The Ten Worst Corporations of 2004

by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

It is never easy choosing the 10 Worst Corporations of the Year — there are always more deserving nominees than we can possibly recognize. One of the greatest challenges facing the Multinational Monitor judges is the directive not to select repeat recipients of the 10 Worst designation.

There’s no way we could keep off companies that have ever appeared on the 10 Worst list — what is one to do with the likes of ExxonMobil, Philip Morris or General Electric? — but we do try to stick to the rule of not naming companies to the list who appeared on the previous year’s list. MORE>>

Offshoring: The Evolving Profile of Corporate Global Restructuring

by Kate Bronfenbrenner and Stephanie Luce

In late 2003, Accenture LLP — formerly Andersen Consulting, a spinoff of Arthur Andersen — announced that it planned to increase employment in India from 4,300 people to 10,000 employees by the end of 2004. On January 27, 2004, the corporation announced that it would lay off 90 of its 450 workers in its Wilmington, Delaware office. When announcing the layoff, an Accenture spokesperson said that the company had been asked by a client to shift some of work to other locations, and noted that the jobs may be moved to India. In April and May 2004, the company filed WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act) notices in Pleasanton, California, announcing it would lay off 129 workers. By March 2004, the company was building a second facility in southern India, in Chennai, although the firm would not confirm that the Pleasanton jobs were in fact being moved to India.

Such white-collar and service industry job shifts to India are becoming increasingly common, but as publicity around the trend grows, companies are becoming more circumspect about announcing their plans. MORE>>

Blowing the Whistle on the FDA

an interview with David Graham

Dr. David Graham is the associate director for science and medicine in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Drug Safety, and the FDA medical officer who blew the whistle on Vioxx. Graham graduated from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and trained in Internal Medicine at Yale and in adult Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania. He also has a Masters in Public Health from Johns Hopkins, with a concentration in epidemiology and biostatistics. Over a 20-year career at FDA, he has contributed to the withdrawal of a number of drugs from the U.S. market, including Abbott Laboratories' Omniflox, an antibiotic that caused hemolytic anemia; Warner-Lambert's Rezulin, a diabetes drug that caused acute liver failure; Wyeth's Fen-Phen and Redux, weight loss drugs that caused heart valve injury; and PPA (phenylpropanolamine), an over-the-counter decongestant and weight loss product that caused hemorrhagic stroke in young women. MORE>>