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 with40 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.
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.
NO to a World of Enslaved and Unemployed People. Solidarity! Justice in North-South Relations Campaign
byChristian 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.
According to the 1900 U.S. Census, at the turn of the
century in states like Alabama, the official percentage of male child slavery was close
to 60%. Moreover, a contemporary New York Times article reported that due
to deliberate employer underestimation, the number of child “workers” was most
likely between 2 and 3 million. As
the children of the wealthy were receiving ever more education, with many,
consequently, taking until twenty-six and twenty-eight to enter into their
professions, the children of the working class were increasingly being sought
as cheap labor for sweatshops. In 1903, Mary
Harris “Mother” Jones, a prominent socialist and labor organizer, traveled
to Kensington, a neighborhood in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. At the time, between 75,000
and 125,000 textile workers were striking for better pay and a fifty-five-hour
workweek. According to Mother Jones, at
least ten thousand of the strikers were children. Mother Jones was distraught by the condition of the
children she met. Some were missing fingers and thumbs, others were missing
entire hands, and many looked malnourished. Though state law prohibited
children from working before the age of twelve, the law was poorly enforced and
mothers routinely lied about the ages of their children because they were in desperate need of income and
many had husbands who had been killed or maimed in the mines. According to
these mothers, “it was a question of
starvation or perjury.” With more than 120,000
officially reported child slaves, most of whom were employed in coal mining
or manufacturing, Pennsylvania employed the most children of any state in the
nation. What’s more, at that time 1,161,524 children were officially enrolled
in Pennsylvania schools, but average daily attendance was only 847,445, leaving
314,079 children unaccounted for. But Mother Jones knew where these children
were, slaving at the mines and factories. Furthermore, one investigation
reported that the average hours of labor for children in Pennsylvania was
approximately eleven hours a day and
sixty hours a week for compensation of about $2.50 a week (equivalent to the
purchasing power of about $60 in 2010).Many children worked sixty-five hours a week, and in some towns,
children were required to work as much as fifteen hours a day, from 6 am to 9
pm, with just a half hour for lunch and a half hour for dinner. When Mother Jones inquired as to why the newspapers
neglected to report the facts about child labor in Pennsylvania, she was
informed that the employers of those children had stock in the newspapers. Her
response: “Well, I’ve got stock in these
little children and I’ll arrange a little publicity.”
On 7 July, the
65-year-old Mother Jones organized a group of nearly two hundred laborers,
including dozens of juvenile mill workers, to march to New York in order to
raise funds in support of the striking textile workers and bring attention to
the injustices of child slavery.
