Crime Doesn't Pay

Criminal corporations will soon be prohibited from doing business in Palmer, Mass. Palmer is joining a growing movement of states and localities to enact "bad boy" laws, which prohibit lawbreaking corporations from doing business with government entities. The Palmer law prohibits a company from doing business with the town for three years after any conviction for bribery, price-fixing or bid-rigging. The Arlington, VA-based Citizen's Clearinghouse on Hazardous Waste (CCHW) reports that at least 14 states and the District of Columbia have implemented some type of bad boy law.

Properly enforced, the bad boy laws can have a significant impact on criminal companies. In February 1988, waste disposal companies Waste Management, Inc. and Browning-Ferris, Inc. lost the right to do business with the city of Chicago because of convictions for anti-trust violations.

Although the Palmer law still awaits final approval from the Massachusetts attorney general, Waste Management, Inc. has already cancelled plans to seek a contract for a controversial, proposed regional landfill in the town. Many residents of Palmer and the adjoining town of Ware particularly objected to the idea of awarding the contract to Waste Management because of the corporation's history of law-breaking. "If we have to have a landfill," says Elizabeth Hancock of the Ware River Preservation Society, "we want to have it town-owned so at least we can call the shots and say who and what we want in there." In addition, a new recycling center in Springfield, Mass. has opened up capacity at other landfills in the region, causing residents to question the need for another landfill.

Campaigning for a bad boy law in Palmer, says Hancock, "was one way we could do something about [the landfill]." The Ware River Preservation Society brought attention to Waste Management's corporate history of bribery convictions and price-fixing. Getting people to sign a petition favoring the bad boy law was not difficult, according to Hancock, because regardless of an individual's opinion of the landfill, "people just don't want the town to do business with anyone who's been convicted of these types of things."

Waste Management launched its own campaign to convince voters that the law would cripple the town's ability to do business. But the hard-sell campaign of newspaper ads, door-to-door campaigning and telephone calls, says Hancock, led many voters to ask, "'If you're not guilty of these things, why are you so afraid of it?'"

Funding Apartheid

U.S. Commercial Banks are helping South Africa escape from its financial difficulties, according to a recent General Accounting Office (GAO) report. While anti-apartheid activists in South Africa and the United States have called on the banks to demand quick payment on outstanding loans to South Africa, the GAO found the banks' most recent rescheduling arrangement "particularly favorable to South Africa" (see Multinational Monitor, September 1988).

While South Africa is not heavily indebted, the GAO determined that it is vulnerable to financial sanctions because a high percentage of its debt is short term and must be repaid with liquid assets or with new loans, which the government cannot easily obtain because of bank concerns about political instability in the country.

For a country of its production capabilities, how-ever, the banks consider South Africa "underborrowed" and say that it has maintained a steady history of servicing its debt. This clean financial record has made banks unwilling to place what they characterize as extreme and unnecessary financial burdens on the country.

A coalition of church groups, including the Protestant churches of Germany, France and Britain, the Catholic and Protestant churches of Switzerland and a coalition of U.S. churches represented by the California/Nevada Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility (CANICCOR), has sought to use South Africa's debt as a lever for promoting change in the country's apartheid system. Church leaders suggested South Africa pay $1.6 billion in one year, rather than $1.5 billion over three and a half years, as was eventually agreed to by the banks. In addition, they asked the banks not to accept exit-loans, which would allow South Africa a five-year grace period before it had to begin paying off its loans. (In exchange for the grace period, South Africa would place higher priority on repaying these loans.)

According to the Bank for International Settlement, South Africa owed $14.6 billion to international banks at the end of 1988, 83 percent of which was to banks from the United States and four European countries. Major South African financiers are Citibank, Morgan Guaranty and Manufacturers Hanover from the United States, Deutsche Bank and Kommerz Bank from West Germany, Credit Lyonnais from France, Barclays and National Westminster from Great Britiain and, from Switzerland, Credit Suisse and the Union Bank of Switzerland.

Only Citibank has converted a substantial portion of its accounts to exit-loans. The Union Bank of Switzerland, which John Lind, director of CANICCOR, characterizes as the bank "most behind South Africa" due to its loans as well as it handling of South African gold, may make additional favorable arrangements.

Kids in the Sweatshops

A recent three-day investigative sweep by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) discovered 12,500 violations of child labor laws nationwide - half as many violations as in all of 1989. The sweep was conducted after a report from the General Accounting Office (GAO) revealed significant increases in such violations since the mid-1980s, as well as the prevalence of sweat-shops, defined as workplaces that regularly violate both wage or child labor laws and workplace safety or health standards.

'The growth of child labor violations is consistent with opinions of enforcement officials around the country that there is a widespread problem of multiple labor law violations or 'sweatshops'," says Franklin Frazier, director of Education and Employment Issues at the GAO. In a GAO survey of federal officials responsible for enforcing laws relevant to working conditions, 40 of 53 officials said sweatshops were a problem in at least one industry in their region.

During fiscal year 1989, the Department of Labor identified about 22,500 children under age 18 employed in violation of federal child labor laws, a 150 percent increase from the 9,200 identified in 1983. During the period of 1983 -1989, there wasonlya small increase in the number of young people working.

Labor officials said that low unemployment rates, leading to a shortage of adult workers in some areas, as well as the DOL's increased emphasis on child labor issues, may account for the increase in detected violations.

Child labor activists, however, deny that the Department of Labor deserves any credit for its enforcement of child labor laws. Linda Golodner of the Child Labor Coalition says, "There has been no enforcement and nobody knows how many violations are out there." She continues, if they find almost 13,000 in three days, which is half of what they found in 1989, obviously there's a lot more going on out there than they had been checking." Golodner adds that the recent DOL sweep does not include any violations in the sweatshops in New York City: "But anybody will tell you," says Golodner, "as soon as you walk into these places you see kids, it's not something you have to seek out, or try 10 different shops, it's right there."

Golodner would like to see the DOL work with local health or fire departments which make routine checks of establishments where children might be found working. Says Golodner, "If they can check for cockroaches, they can certainly check for kids."

The Child Labor Coalition also believes more stringent penalties for violations is an important first step. The GAO investigated 29 cases of children under the age of 18 who died while working in fiscal years 1987 and 1988. Eleven of these deaths involved at least one violation. Penalties for the violations, however, ranged from no fine at all to $1,000, and, in some cases, the fine was never collected.

Congress is considering legislation to strengthen the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the primary federal law regulating the wages and working conditions of children. The proposed legislation would increase the maximum fine for a violation from $1,000 to $10,000, and institute tougher criminal penalties for repeat and willful offenders. Employees under age 18 would need a work permit, with permission to be granted by the child's school, physician and parent or guardian. In addition, repeat violators would not be eligible to compete for any federal contract or to receive a federal grant or loan for a period of five years after the date of the last conviction.

Golodner says, "If the law is not enforced, then employers will take advantage of cheap labor, and the cheapest labor you can get is a kid... They don't usually demand expensive benefits, they don't demand benefits at all."

Glowing on the Job

Workers in U.S. commercial nuclear power plants were exposed to the equivalent of two million chest x-rays in 1988, according to a report by Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy Project. "Glowing on the job: Worker Exposure to Radiation at Nuclear Power Plants" is based on the most recent data available from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) The study notes that workers were exposed to a total of 41,077 person-rems of radiation in a recorded 105,265 instances, the highest number ever recorded in one year. Each exposed worker received an average radiation dose of 0.390 person-rem, roughly equivalent to 20 chest x-rays.

Also during 1988, 100 of the 107 commercial nuclear power reactors exposed individual workers to radiation doses of at least 1.00 person-rem, an annual exposure equivalent to about 50 chest x-rays and approximately three times the average annual radiation dose received by each person in the United States from all sources.

The NRC challenged the validity of Public Citizen's findings. NRC spokesperson Frank Ingran says the Public Citizen statistics "failed to take note that there is an increasing number of workers in the nuclear industry because there are more plants licensed to operate and that the average exposure per worker has been going down."

The report also finds that the nation's 35 General Electric-built Boiling Water Reactors exposed workers to higher levels of radiation than other types of reactors. And regardless of make or design, worker exposure increases dramatically as plants age.

The Public Citizen report made five recommendations for improving the safety of nuclear facility workers, including a call for the NRC to lower by ten-fold the level of allowed radiation exposure for workers so that it conforms with exposure limits for the general public.

Public Citizen believes, however, that the real way to ensure nuclear workers' safety is to shut down the nuclear power industry. "The bottom line," says Cleo Manuel, a nuclear safety analyst at Public Citizen and primary author of the study, "is that nuclear facilities are never going to be made safe places for people to work; it's [an] inherently dangerous technology. As we see it, this is just another reason to stop nuclear power."

� Katherine Isaac and jim Sugarman