Lesson Plan for the Documentary Film: The Corporation

ACTIVITIES:

The following: Material for the Teacher also includes additional questionnaires to be used with the students to practise vocabulary and ensure their better understanding of the documentary.

A. BEFORE WATCHING THE FILM

1.  Ask students if they know what a corporation is. Providing examples can help them with their reply.  (Brief talk with the class)

What is a Corporation?

It is a very large usually diversified firm that meets certain legal requirements to be recognized as having a legal existence, as an entity, it is separate and distinct from its owners. Corporations are owned by their stockholders (shareholders) who share in profits and losses generated through the firm's operations, and have three distinct characteristics 

(1) Legal existence: a firm can (like a person) buy, sell, own, enter into a contract, and sue other persons and firms, and be sued by them. It can do good and be rewarded, and can commit offence and be punished.

(2) Limited liability: a firm and its owners are limited in their liability to the creditors and other obligors only up to the resources of the firm.

(3) Continuity of existence: a firm can live beyond the life spans and capacity of its owners, because its ownership can be transferred through a sale or gift  of shares.

2.  Divide the students into six teams. Allocate one questionnaire to each group. There are six questionnaires:

1.THE NATURE OF THE CORPORATION
2.BRANDING AND MARKETING TO KIDS
3.ETHICS AND VALUES & SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
4.CORPORATIONS AND GOVERNMENT. REGULATION & DEMOCRACY
5.LABOUR
6.SELLING THE COMMONS

CLICK HERE to see questionnaires

3.  Tell students to read the questions and write useful notes in order to be able to answer them while they are watching the film.

B. WATCH THE FILM

1.  Give each group some copies of the file “Who is Who” for them to know who the speakers in the documentary are.

"The Corporation" Documentary Film

The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary examines the modern-day corporation. Bakan wrote the book: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, during the filming of the documentary.

The film was nominated for over 26 international awards, and won the World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, 2004, along with a Special Jury Award at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2003 and 2004.

Provoking, witty, stylish and sweepingly informative, THE CORPORATION explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time. Part film and part movement, The Corporation is transforming audiences and dazzling critics with its insightful and compelling analysis. Taking its status as a legal "person" to the logical conclusion, the film puts the corporation on the psychiatrist's couch to ask "What kind of person is it?" The Corporation includes interviews with 40 corporate insiders and critics - including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Milton Friedman, Howard Zinn, Vandana Shiva and Michael Moore - plus true confessions, case studies and strategies for change.

Teaching Resources: CLICK HERE to see Lesson Plan on the Documentary Film

No to a World of Enslaved and Unemployed People

Iqbal Masih: a Pakistani child murdered on 16 April for fighting against child slavery.

What are the ILO, UNICEF or trade unions doing to put an end to this crime?

Permanent campaign for Justice in North-South Relations, against the causes of hunger, unemployment and child slavery

16 April: International Day  against Child Slavery

400 million child slaves: 

a Political and Trade Union Crime
Communiqué

Every day we can find products made by enslaved children in our homes, in our streets, in shopping malls, in our consumption. At present, millions of children breath the smoke of rubbish landfills, they risk their lives as pearl divers, they work in the mines to get the minerals for our cosmetics, for new technologies, they are kidnapped to become child soldiers, they live amidst bullets and rapes in the streets, they are used for the trade in human organs, in brothels, in sweatshop,... Children who have been deprived of their childhood and education. Children who are subjugated, enslaved, humiliated.

There are more slaves at present than at any other time in history. Children are forced to participate in the international planning of work, resulting from a perverse economic system. This world crime, far from disappearing, is on the rise in number and cruelty. Let us not be carried away by a manipulated language: they are child slaves, they are not child workers!

When we talk about an economic crisis in international forums and in the media, no one says that this crisis will be paid by the poor, and especially by the children who will be aborted or subjected to more bondage.

The causes of this crime have a clear economic dimension: a radically unfair international economic system, tailored to the requirements of large multinational companies (including the Spanish ZARA and El Corte Ingles, and of a global financial system seeking to maximize profits at all costs and having no qualms about using child slave labor.

Yet, child slavery is primarily a political and trade union crime. The political system, which is supported by large international organizations (UN, UNICEF, ILO...) and by all the parties represented in Parliament, has legitimized this situation and has done nothing to put an end to this crime. All the reforms being carried out by Europe are causing more slavery and a greater growth of the informal economy, which drives millions of children out of school and into sweatshops, agricultural fields, mines and warehouses.

They Call it “Child Labour” but it is Child Slavery

NO to a World of Enslaved and
Unemployed People. Solidarity!
Justice in North-South  Relations Campaign
by Christian Cultural Movement,
Solidarity Youth Path and SAIn Party

The Bolivian President Evo Morales, supposed champion of “21st Century Socialism”, has declared himself partly supportive of “child labour”. This debate is not new. Associations of “child labourers” demand “fair” conditions for jobs that have “always existed” and that are considered necessary to help to end the poverty of their families.

By saying that work helps to form a “social conscience”, the President defends a current that, instead of favouring the abolition and total eradication of child labour, proposes its regulation

Confusion is born from the very moment in which we accept the term “child labour” instead of calling it what it actually is: exploitation and child slavery. In Bolivia, there are over 850,000 children between the ages of 5 and 14 who are exploited in this way. A large part of the blame for this confusion lies with international organisations, like the ILO, which itself doesn’t stop talking about “child labour” and the “worst forms of child labour”. It is part of the bureaucratic and materialist vision that oozes from each speech given by organisations that have always served to defend the ruthlessness and criminality of capitalist imperialism that is always behind their decisions. Morales’ comments about “child labour” represent this contradiction.

Work in itself is not reprehensible. We have always believed that children should “work” on what they ought to: playing and developing themselves. But each child forced to work to satisfy their most basic needs, and those of their families, is condemned to forced labour. And this is often the result of the lack of job opportunities for their parents, or the lack of a dignified wage in the jobs they have that would allow them to escape poverty. Over sixty percent of the world’s adult workers live in such a situation, and in Bolivia it represents seventy percent of adult workers. While this situation persists, so will the exploitation of children in the labour market – perpetuating in this way the disgusting and criminal economic system of capitalism.

Publishing house of Self-management magazine

Extracted from: www.solidaridad.net