A report by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) is calling out some of the world’s biggest companies, saying they undermine democracy worldwide.

The ITUC says its mission is “the promotion and defence of workers’ rights and interests, through international cooperation between trade unions, global campaigning and advocacy within the major global institutions.”

The ITUC has published a list calling out the top seven “emblematic companies that benefit financially by continuing to violate trade union and human rights, monopolise media and technology, exacerbate climate catastrophe, and privatise public services. They represent a wider corporate world that protects and expands its own profits by undermining democracy.”

The list includes:

1. Amazon.com, Inc.
2. Blackstone Group
3. ExxonMobil
4. Glencore
5. Meta
6. Tesla
7. The Vanguard Group

The organization then goes on to describe why each company made it on to the list.

Amazon

ITUC calls out Amazon for its repeated privacy violations, worker endangerment, and opposition to labor laws.

The world’s largest online retailer and cloud computing service, and its fifth-largest employer, there is no industry or community Amazon and its subsidiaries have not adversely impacted. The company has become notorious for its union busting and low wages on multiple continents, monopoly in e-commerce, egregious carbon emissions through its AWS data centres, corporate tax evasion, and lobbying at national and international level.

In the United States alone, where Amazon’s worker injury rate is twice as high as similar companies, the company has racked up more than US$250 million in fines for privacy, occupational health and safety, wage, and environmental violation cases filed by workers across sectors. Attempts to hold Amazon accountable to labour rights have led the company to challenge the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board in the U.S. In Canada, the company is trying to overturn provincial labour law. In Europe, Amazon was barred this year from lobbying within the European Parliament for its refusal to attend hearings on violations of worker rights in its warehouses, becoming only the second company in history to face such a sanction. Its refusal to negotiate with unions in Germany has resulted in a decade of strikes. In India, the company has admitted to breaching workplace safety standards in its warehouses.

Blackstone Group

Blackstone Group makes the list for opposition to violations of consumer protection laws, violating employment laws, employing child labor, and harming the environment, including deforestation of the Amazon.

Blackstone is well-known by climate justice advocates for its role in the rapid deforestation of the Amazon rainforest and huge investments in fossil fuel projects. In the UK, Blackstone reaped huge profits while saddling one of the country’s largest long-term care providers with insurmountable debt. Blackstone infamously profited from housing market speculation after the 2008 financial crisis and aggressively evicted workers after the Covid-19 pandemic.

Blackstone and its subsidiaries have been penalised for competition, contracting, employment, financial and consumer protection violations to the tune of nearly US$300 million in one country alone. It was also the face of child labour in meatpacking, is known for its exorbitant fees to manage worker pensions, and has so far failed to sign up to a coalition-designed Private Equity Labor Rights Platform. In Brazil, it has been criticised for helping to privatise public infrastructure and corporatise agricultural land.

Blackstone seems to believe that it – not voters – should determine public policy. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on housing has accused Blackstone of, “using its significant resources and political leverage to undermine domestic laws and policies that would in fact improve access to adequate housing.”

ExxonMobil

ExxonMobil’s inclusion on the list should come as a surprise to no one, given the company’s long history of hiding its finding about the impact of fossil fuels on the environment.

Perhaps the greatest example of Exxon’s disinterest in democratic deliberation was its corporate commitment of nearly four decades to conceal from the public its own internal evidence that climate change was real, accelerating, and driven by fossil fuel use while simultaneously financing far-right think tanks in the US and Europe to inject climate scepticism and denialism into the public discourse.

While it altered its public position on climate change years ago, Exxon continues to lobby against meaningful climate policy and still promotes fossil fuel and plastics use to the detriment of communities around the world. It benefits from another entry on our list, Meta, by spreading right-wing propaganda in favour of fossil fuels. It finances the Republican Attorneys General Association, which has led efforts to pressure the US Supreme Court to throw out climate change lawsuits seeking damages from Exxon and its competitors.

Glencore

Glencore has a track record of flaunting the law, pleading guilty to various charges in a number of countries.

The largest trader of commodities and the largest mining company in the world by revenue, Glencore controls or produces huge portions of the global supply of coal, zinc, cobalt, and other minerals, metals, fuels and foods. The company’s undermining of democracy is not in dispute, as it has in recent years pled guilty to committing bribery, corruption, and market manipulation in countries as varied as Venezuela, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and South Sudan.

The scale of Glencore’s global lobbying lays bare the organisational conviction that it, rather than the voting public, should determine policy. While it publicly shows itself to support measures such as the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, for years it has made use of right-wing consultants to spend “millions bankrolling a secret, globally coordinated campaign to prop up coal demand by undermining environmental activists, influencing politicians and spreading sophisticated pro-coal messaging on social media.” This self-serving posture is also exhibited in its efforts to undermine popular climate policy in the European Union, the United States, and South Africa.

Meta

Meta’s role in politics and its ability to influence people, including its users falling victim to misinformation, has long made the company the target of critics and led to its inclusion on the list.

The world’s largest social media company, Meta is the parent of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger. Combined, these products have nearly four billion users – the same number of people estimated to be voting worldwide in 2024. The company’s scale, and its corporate behaviour, have led some to call it “a foreign state, populated by people without sovereignty, ruled by a leader with absolute power.”

Meta’s algorithms can quite literally alter humanity’s perceptions of reality. Its revenue model exploits trillions of personalised data points to deliver highly effective advertising to its users. That has made it a perfect target for data breaches seized on by authoritarians and an ideal vessel for right-wing political parties to spread propaganda around the world. Violent, far-right militias in the US use Facebook to recruit new members. In Germany, the far-right AfD used Facebook to stoke anti-immigrant hatred and position itself for unprecedented success in June’s European parliamentary elections.

Tesla

While Tesla may be the world’s leading EV maker, that standing has come at the expense of workers rights, with the company engaging in a long history of combating unionization efforts.

In Germany, Sweden, and the US, Tesla has aggressively violated the right to organise, refused to engage in collective bargaining, and provoked unprecedented strike action for its subversion of social dialogue, a pillar of industrial democracy in many European economies. Tesla’s hostility toward unions earned it a place on a list of Worst Union-Busters of 2023. Tesla’s factories have “reported ten times more safety violations than Nissan … despite the fact that Nissan built almost ten times as many cars over the same period.”

But Tesla does not limit its efforts to weaken democratic norms in highly industrialised economies. Its supply chain relies on nickel mining companies that undermine consultation standards with local Indonesian communities and are deforesting so rapidly that flooding and water pollution threaten neighbourhoods. The company’s supply chain relies on another corporation on our list, Glencore, to mine copper and cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where child labour has allegedly been employed.

The Vanguard Group

The Vanguard Group makes the list for concentrating its power to such a degree that even its founder was worried about where the company was headed.

One of the “Big Four” institutional investors in the world alongside BlackRock, Fidelity, and State Street, Vanguard’s holdings put it “into an extreme position of power” at many of the companies it funds and makes it “the voice that matters most among investors.” This concentration of power troubled even Vanguard’s late founder, John Bogle, who wrote in 2018 that “If historical trends continue, a handful of giant institutional investors will one day hold voting control of virtually every large US corporation.”

Despite holding billions of dollars in worker money, Vanguard recently abandoned one of its most public commitments to environmental and social governance. After signing on to the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative in 2021, it left in 2022, bowing to pressure from its far-right friends and provoking a backlash from more than 1,000 of its more climate-friendly clients.

Conclusion

The ITUC’s list, and the cases it makes, is a damning indictment of the included companies. The ITUC minces no words in calling out the seven companies for their actions.

These companies deploy complex lobbying operations to undermine popular will and disrupt existing or nascent global policy that could hold them accountable. They are invariably led by ultra-wealthy individuals that support and finance far-right politicians and parties to further their own interests. When the far-right wins power, it discredits and defunds democratic global institutions; reduces taxes on the wealthy and on corporations; undercuts living wages; favours bilateral aid financing over multilateralism; and cracks down on human, trade union, and democratic rights, as evidenced by the ITUC’s Global Rights Index.

If more organizations continue to shine a spotlight on the actions of the companies on the list, public perception could eventually force them to change how they do business.