiji Water and Teleflora.
Basically anything touched by Stewart Resnick, the wealthiest American “farmer” and water pirate.
All restaurants
Herbalife
LuLaRoe is up there as well with the life-ruining debt. Then their clothes are so bad that they are literal pollution.
(post from the ceo, who is honestly one of the most evil people in the world)
Anduril, Palmer Luckey’s foray into military hardware and an ever-present surveillance state. Some of the first hardware they rolled out were surveillance towers for the US border patrol.
So Mark Zuckerberg officially isn’t the only giant pile of shit connected to Oculus, the original owner is a fucking pile of shit, too.
Trader Joe’s is also thought of by many people as “liberal” and a “good company.” Go learn about the conditions in their warehouses and you’ll find out that’s not true at all. I had a friend who worked TJ’s warehouse in Lacey, WA and all he had was fucking horror stories and how the warehouse was owned and run by MAGA fucks.
So yeah fuck Trader Joe’s.
Anduril, Palmer Luckey’s foray into military hardware and an ever-present surveillance state. Some of the first hardware they rolled out were surveillance towers for the US border patrol.
Same vibe as Palantir by Peter Thiel, big data analytics platform used by many defense/security organizations. Far right pseudo-libertarians love abusing Tolkien’s lore, sadly.
Stopped shopping at Trader Joe’s after their anti union shenanigans. Shame because we love their food
I have found a small amount of Trader Joe’s food labelled under different brand names at WinCo. Same companies producing the food, just boxed and bagged with a different name.
To be clear, WinCo also has it’s own issues.
That’s a shame about Brave, does anyone have an reccomendations for another browser that reduces digital fingerprinting in a similar way?
Let’s keep that surveillance state alive because nothing screams democracy like never trusting anyone!
Like the other comment said, I would love to know some morally appropriate companies, that way I can choose to use them. Boycotting is nice but if you lack the knowledge of where to shop then it’s a fruitless effort
Disney decided to keep their dei policies so that’s something.
But they also cut a trans story to avoid controversy and probably other shit things I cant remember atm. So take what you will I guess
Disney didn’t. Their shareholders did.
Isn’t that the same company which refused to pay a guy compensation for choking because he used a disney+ free trial and also completely ruined copyright law
Yeah. That’s one of the shitty things I forgot
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Valid thing to want, but I get the feeling this thread is about alerting people to horrible companies they might not realize are horrible… like my comment about Trader Joe’s.
There are large companies, many of them in Germany, who are owned by foundations. Perhaps the best known is Bosch, which is almost entirely owned by a charitable foundation. Another very large one is ZF Friedrichshaven, owned by the Zeppelin Foundation. They don’t do any consumer products, but are one of the world’s largest players in the automotive industry.
Is that you, Luigi?
I use good on you app to find ethical, bio brands. It’s hard to find good companies, but they do exist.
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I haven’t heard of this app, will defo check it out
For the big makers of pseudo-science based bullshit medicine, see Weleda (naturopathy, anthroposophy) and Boiron (homeopathy).
Vale do Rio Verde, two of their (mining waste) dams broke in Brazil, killing thousands and permanently damaging the ecosystem of a entire river
Mark all corporations off your list. Corporations don’t care about the consumer. Only your money, which supports their shareholders.
I mean, the whole “no ethical consumption under capitalism” or “all corporate ethics are fake” type stuff has plenty of truth to it, but at the same time, one does have to get any good or service not made oneself from somewhere, and corporations are made up of people with different views about what they’re personally willing to do, or how much they think taking unethical actions even is the profitable thing. So, there is still room for some businesses to be worse than others.
Ben & Jerry’s was traditionally a “good” company for example, but what killed that was them getting bought out by an evil company, Unilever. This path is the path a lot of “good” companies take when they go bad.
We had to pressure them about occupied Palestine.
To be fair, Unilever has owned Ben & Jerry’s since April 2000.
Unless you were pressuring them about that issue before April 2000, you were actually dealing with Unilever.
Which is literally my point.
Published date: 20 July 2021 14:27 BST
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_%26_Jerry's#Unilever_era
In April 2000, Ben & Jerry’s sold itself to British multinational food giant Unilever for $326 million
In 2010, Jostein Solheim, a Unilever executive from Norway, was appointed CEO.
In 2018, Matthew McCarthy, previously a Unilever executive, was appointed CEO, replacing Solheim.
You’re missing the point here. It hasn’t been in control of the original people who ran the company for a long, long time. It’s literally been being run by Unilever executives.
_The brand said it would end sales in the territories
spoiler-title
after years ::: of campaigning by activists allied with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign._
I think I see what you’re saying but they still owned the company.
However,
When did Ben and Jerry’s become a public company? In 1978, with $12,000, Ben & Jerry’s opened in a vacant gas station. The first franchise followed in 1981, distribution outside Vermont began in 1983, and the company went public in 1984.
So maybe that’s the biggest issue.
Businesses exist for 1 reason: To make money.
Save the Children might have an objection to that.
Are they a business?
Yes, non-profits are still a type of “business” and many of them absolutely do not help their supposed causes as much as they portray. Susan G. Komen Foundation went from a darling of the non-profit world to people wondering whether they really helped women at all.
I think they’re using Save the Children as an example because ostensibly 74% of their revenue actually goes directly to aiding people, and 26% is employee compensation, advertising, and so on.
From under-staffing, to threatening managers to do more with less, to refusing to allow resources for security. They treat people like shit, their customers like shit, and try to undercut their suppliers which leads to half ass quality goods.
Isn’t this the entire “dollar store” industry? My understanding was that these kinds of thing were the entire reason that business model was profitable. Or does this company do it worse than say dollar general or something does?
Last Week Tonight did a story about dollar stores:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p4QGOHahiVM
Yeah, they’re as bad as you’d expect.
Its worse than you would think…
Not the video I was looking for but it proves the point…
