23 January, 2012
With on-line voting about to end at midnight on 26 January, the United Steelworkers (USW) has issued a last-minute alert for global trade unionists to make the Brazilian mining company Vale the shameful recipient of the 2012 Public Eye Award, as bestowed by a Swiss NGO, the Berne Declaration, and Greenpeace.
Going into the final week’s balloting, Vale trails the Japanese electric energy company TEPCO by less than 300 votes – 17,276 votes for TEPCO, 16,996 for Vale.
Visit the Public Eye website here to cast your ballot, and push Vale into the number one spot.
In early January, the two organisations launched this year’s version of the contest, with six multinationals judged as being the worst violators of environmental stewardship and human rights abuses. Besides TEPCO and Vale, the other nominees are the US mining company Freeport-McMoRan, Korean electronics manufacturer Samsung, Swiss chemicals company Syngenta, and the British bank Barclays.
The winner will be announced at a press conference on 27 January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Vale, of course, besides heaping environmental damage the world over, extracted more than just minerals from the earth in recent years; it extracted deep and unnecessary economic concessions from USW members in 2009-10 strikes in Canada.