UNDER CORPORATE SKIES: A Struggle Between People, Place and Profit
By MARTIN BRUECKNER and DYANN ROSS
Fremantle Press, 2010 pages, 316 pages, $26.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
It was a terrible case of the ‘neighbour from hell’ when, in 1984, the Alcoa alumina refinery moved into Wagerup just two kilometres away from the town of Yarloop, 125 kilometres south of Perth. The local geography and topography were never suitable for a refinery, a climate inversion marinating the locals in trapped, toxic emissions.
In Under Corporate Skies, Martin Brueckner and Dyan Ross, two Edith Cowan University academics, recount the health problems that arose, particularly after the company installed a liquor burner in 1996 to dissolve alumina out of the contaminant-riddled, low-grade bauxite ore, a process which also releases hazardous ‘volatile organic compounds’ such as the potent carcinogens, toluene and benzene. As well as cancer, Yarloop residents experienced organ failure, respiratory problems, skin irritations, sore throat and eyes, extreme fatigue, mental dysfunction, stomach upsets and blood noses.
Alcoa knew of the health effects attendant on the liquor burning process because the same illnesses had also appeared when Alcoa introduced the same refining process at Kwinana in WA in 1990. Yet, despite Alcoa boasting of its emissions controls at Wagerup, air monitoring in 2008 was still finding 260 chemicals lingering close to the ground for up to 18 hours within 7 km of the refinery.
The battle between a small community and a giant, Pittsburgh-based, US multinational, welcomed into WA by ‘development’-addicted state governments, has been a David and Goliath epic with the Yarloop residents, aided by Erin Brockovich, most recently winding up its slingshot by taking Alcoa to court in the US for “knowingly, negligently and recklessly” operating its refinery, poisoning surrounding communities with toxic emissions, and deliberately concealing the dangers.
For a decade before this, residents’ concerns and health complaints had been treated with disregard by Alcoa and many came to see Alcoa as “nothing more than a profit-motivated multinational, prepared to sacrifice a community to maximise revenue for shareholders”.
Alcoa’s oft-proclaimed good intentions were also undermined by the reality of their consultative mechanisms which were seen through as flawed, tokenistic and biased in Alcoa’s favour, their abrupt switches between denial of the existence of any health problems and declarations that “those very problems had been addressed and rectified”, their bleating that the company was the victim of a “hostile minority group in the community”, and their strategy of buying up private properties to make the complainants go away in the middle of a conflict about pollution.
Alcoa’s rhetoric about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) - the ethical conduct of corporations for the protection of public and environmental interests – was challenged by the Yarloop conflict, the authors concluding that the whole concept of CSR is a con, enabling companies to “legitimate their operations” without changing their fundamental values – namely the making of profit. ‘Sustainability’, in the hands of Alcoa, was another concept mangled in the “dominance of profit maximisation”.
Neo-liberal government, too, failed the Yarloop residents. Regulation was inadequate and enforcement weak as successive Liberal and Labor state governments displayed bipartisan indifference to the residents and often hostility – the Labor Premier, Alan Carpenter, chastised residents’ demands for tighter regulation of emissions as a ‘serious disincentive to further investment’. A core tool in the small-government/big-business model of “market-based environmentalism” is industry self-regulation, which, by allowing “industry to monitor and report on its own environmental performance”, assigned Alcoa to be its own judge and jury, with the inevitable, not guilty, outcome.
The government ‘soft touch’ on regulation continued the history of government favours to the aluminium industry in Australia, an industry which incurs a net loss to taxpayers when all the bargain basement royalties, hidden government subsidies (cheap access to water and electricity) as well as the ‘externalities’ (social and environmental costs, including the clearing of native jarrah forest for mining of bauxite) are factored in.
“Industry cannot be relied upon to put people ahead of profits”, conclude the authors, reflecting on the “power imbalance between the pursuit of corporate profits” and human and environmental health. In giving space to the marginalised voices in this conflict, the authors show us a community disabused of its innocent beliefs in the goodwill of corporate and state power.
We can also discern two academics, at one stage funded by Alcoa, whose faith in a rational world where corporate and community interests work collaboratively, runs into the brick wall of their realisation that, for Alcoa, corporate-sponsored “academic research must ultimately serve its commercial interests”. Although their goal of balancing people with profit is not abandoned entirely, their proposed new rules for a “compassionate, socially just and accountable corporate engagement with communities” have a plaintive air given their damning case-study of capitalism in action.