4 Great Moments in Corporate Malfeasance | What the Stuff?!
Corporations can commit crimes just like people – so what are some of the biggest corporate crimes in history?
10 Great Moments in Corporate Malfeasance
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Great can mean something’s excellent or fantastic even; it can also mean large or immense. We’re using the latter sense and you’ll see why.
United Fruit Company’s CIA Coup
United Fruit Company, known today as Chaquita, seller of bananas, used to have lots of land in Guatemala, so much so that when lefty Jacobo Arbenz was elected president in 1951, he forced the company to sell the land it wasn’t using so the government could redistribute it. Dole found this unsatisfactory and went to the former president of the company, Allen Dulles, who’d become the CIA chief and undertook an operation to back an overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically-elected government. United Fruit was extra helpful by offering to smuggle arms to the rebels along the company’s supply chain. The coup was successful and United Fruit got to keep its land while Guatemala was plunged into a dictatorship followed by a 36-year long civil war.
WellPoint’s Breast Cancer Algorithm
In 2010, Americans learned the term rescission, a policy where insurance companies cut costs by looking for any reason to deny a claim or cancel a policy. No one bore the brunt as much as WellPoint, thanks to the exposure of their breast cancer algorithm. The company had a policy where any woman it insured who was diagnosed with breast cancer would have their file flagged, and claims administrators would look for anything – even a clerical error – that would give the company a legal reason to drop that person. The company said it would stop after the backlash.
Wal-Mart’s Janitor Lock Ins
You know how forced servitude is illegal in the U.S.? Apparently Wal-Mart wasn’t aware of that. In 2004 it came out that the company frequently locked late shift cleaning staff in stores so they couldn’t take breaks or leave at all really. The company maintained that a key was always on hand, but there were at least two incidents where workers who’d been injured on the job had to wait to go to the hospital after being injured for hours, until a manager showed up with the key.
IBM’s Support for the Nazis
IBM, longstanding retailer of fine computers, was also the company that supplied the Nazis with the early computing machines they used to make their death camps maximally efficient. Thanks to the thousands of Hollerith punch card calculators IBM sold and provided technical support for to the Third Reich [ref], the Nazis were able to round up people, send them off to concentration camps and keep track of their deaths, which totaled an estimated 21 million POWs and civilians throughout the Third Reich’s 12 years in power [ref]. And when the US placed an embargo on doing business with Germany during WWII, IBM kept its hand in the country through its Swiss subsidiary.
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