- [Nicole] Hello everyone. This lesson today is going to be looking at researching company harm. So the aims of this section are to gain an understanding of the different ways to research company harms. So what do we mean by company harm is like the impacts of that company on people, on animals, on the land, kind of, I guess if you are involved in some sort of campaign or a struggle, like I guess this section is probably what comes most easy to you of knowing how corporations are affecting people's lives. And yeah, I'm gonna share a little bit about how to become a bit more sensitive and skillful when speaking to people affected by a company. So like there's lots of different layers of like power and privilege and stuff when we're doing research. And I think it's really important to be aware of that we'll get to that in a little bit, so yeah. What we're gonna be exploring are questions such as what are the most obvious problems with the company's activity? Is there a particular pattern of destructive or exploitative behavior? Like has a company done something in one country and then doing something similar somewhere else? For example, G4S running prisons in England and Wales and they're also running prisons in South Africa and in Australia and maybe we can see different patterns of harm like between those countries who is suffering or has suffered because of its activity and how? So again, the G4S example we might look at the people in prison that are suffering or people that are getting detained or deported. And yeah, you might want to go into more detail in that of how that is organized and structured and the kind of impact that's having on people's lives. And finally, like has the company been involved in any particular controversies or scandals? So, yeah, so bare those questions in mind. And like I said, practical, practical, practical add this into your company profile that you should be building throughout the course add this to your mind map of the impact this company is having. Okay, so just another little case study. So I helped to do a profile of the Norwegian fertilizer company called Yara. So to do this research I collaborated with people who had already been organizing at Sierra longer-term so they kind of knew the territory, they knew Yara's impacts. And my role was kind of just putting that together into a report, certain things I did to kind of, because when I Googled Yara, it was quite difficult if I'm honest to find connections between them and people they'd harmed. But what I did was I used this phrase like controversy and then I went through the kind of advanced Google techniques and I actually worked through this systematically year by year. And that helped kind of like filter thousands of results to kind of see this kind of catalog of like abuses around the world of their different fertilizer plants, some of their supply chains and some of their issues and different court cases. And it was a really useful way of kind of getting this like quite broad overview of lots of different communities and lots of different places and how they'd been harmed by them. Okay, so yeah, people engaged in resistance to a company they're commonly the people that are already harmed by that company, right? So you might have a group of tenants that are resisting a landlord. You might have like a housing campaign and they're the people that are living in those landlords properties, for example but people that are directly affected like I really believe should be your first port of call when mapping out company harm because they've got like the live daily experience we've caught for what we really believe in like a power from below and like bottom up grassroots organizing. So I think it's really important to kind of centre the people that have been impacted in your research and in your writing and in your organizing. And people that are fighting a company are commonly the ones that have done the most research already into the company itself and its behavior. So, if you are fortunate to be able to speak to someone who's been affected by a company, and this obviously could be you or close friends or people you live with around like a few issues you need to be aware of. I don't identify as a journalist, maybe some people in corporate watch to do, but oftentimes in some sort of journalism training they might talk about some of these issues more. But I feel like as a kind of like militant researcher or as a grassroots organizer we have like a step above those ethics, right? We have even more, hopefully more integrity and responsibility than certain codes of practice like we're there to support people. We definitely don't wanna use people's stories to get some front page in a newspaper for our own personal gain in our career it's just not work. What we're down with as a group of corporate watch, but what is really useful to be aware of when you're talking to people who've potentially been effected by harm is that obviously you wanna think about like privacy and confidentiality. So if you're writing up research maybe you change people's names you need to think about how you store those records. Someone being a whistleblower that be very dangerous for people you know, people can go to prison for sharing state secrets, for example. So we need to get on top of things like that depending on like the scale of the work you're doing, think about the safety of that person. If they're at risk for speaking to you, think about trauma, right? Like especially if someone is disclosing something traumatic corporate watch has done a lot of research around the border regime. And that has involved talking to lots of people that have experienced like absolutely horrific violence when being detained or deported, we've done research around prisons, we've done features about close supervision centers which are like prisons within prisons. And every time we talk to a prisoner or someone that's been impacted you have to think of the cost to them of disclosing all this stuff. And yes, it could be empowering for them to talk about it to know that a group are gonna take action, but it could also be very emotionally triggering and difficult so please just be sensitive to that. And likewise like you might need support in listening to those stories. If you're hearing particularly violent or abusive things then that could be difficult for you. And yeah, maybe you need some sort of structures in your group to enable you to keep doing that work sustainably. And always, always, always think about like the differences like in power and privilege and how that is affecting your conversation and affecting the outcomes of your research. And like again, we wanna move beyond any kind of journalist who sounded like we see ourselves a corporate watch as part of struggles. And for us, like this means like collaboratively doing research. So everything we write, we wanna run it past the campaign check that it's suitable for them. If a campaign is like, "Oh, we don't want it being released yet "because we're gonna do this day of action "and we wanna release it in two weeks." Then we're just like, "Yep, fine we'll wait until then." That struggle and that organization and that campaign is the most important thing. So it's really important if you're doing research for a group or with a group to get consent to kind of be proactive in understanding what you write, how it's edited, where it's shared and to get kind of like group support for those decisions. So ideally you would try to meet someone in person if possible but we're in the middle of a pandemic so it's commonly phone calls, messages, emails. So ask for consent if you're gonna record any calls, the where of you know your data, how it's stored on your phone, if it's encrypted maybe you need to delete their messages after they've sent them to you. Maybe you need to back them up in case the police get ahold of your phone or whatever. Yeah, that's really important that you kind of safeguard them in that way. You may also be able to find contacts like if you're struggling to find people to talk to who've been affected by a company then you're very likely to be able to find contacts in forums or Facebook groups or existing community organizations. And the other option like lots of groups have done is just to meet people directly where they are so going and talking to disgruntled workers, sticking stickers around, encouraging workers to call a hotline and share information. Yeah, it's a really good way to kind of get a bit of like Intel about what's going on is just going to where the thing is happening and talking to people and listening to people. Okay, so another way of researching company harm is to kind of see what's been recorded in terms of them as like an employer and as a workplace. So the Health and Safety Executive are the agency responsible for this for kind of workplace health and safety and welfare. And they have a big database of kind of accidents and deaths in workplaces and whether there's been kind of any convictions or notices of the company. So yeah, they've got this register of convictions and notices. So I just kind of had a little look through before our session. So I think I searched by Southwest and by fatalities and I got this sad list of people. I know I didn't search by region but this is fatalities. So these are kind of different companies and where someone had died. So I just clicked on the first one Designed Roof Systems Limited and you can see here that someone walked onto a skylight and it collapsed and the person died. So obviously it's a bit grim, but it especially if you're researching there for a construction company or something it's a really good resource to find out about cases, about deaths, about what company might be being investigated for. So definitely check out that database. Supply chains, if you're researching a company and you're struggling to find something, it might be that no one's campaigned against that company directly but that there's a lot of information about that particular industry and the harm it's causing. I'm gonna talk about supply chains more in the next section, but yeah, you can see here, you will be able to see what it needs to function and therefore what or whom is most likely exploiting. So for example, with Yara, again we knew that they needed phosphorus and potash to make their fertilizer. So that means that they're gonna be mining in certain areas where that's available and that kind of unveiled a whole load of other horrific things the company were doing. So yeah, harm could be caused directly by the company or it could be part of subsidiaries or a supply chain. So, you might have your front facing brand that are looking quite rosy with their nice adverts and their nice shops, but actually behind them in their supply chain there could be like a sweatshop or a factory with explosive working conditions. So by mapping out this kind of company group and the kind of supply chain, you'll be kind of identify like other potential sources of harm. And also like you might be able to find like other companies within that group that you know are causing harm. So on this previous page, you can see here this is a campaign against new gold mine in Ireland the company, Dalradian Gold like they had a bit of a kind of squeaky clean background considering they were kind of fairly newish company in terms of mining. But actually if you look at their company group you can see that other companies in their company group have got this legacy of pollution and human rights abuses and everything else. So yeah, sometimes it's not direct, but sometimes it's part of that kind of broader ecology of that company. Okay, and so I've just talked about Dalradian that was the example I was gonna use. So for them, we talked to the campaign and the campaign had already talked to a lot of local residents that were potentially gonna be impacted by the gold mine. We looked at groups that had already been organizing against the mine or against mining in general around the world, like London Mining Network, Who've got huge network of contacts around the world of communities that are affected by by mining and different forms. So yeah, you can kind of pay attention to the supply chain and the like broader ecology of what's going on on that company like I said, just to recap, like if you're gonna talk to someone who is directly impacted by a company be kind of skillful and sensitive in that and just be a good listener and represent what they've said with like integrity, ask them to read it over, see if they're happy with it and do your best basically. So yeah, practical, practical, practical, anything I've talked about in this session, please try and include it in your company profile and in your mind map. So maybe you can start looking at your company's impacts around the world, what industry they're in, any pollution, any human rights abuses. Maybe you could look at the Health and Safety Executive and see if they've had any convictions or any worker deaths. And yeah, see if you can add that to your picture.