Elaine Lamy has been a full-time organizer on issues of corporate responsibility for 15 years. She became one of the first grassroots organizers on the Nestle Boycott in the late 1970s. She has been a leader throughout INFACT's GE Boycott Campaign, holding many positions of responsibility in INFACT prior to becoming its executive director. Lamy has also been active on women's, peace and homelessness issues.
Multinational Monitor: How did INFACT form and what were its original goals?
Elaine Lamy: INFACT was started in 1977 by a handful of people who were outraged by the aggressive promotion of infant formula in developing countries to poor families that could not use the product safely. Large companies like Nestle and American Home Products were aggressively marketing these products which resulted in the deaths of about one million babies a year from something called "bottle baby disease." INFACT started as a grassroots consumer effort in the United States to pressure these big corporations, particularly Nestle, to stop their marketing of baby formula in developing countries.
The Infant Formula Campaign was already growing in other parts of the world. For example, in the UK, a development group called War on Want was doing public education around these outrageous abuses. For years doctors in developing countries were complaining about the disastrous impact of the formula companies on babies' lives. In the United States, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility had been filing shareholder resolutions with the U.S.-based companies around their marketing practices in developing countries. INFACT was started primarily to raise awareness at the grassroots in the United States about these abuses and to organize millions of ordinary people to put pressure on these companies.
The Nestle boycott was called in July 1977 and ended in January 1984 when Nestle - the world's largest food company - sat down and negotiated an agreement to make major reforms in their marketing of infant formula. This was an unprecedented accomplishment and built on the Campaign's earlier successes, including the United Nation's passage in 1981 of the World Health Organization's (WHO) International Code of Marketing for Breast Milk Substitutes. This step by the UN marked the first time that the WHO pointed to commercial forces as a cause of health problems in developing countries and clearly called upon an industry to make changes.
An important point to note about the Nestle boycott is that while Nestle actually did implement a good deal of the provisions of the agreement, it did not implement all of them. So a few years later a sister organization formed called Action for Corporate Accountability; it has continued to work on Nestle's compliance with the agreement. There has been some important progress in that compliance since then, but that work is not finished.
MM: How did INFACT move into working on nuclear weapons issues?
Lamy: A few years before the end of the Nestle boycott, INFACT made an organizational decision to broaden our mission beyond the goals of the Infant Formula Campaign. INFACT's purpose is to stop life-threatening abuses of transnational corporations (TNCs) and increase their accountability to people around the world. So, at our core, INFACT is a corporate accountability organization.
In early 1984 INFACT made an assessment of the most pressing abuses of transnational corporations that demanded change. At that time, we were at the very peak of the outrageous and horrendous Reagan-era build-up of these weapons of mass destruction. We believed that corporations were the driving force behind the nuclear weapons build-up. So in May 1984 we launched a campaign called the Nuclear Weaponmakers Campaign, to add to the good work of other organizations such as SANE/Freeze and Physicians for Social Responsibility. What we added to these efforts were large numbers of people organized to directly expose and challenge the role played by corporations not only in building these weapons but in influencing national security policy-making in Washington.
MM: How did your strategies differ from other groups working against nuclear build-up?
Lamy: Our strategy was different to the extent that we were mobilizing large numbers of people to put pressure directly on the corporations that made these nuclear weapons, most notably General Electric (GE), which became our strategic target as the industry leader. We worked to get the companies themselves to make the decision that it was in their financial interest to stop producing nuclear weapons. So while we were and continue to be very supportive of efforts to control these behaviors through government action, one of the things that makes INFACT different is that we organize people to get these companies to make the change directly.
MM: What were some of the most effective strategies in the nuclear weapon-makers campaign?
Lamy: By letting large numbers of people know which companies were involved, and how much profit they made, we exposed the fact that profit was the primary, driving force behind the weapons build-up. A boycott of GE products became the primary strategy of a larger campaign intended to make it undesirable for corporations to be in the nuclear weapons business - to change the cost-benefit ratio. We wanted GE, which for 50 years was the industry leader, to set a precedent and make it clear to other corporations that nuclear weapons production was no longer a desirable business. Our goal was essentially to make it in GE's financial interest to get out of nuclear weapons and remove the most powerful corporate force behind nuclear weapons.
We employed several different strategies and tactics, many of them aimed at decreasing GE's sales or increasing its costs due to its involvement in the nuclear weapons business. Among them was a very effective consumer boycott that involved over four million individual consumers around the world. It also involved hundreds of institutions and eventually succeeded in getting some major retailers, most notably Target (with 402 stores around the United States) to break a 25-year exclusive agreement with GE and begin to devote half of its shelf space to non-GE light bulbs.
Once this solid foundation for the Boycott was built, we escalated the pressure on the company by targeting a few of its strategic vulnerabilities. One of these was its medical division. GE is the largest producer of diagnostic medical equipment in the world, equipment like CT scanners and X-Ray machines. We learned that there was a lot of support in the medical community for purchasing this equipment from GE's competitors given GE's leadership role in the production and promotion of nuclear weapons. We worked with the religious medical community in the United States and with the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in other parts of the world. We can document over $50 million in lost medical sales to GE (in the United States and Europe), not to mention all of the money and time GE spent trying to stop the medical sales losses.
Another important strategy we used was to decrease the value of GE's image by exposing the reality behind it. GE has spent millions of dollars establishing its "we bring good things to life" image. INFACT chose to expose the deadly reality behind that image through our film: Deadly Deception: General Electric, Nuclear Weapons and Our Environment. This is a hard-hitting documentary that contrasts GE's warm and fuzzy TV ads with the graphic and compelling stories of people who have been harmed by radiation and toxic poisoning from GE's nuclear weapons work. Deadly Deception won an Academy Award in 1992 which increased the pressure on GE even more since the Oscar afforded tremendous press coverage of the film and INFACT's Campaign.
MM: What was GE's response to the campaign over the years as it became more widespread and effective?
Lamy: One of the things that we have learned in taking on two very powerful transnational corporations is that the companies always respond in one way or another.
In GE's case, as the pressure grew, it began sending letters to specific people trying to dissuade them from supporting the boycott. The company targeted people affiliated with organizations like medical institutions or religious groups.
The other response that we believe is attributable in large part to our campaign is an increase in GE's image advertising. In the first four years after we called the boycott, GE's image advertising dollars increased four times over the previous four years.
A third very notable response was the increasing and direct engagement of the company's top management at tactical escalation points. When a midwestern chain of grocery stores removed GE products from the shelves of all 14 of its stores, GE sent two representatives to Hudson, Wisconsin to offer the retailer "incentives" to change its mind. The retailer refused to budge. As the medical equipment boycott grew, GE's top management became involved: John Trani, Vice President of GE Medical, sat down and met with medical supporters. And eventually Jack Welch himself, GE's chief executive officer, was pulled in to do damage control. In one instance, the company flew a group of Catholic sisters from Texas who own a major health system to GE's home base in Fairfield, Connecticut to meet with Welch. And, as recently as July 1992, Welch flew by helicopter to Pennsylvania to meet with two other groups of sisters who own hospitals.
But, of course, the most important response of all is that GE got out of the nuclear weapons business. The company had taken some big steps out of nuclear weapons as the Campaign grew, but last November it announced it was taking the biggest step of all by selling its entire aerospace division to Martin Marietta.
MM: What impact do you think GE's selling of its nuclear weapons division to Martin Marietta will have on the rest of the industry?
Lamy: What we were seeking broadly to do was change the public climate so that people would know that there was an industry pushing for these weapons - it was not simply the "Soviet threat" or the Cold War. We believe we added tremendously to that public awareness. Our campaign, the work of other organizations focused on nuclear weapons issues and certainly the change in global conditions all came together to create a situation in which it really is no longer desirable for many corporations to be in the nuclear weapons business.
We believe the biggest impact we had was removing an extremely powerful transnational corporation - General Electric is a $60 billion corporation - from its influential spot in determining public policy on national security issues. So even though major corporations like Martin Marietta and General Dynamics are still involved, these companies are not as powerful as GE is. We believe that removing GE from the nuclear weapons business eliminated a very powerful force driving nuclear weapons; that will affect the whole problem and certainly the industry.
MM: How are your relations with the labor community? How did GE workers respond to the boycott, for example?
Lamy: Less that 25 percent of GE's workforce is unionized; there is not much "organized" labor at GE, but of course there are certainly a lot of laborers. We were careful with the GE campaign to communicate with GE's labor unions and let them know what we wanted and what we were about. And we worked when we could with certain parts of their labor constituency. For example, after GE bought RCA and acquired NBC, we worked a lot with the NBC unions to help them with their various efforts fighting GE.
In our campaign, we emphasized that our grievance was with the policy-makers at GE, that what we wanted the company to do was find safe and responsible ways to employ people beyond the production of nuclear weapons. Since our emphasis was on the policy-makers, our involvement with GE workers was not extensive, but we certainly did get a significant amount of support from some GE workers, especially after we released Deadly Deception.
MM: How was the decision made to focus on the tobacco industry after the GE campaign? What other industries were considered?
Lamy: INFACT did three things in order to make that decision. The first was an inventory of the most outrageous and egregious abuses of transnational corporations around the world. We gathered information about social problems, eventually narrowing our pool to 18 possible issues that we might take on. These included environmental issues like ozone depletion, rainforest destruction, the greenhouse effect, toxic dumping and pesticide dumping. We looked at abuses of the pharmaceutical industry, both in the United States and abroad - overpricing of drugs, lack of access to drugs; we took a specific look at corporate profiteering in response to the AIDS epidemic. We looked at agribusiness and the control of the food supply; we did some work on biogenetic engineering. And we looked into the outrageous behavior of the tobacco industry as it markets its deadly products around the world.
The second step was consulting with the people and organizations who currently work on these issues. We conducted over 80 interviews with organizations like Greenpeace, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, Rainforest Action Network and Health Action International. We met with the people who work on these issues both to learn about the issues and to get their opinion about what INFACT might contribute to their efforts.
And the third very important step in the process was to consult our own supporters. We did about 300 in-person visits with INFACT supporters around the United States. We sent a "corporate abuse survey" to 4,000 of our supporters in the United States and other countries, and 1,000 of them came back.
All three of those components were factored into our Board's decision in May to launch a major campaign targeting the abuses of the deadly tobacco industry. A major reason for this campaign is that 2.5 to 3 million people around the world die each year from tobacco-related illnesses - that's 80,000 each day. To make up for the 5,000 customers the industry loses each day in the United States (from people quitting and dying), this industry targets children and young people to find replacement smokers. And, while there are many successful and important efforts which educate people about the dangers of smoking, and legislative and other efforts to curb the problem, what seems to be missing is a major international grassroots movement of people directly challenging the source of the problem - the powerful tobacco transnationals like Philip Morris, RJR Nabisco, BAT [British-American Tobacco Company] and American Brands. This is what INFACT plans to contribute.
MM: What are the demands of this campaign?
Lamy: There are three long-term goals of INFACT's Tobacco Industry Campaign: stop the marketing and promotion of tobacco to children and young people around the world; stop the industry's actions that undermine public health efforts, including interference in public policy-making; and forge an international movement of people holding TNCs accountable for their abuses.
MM: What tactics will you be employing in this campaign?
Lamy: Right now, INFACT is concentrating its efforts on widely
exposing and beginning to directly challenge the abuses of the industry.
The first phase of the campaign, which we are launching in October, is
essentially to put the industry on notice that consumers are aware of and
opposed to its marketing practices. We will be generating contact with
these companies through large numbers of ordinary people - we are aiming
to have 50,000 people communicating directly with these companies.
During this first phase we will also be raising public consciousness that household names make cigarettes and aggressively promote smoking to children and young people. Philip Morris owns Kraft General Foods; RJ Reynolds (RJR) is now RJR Nabisco. These companies gain a lot of their support from us as consumers in the grocery store - we give them our money all the time. So we have some economic power over these companies.
If the companies do not respond to the growing public call to end their marketing to children and young people - even the Surgeon General and the American Medical Association have asked RJR Nabisco to stop its "Joe Camel" campaign which targets young people - we will likely escalate the pressure through another boycott campaign with possibly more than one company target. Even though these companies get most of their profits from tobacco sales, they also rely on major revenues from their other divisions. A boycott of this industry would focus mainly on these other products. Since cigarettes are an addictive product, we would be asking smokers to join in by boycotting the other products of these companies.
Through the Infant Formula and Nuclear Weaponmakers Campaigns, INFACT has amassed a lot of experience in waging effective campaigns to bring about change in corporate behavior which include boycotts and other tactics. As the Tobacco Industry Campaign grows, we will escalate the pressure with a number of strategies and tactics that best serve the goals of this Campaign.
MM: What are the benefits of getting citizens involved in directly challenging corporate abuses?
Lamy: A very important underlying point for INFACT is that transnational corporations are very powerful institutions growing more powerful by the day in our society. And because they are institutions unto themselves, we believe that it is extremely important for people interested in social change to find ways to directly hold these companies accountable for their abuses. We applaud efforts to hold companies accountable through the legislative process. But that, in some ways, says that companies can do whatever they want, that it is the government's responsibility to stop them. We do not believe that - we believe that companies should not act irresponsibly.
As consumers who vote with our dollars every time we support one of these companies, we have a responsibility to insure that the company behaves in a socially responsible manner. It is no different from the democratic process in which we have a responsibility as citizens to vote for the policy-makers that are going to implement policies that affect our lives. Every day, corporations make policies that profoundly affect our lives.
I think more and more people are becoming aware that our legislative process itself is largely controlled by corporations - and that is particularly true for the tobacco industry. The Surgeon General has made it very clear that smoking is a very dangerous practice; more and more government officials and health advocates are making very clear the dangers of this addictive product. Yet Congress has done little to regulate tobacco. And the reason why is that the industry has a "stranglehold" over Congress, in the words of Representative Mike Synar. So we believe that in addition to working through the legislative process, we have to work to get this industry to back off of that process.
MM: Do you have a sense that there is an awareness among the general public of the massive power international corporations hold and of the harm they cause? Are these issues of concern to U.S. citizens?
Lamy: Our experience after two grassroots campaigns is that people have a general sense that something is really wrong; what they do not know are the specifics, and they certainly do not know what they can do about it.
One of the things that we add to corporate accountability efforts is to take a general feeling out there among people and share the specifics. We say, "This is exactly what is going on, and here is what you can do." That is a very powerful formula. You give ordinary people the information they need and they will act. People need to know more.
The mainstream media in our country is of course controlled by major corporations - GE owns NBC. So access to information is definitely limited. Once people know the specifics, they get outraged and then they want to do something.
That is where INFACT comes in: we expose the abuses of powerful corporations and then we organize large numbers of people in effective campaigns to bring about a change in corporate behavior - we give people something they can do to make a difference.