Protect peoples, not corporate elite

The Corporate Accountability Working Group (CAWG) strongly believes in our role as part of the global community to shape a new reality where the well-being of people is placed before corporate profit. In a recent Working Group call, Consejo de Pueblos Wuxhtaj, a social movement member of CAWG, rightly articulated that “collective efforts and solidarity are the only way to overcome the COVID-19 crisis, and other – political and economic – systemic global challenges. We need to confront the savage policies that have benefited a small minority of world elites and big corporates while working against the majority of the people, particularly against women, migrants, ethnic minorities, asylum seekers, refugees and indigenous communities”

CAWG work had long highlighted that corporate power limits access to human rights for all. It does so not only through exploitation, dispossession and direct abuses of workers’ and environmental rights, but also through corporate capture of public policy making to prioritize company profits over the realization of human rights. The COVID-19 pandemic and responses to it have served as a magnifying glass on deep fractures and inequalities in societies, and on the dismantling of public services vital for rights such as health care at the benefit of corporate actors. With massive job losses and the breakdown of informal economies, the COVID-19 crisis has again revealed why we resist current political and economic systems that are connected to a much deeper history of patriarchy, discrimination, colonization, imperialism and capitalism. It is important to bear in mind that a majority of those working in health care, and those who work in more precarious and badly remunerated conditions are women.

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Governments must Protect Peoples, not Corporate Elite