Fiduciary duty

Wednesday 22^nd November

I am aware of the irony involved in the watching of the five “movies” about companies that have come out in the last few years: The Corporation, Supersize Me, Enron: smartest men in the room, Wal-Mart: the high cost of low-price, and McLibel. With one of them bought, two rented, someone else’s bought copy borrowed and one pirated for me as a gift, there are still profits for a variety of corporations involved in the distribution of elements of counterculture as consumer choice. Still, it’s easier than reading a book, innit? Tonight I saw the story of the two North London Greenpeace activists who, after the longest ever trial in UK history, produced a propaganda victory of enormous proportions against a company whose decision to use Britain’s outdated libel laws to try to curb free speech may ultimately have resulted in the decline of said Mc-company. This was the most inspiring of the films. In 1986, Helen Steel and Dave Morris circulated leaflets that accused the company of, amongst other things, exploiting children, cruelty to animals, paying badly and promoting unhealthy products diet that increased the risk of heart disease. They refused to say sorry and then refused to compromise and did it all in the name of the people.

The issues raised in the film McLibel made a larger point about the power of corporations that was lacking in the Supersize Me and Enron films. Morgan Spurlock’s puking and impotence were entertaining images to further tarnish a product range, but Eric Schlosser has more comprehensively chewed over the production process and raised Steel and Morris’s points and more in the pages of Fast Food Nation. While Enron detailed the complicity of Arthur Andersen and other companies in unheard of levels of corruption, it implied culpability at the individual level and never suggested the nature of corporations was the problem. In contrast, The Corporation (the book is better) made the importance of fiduciary duty in law a specific point of reference. This requirement to maximise shareholder profits is, ultimately, the brake on ethical behaviour in corporations and a reason for the dominance of the multinational McService industry. The scope of the film and the examples of people power it portrays make it a must-see.

By the way, I haven’t made any significant change in my Tesco visits, so I am holier-than-thou-ing nobody. I worked for the Watford branch too, back after the development of the whole Lower High Street had begun and before MFI (who I’d worked for before that) had moved onto the retail park, Waterfields, which later had its own M1 link road. Of the films, Wal-Mart was most Schlosseresque at portraying the effect of big business on local businesses and even touched on the role of the car, which is surely an anti-corporate movie waiting to be made (think about his job in Fight Club for easy early points). The film detailed the subsidies big business gets even from local councils in order to help it kill local independents. In Watford, it was allotments, where earlier in the century there’d been a lake, which were cleared so that the superstore could change the shape of the town.

I also worked at Burger King (which had taken over the site of Wimpy’s, which had taken over from Wendy’s), where I was able to do my unskilled labour with a cheerfulness that was based in knowing it was temporary, even after I transferred the “unskills” to the Manchester Piccadilly Gardens branch. While I was there, one of the sub-management supervisors (not quite a white shirt) had a crafty theft-thing going. All the tills would be tens of pounds down every day and each of the workers needing to watch their till at all times, even if they were in the kitchen. It turned out that this supervisor was taking money out of the coin bags in the safe which nobody had time to check when they swapped notes for bags of coins into busy tills. The point was made in McLibel that about two-thirds of robberies at fast-food restaurants involved an insider. The love these companies get from their workers.

Dave Morris put forward the alternative: communities deciding for themselves the practices and priorities they governed themselves by. Democracy, no less. No wonder the people at McDonalds were offering them “a big bag of money” to settle the case that the bigwigs later claimed they’d won. You could almost feel sorry for McDonalds: the company has been a favourite target ever since the catastrophic decision to sue. After all, José Bosé, a French farmer who bulldozed a branch and now milks not cows but his “counterculture celebrity” status at social forums and the like, was really aggrieved with the WTO. The McLibel story finishes at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in early 2005, 19 years after it began. With the activists’ determination, European human rights law won out over antiquated English law and two “normal” British people, who it was all a bit of a diversion for, are now global heroes quietly living “normal” lives.