By Pratap Chatterjee
SAN FRANCISCO, Jun 13 1996 (IPS)

Sleepy drivers coming into this city one morning last month caused the worst traffic jam in decades when they slowed en masse to read a huge banner draped on a skyscraper protesting the local telephone company’s alleged destruction of Canadian forests.

Earlier this month, Roger Beach, chief executive of Unocal, a Californian petroleum company, was confronted by Adelle Lutz, the star of the recent film ‘Beyond Rangoon’, who condemned his company for employing forced labour to construct a new pipeline in Burma.

The protests, both of which occurred on the morning of annual shareholder meetings, mark the emergence of carefully planned, high-profile actions aimed at condemning U.S. multinationals for environmental and human rights abuses in other countries.

While such protests provide excellent photo opportunities, they are more than just publicity stunts for television cameras. Activists follow up the public protests by sponsoring strongly worded resolutions at the shareholder meetings, calling on corporations to change alleged bad practices.

Chris Hatch, a Canadian campaigner who works for Rainforest Action Network, the group that surreptitiously hung the traffic- stopping banner on a San Francisco skyscraper at sunrise, said that the protest follows years of writing letters to Pacific Bell asking it to change its ways.

“PacBell telephone directories are printed on paper that comes from trees that took thousands of years to grow in the forests of British Columbia,” he explained. “This is absurd when there are easy alternatives such as using recycled paper.”

Company officials were squirming with embarrassment and rage as every local radio and television station carried reports from the scene. “The action has annoyed thousands of commuters and this will probably backfire on the activists,” said Nancy Swasey, a Pacific Bell spokeswoman.

Shortly after the banner was unfurled, Hatch drove over an hour south of this city to San Jose, where Pacific Bell was holding its annual meeting with shareholders later that morning.

At the meeting a Roman Catholic nun and a financial analyst were widely applauded when they joined environmental activists to address shareholders on the subject of deforestation in British Columbia.

“As religious people, we take a vow that we should tread lightly on this earth. We believe that our companies should do the same,” said Susan Vickers of the Sisters of Mercy.

At the Unocal shareholder meeting last week, company officials and shareholders had to brave a noisy group of protesters, including actress Lutz, in order to enter the building in the southern California town of Brea, where the meeting was being held.

Inside the meeting dissident shareholders, led by Roman Catholic Maryknoll priests, took the floor to tell the gathered shareholders that the company was cooperating with a brutal military regime in Burma and using forced labour to build roads and evict villagers along a new pipeline route.

Chief executive Beach denied the allegations. “I visited Myanmar (the new name coined by the military regime for Burma) just six weeks ago,” he said. “Let me assure you that there is no conscripted labour work on this project. No villages have been relocated because of our project. And no pristine rain forest will be negatively impacted by our project.”

Several other companies have also been targeted by activists during shareholder meetings in recent months.

Time Warner, one of the world’s largest media conglomerates and publishers of Time magazine, was challenged at its annual meeting last month in Los Angeles by activists who demanded that the company stop buying paper bleached with environmentally harmful chlorine.

The New York-based petroleum corporation Texaco was the target of shareholder resolutions at its annual meeting in Houston, Texas, last month, where activists protested the company’s work in Burma. And, at its annual meeting in Savannah, Georgia, in late April, Union Camp was asked to stop using chlorine to bleach its paper products.

In all these cases, activists and their supporters were able to present management with a set of demands by simply buying a small number of shares in the company.

Shareholder resolutions, as these demands are called, can be thrown out if the company can prove to the federal Securities and Exchange Commission that they are frivolous. However, if the resolution is accepted by the SEC, then the sponsoring shareholder is given five minutes to explain his or her demand at the annual meeting.

Conrad MacKerron, a financial analyst who works for Progressive Asset Management (PAM), a 500-million-dollar investment firm in Oakland, California, told IPS that environmental activists started using shareholder resolutions about three years ago, using the successful efforts to persuade more than 160 companies to pull out of South Africa as a model.

Careful crafting of the resolutions is key to ensuring SEC approval, MacKerron said.

“The resolutions we have tabled are relatively simple. In the case of Pacific Bell, we simply asked the company to prepare a report to shareholders, within six months, on plans to adopt ecologically sound paper procurement policies,” said MacKerron, who helped draft several of the resolutions.

Although the Pacific Bell shareholder resolution garnered only 9 percent of the vote, activists say it was a major victory. “Many of the resolutions that have changed company policy, such as stopping the use of styrofoam in McDonald’s hamburger packaging, resulted from a 5- to 6-percent vote,” Thomas Van Dyke, another analyst at PAM, told IPS.

“The problem is that large institutions like pension funds own most of the shares and they always side with management. But, under SEC rules, any resolution that gets over 3 percent can be brought back the following year,” he added. “We fully expect to be able to return for four to five years now.”

All the resolutions activists presented this year to shareholders at Unocal, Time Warner, and Union Camp cleared this hurdle. Each year, however, the percentage of votes required to allow the resolution to be reconsidered the following year is increased by 2 percent.

But the activists say that the public awareness generated by the publicity stunts together with other public awareness tactics should ensure sufficient future support.

MacKerron now hopes that the companies will sit down and negotiate to prevent another round of bad publicity next year. “We have built leverage for the causes,” he says. “Now, it is up to the companies to take action.”

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