The corporate crime par excellence

The disaster in Bhopal is a crime of Globalisation, as it was a direct consequence of double standards in safety, the routine violation of worker's rights, a callous disregard for the lives of people from poor, marginalised communities and a calculus of environmental harm, all framed within an inequal yet complicit relationship between government and big business.

Bhopal epitomizes the utter failure of international agencies to meet the challenges of a globalized world, where the protection of health, human rights and the environment depends upon the possibility of holding corporations fully accountable for their crimes.

Because it was a technological disaster, and because nobody has yet been held accountable, Bhopal has never ended. Union Carbide and Dow have heaped crime upon crime. People die each day from the effects of still unidentified gases, families are made destitute by gas-related incapacity and pathetically inadequate compensation and a new generation is being poisoned by toxic waste left behind by the company.

The history of Bhopal marks a depressing catalogue of injustices suffered by the powerless at the hands of the most powerful. But this is not the whole story.

In the face of extreme poverty, chronic illness, polluted water, official indifference and overwhelming corporate power, the survivors of Bhopal not only refuse to give up, they have led an unbending fight for justice and for health. Not only is this fight being won, it has the potential to realise a safer and healthier world for everybody.

“[Businesspeople] had long dreamed, as the chairman of Dow Chemical once put it, ‘of buying an island owned by no nation and of establishing the world headquarters of the Dow company on the truly neutral ground of such an island, beholden to no nation or society’…” 'The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea', John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge

A Short History Of Bhopal

Bhopal began as a classic instance of corporate double-standards: Union Carbide was obliged to install state-of-the-art technology in Bhopal, but instead used inferior and unproven equipment and employed different operating procedures and maintenance and safety standards to those used in its US 'sister-plant'. The motive was not simply profit, but also control: the company saved $8 million, and through this deliberate under-investment managed to retain a majority share of its Indian subsidiary.

Bhopal continued as a failure of government regulation, when Carbide were allowed to site this ultra-hazardous and inherently flawed chemical facility less than two miles from the centre of a city of 800,000 people. Bhopal progressed as a failure of official monitoring, as a succession of local inspectors passed the plant fit for production.

Bhopal became an occupational health issue, as routine mis-management along with a series of safety failures resulted in workers at the factory being regularly poisoned.

Bhopal developed into a labour rights issue. Worker's unions petitioned factory management, local communities, local and national officials and even Carbide management in the US about the dangers at the Bhopal plant: the result was suppression of the union, the sacking of three leaders and the continued de-skilling and downsizing of staffing levels under a savage cost-cutting programme orchestrated by the US parent.

Bhopal evolved into a community 'right-to-know' issue. Carbide management declined to inform local communities about the hazards in the plant or how to protect themselves and had no emergency planning or evacuation plan. The result was thousands of avoidable deaths. As a consequence of Bhopal, 'right-to-know' legislation was enacted in the US and elsewhere.

Following the massacre, Bhopal became a test case for corporate accountability. While the world anticipated an exemplary punishment for Carbide - such as ownership of the
$10 billion corporation's assets being transferred to the survivors - US courts allowed Carbide to take the case
to India, far away from it's asset base.

There, the company used a strategy of delay, denial and disinformation. It contested the legitimacy of courts it had asked to be tried before. It denied it was a multinational. It claimed the gas was not ultra-hazardous. It blamed an unnamed saboteur. It appealed court orders for humanitarian relief, while professing its concern for the victims.

The strategy worked. Once Union Carbide and the
government of India had hatched an out-of-court
settlement, hazardous enterprises everywhere had the go-ahead to carry on business as usual, safe in the
knowledge that the price for industrial massacre had been
set at just 48 cents a share.

The unimaginable suffering of thousands became a personal triumph for corporate law firms and the crisis management
and public relations industries, turning Bhopal into a critical case study for multinational corporations.