The World Council of Churches Takes On the Corporations

On May 10, Multinational Monitor's Patricia Perkins and Matthew Rothschild interviewed Arruda while he was in Washington, D.C. on a brief visit. Arruda discussed the activities of the World Council of Churches' transnationals program. He also suggested ways for Third World countries to control multinational corporations and to break out of the economic policies that serve those companies, rather than the people of the developing world.

What has been the purpose of the World Council of Churches' program on transnational corporations?

The program has been mainly an instrument to sensitize churches about the issue of transnational corporations. In the milieu of ecumenicalism, there has been a broad ignorance about the importance of transnationals.

If churches have a social responsibility to help change the world into a more just, fair, and egalitarian place, then churches have to understand the mechanisms of economics. And nowadays, the world economy has one central agent: transnational corporations. The churches have to engage in the study of transnational corporations in order to play an active role in society.

What activities has the program carried out to "sensitize"churches to corporations?

Our work has involved not only the development of contacts, producing studies, and writing newsletters to churches around the world, but also we have organized regional conferences, which are called consultations. The purpose of those consultations was to bring together church representatives with people who are directly affected by transnationals such as workers and consumer organizations - to discuss the issue of transnationals and the church's responsibility.

Has the program been a success?

I think these years of the program have created a response, a very active response. The churches really have begun to be more active about the issue of transnational corporations. And the program on transnationals has helped exchange the experiences of action among churches that did not know what was happening in other parts of the world by other churches.

What are some of the actions affiliated churches have become involved with regarding multinationals?

The church is beginning to be concerned with supporting, with offering resources to, the people who are directly involved with transnationals.

One of the most outstanding examples would be the Brazilian archdiocese of Sao Paulo, during the metalworkers' strike in 1979 and 1980, which involved a number of transnational subsidiaries [Volkswagen, Ford, and GM - see MM, May, 19801. The archdiocese not only gave direct public support to the strike, but also when the labor court decided that the strike was illegal, the churches opened their buildings to the meetings of the workers, and the pastors, the priests, the bishops served as sort of intermediaries between the police and the workers. Workers began to have meetings inside the church: 2,000 would come in through the front door, and would meet and discuss whether to continue the strike, they would take a vote, and then they'd go through the backdoor and another 2,000 would come in. The archdiocese also tried to get business and government to begin negotiations with the workers and to be open to their demands, which were just according to the church.

There is a whole number of other types of actions that churches themselves have gotten involved in such as examining their own investment portfolios to see which corporations are acting in what can be called moral or acceptable ways so that we could remain as investors or stockholders. Also in using their power as shareholders, churches have brought into question policies of corporations operating in Southern Africa, or in Central America, and so on.

Do you see any positive role that multinational corporations play?

The transnationals that we have today can be used to some extent, under certain constraints, and under a lot of public and government pressure, in ways that benefit people. But without these constraints, the tendency is that they would be instruments of repression.

Transnationals are neither the whole problem, nor are they the whole solution. The real problem is how the whole world economic system, the free market system, is organized. The very logic, the very principle that directs business relationships is incorrect from the viewpoint of a desirable, just and participatory society, where people have a say in their own destiny, and where the economy is organized around people's needs, not around greed and capital accumulation.

I also have my conviction that transnationals have brought some benefits to the world: there is more exchange on a world basis, that is all positive; there are technological innovations which have wiped out some of the hardest and most inhuman types of jobs, that is also a positive thing. Some transnationals in some political and social contexts are favorable instruments.

But we have to see in what conditions transnational corporations operate - this is the main problem. The majority of countries in the Third World - the poor regions of the world - don't have enough leverage to deal with the largest transnational corporations in a fair way, that is, from a position of national sovereignty.

Such companies bargain by saying, "either you accept our terms, or we will go to another country." Then you have the problem of bribery, by which transnationals give money to government officials in exchange for policies which accord to the company's interests. Third, the national governments don't have any possibility of knowing what is the real power and the real capabilities of the companies with which they are dealing. So there is a totally unequal relationship.

While you were coordinating the World Council of Churches program on transnational corporations, you wrote of the need to "build transnational countervailing powers" that would impose "constraints on transnational corporations that can effectively make them act responsibly. " How is it possible to create such a counter-vailing force?

We believe that the only way for workers and others to come to a different position of power in relation to transnational corporations is if there is a growing organization not only on a local and national but also on a regional and international basis. Workers of transnational companies can only effectively fight for their own rights if they organize internationally. This is one of the most important forms of countervailing power that has to develop.

There are other countervailing powers. One of them is the national state. What happens, though, is that transnational corporations have been able to redefine the role of the national state in such a way that national states are more and more serving the interests of transnational investors. There is an interlock of interest. These countries are more interested in promoting the logic of capital accumulation than to put people as the main center of the productive economy.

What role would multinational corporations play in a development strategy designed by a progressive Third World government to serve the needs of the people?

The country would have to design a policy of gradual delinking from the transnational economic system if it was to concentrate its energies into restructuring the sectors of production which are directed to meeting the immediate basic needs of the population.

Now, where does the transnational corporation come in? It comes in at many levels. Perhaps we will find some transnationals that are already there that we will have to deal with because we cannot make a total delinkage. If that's the case, we will have to establish - as Nicaragua and Angola have - certain terms of new contracting in order that the corporations will stay there, but according to new conditions and a new type of economic relationship with the government.

The most realistic way I have seen so far for obtaining changes with transnationals has been to create situations where the company understands that there is some gain - even though it's not the highest gain - in staying and doing business with the new government. If transnationals accept that, very good. If they don't we'll have to go for others - and there are many others. In the case of Nicaragua, a very clear political line has been drawn: "We cannot do away with dependency, so let's diversify dependence in order not to be dependent on one or two monopolists." This is feasible, and the Nicaraguans have done it with some success.

What is the future of the World Council of Church's Program on Transnationals?

Well, the program has come to an end in terms of the established five-year period of life it was created for. But we have recommended that the program be continued and have asked for reinforcement of its resources so it can do a better job. Whether recommendations are going to be accepted, I don't know, but they probably will be. For me, however, the main question is not so much if it will continue, but when. I would hope very much that the central committee of the World Council decides that the program should be continued immediately.

Can you tell us what you plan to do next?

I will be working with the government of Nicaragua next month to try to develop an integrated economic system for Central America and the Caribbean. We are trying to deal with what exists, and develop plans for the gradual integration of these countries as they achieve their own autonomy. This is the first concrete alternative to the transnational model of development for the region, so it is very exciting.

But I have only one month to spend on it, because then I return to Brazil to work at IBASE (Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Affairs). I was a founder of IBASE in the beginning of 1981. We study the economic projects that the government has planned. We try to understand what policies are behind the projects and what impact the projects would have on the lives of the people living in the area. One part of our studies is to critique the projects themselves; and the second part is to propose alternatives: how could we do the same project in a way that would benefit the Brazilian people and the economy, instead of transnational corporations.

Corporate Victims "They are the labouring children of Bangkok, Singapore or Paraguay who are stripped of their childhood and their humanity; the poor children and adolescents of the Philippines, whose dignity is devoured by tourism prostitution; the women workers of Seoul, Jakarta or Taiwan who lose their sight, and often their virginity, in microprocessor firms; the indigenous people of Bolivia, Guatemala, New Zealand, Australia or Kenya whose sacred land, culture and food sources are violated in the name of `progress;' the unemployed of England and the U.S., Spain and West Germany, particularly the women, the blacks and the migrants, who lose not only their jobs but also their dignity as they are forced to beg for food; the thousands starving on the sidewalks of Calcutta and Bombay while India is exporting its rice to Southeast Asia and its meat to the Middle East; the poor peasants of Brazil, Mexico, Tunisia, Malaysia or Japan, who are forced out of their lands by modernization and migrate to overcrowded cities where they live in subhuman conditions; the mine workers of South Africa, Namibia, Chile or Indonesia, whose young bodies age in no time, devoured by brutal work conditions, pollution or accident. They are also the birds and sea life killed by the oil tides; the forests burned and sterilized by chemical waste; Mother Earth transformed by nuclear garbage into a threat to life. This suffering is not caused only by TNCs [transnational corporations] or by any one political agent taken in isolation. It is the unavoidable result of a way of organizing society on the basis of unlimited growth; the primacy of commercial relations over the human being; competition for maximum accumulation and profit; the identification of human freedom with price freedom, of human reason with the market laws; the conception of money and capital as the ultimate values of human life." Excerpted from "The World Council of Churches Programme on Transnational Corporations: Some Lessons and Challenges, " by Marcos Aruddy, Geneva, 1982.